Midway All Year: Adaptive AI: Making News Selectable and Engaging

Most AI tools generate or just summarize content. This session introduces a fundamentally different approach. Adaptive AI that restructures original news into a new interactive format for diverse audiences without generating new information. Built on a new Digital Engagement Model, it adapts content to readers’ interests, available time, and environment while preserving the integrity of the original reporting.

Attendees will:

• See a live preview of the “Smart Story Suite” not yet used online.
• Discover how Adaptive AI simultaneously supports short-form and long-form engagement.
• Learn how this new structure for web and mobile use increased perceived interest, personalization, and interactivity, and in some cases, trust compared to the same news presented as a traditional page of text.

Speaker

Ronald Yaros is the director of the Digital Engagement Lab and an associate professor in the Philip Merrill College of Journalism at the University of Maryland. He is the author of The Digital Engagement Model: How to Capture and Keep Audience Attention (2026), which introduces a new framework for structuring digital information that adapts to audiences’ DIET—their demographics, interests, environments, and available time.

Join ONA as we bring the signature experience of the Midway, our journalism futures lab, to you year-round. Check out cutting-edge journalism tools and learn from real-life case studies on how they’ve been used in newsrooms. If you have a tool you’d like to pitch to the Midway for consideration in for a future Midway session, email ONA Deputy Director Hanaa Rifaey at [email protected]