The rapid expansion of artificial intelligence in South Africa’s media sector is creating new opportunities for news outlets to improve operations. However, South Africa’s diverse linguistic landscape and uneven digital access require ethical and context-sensitive AI adoption.
Feedback from journalists and media organizations indicated that a lack of internal AI policies and limited training opportunities has increased the risk of uncoordinated adoption, with individual reporters experimenting on their own. These findings align with a Foundation report examining AI and journalism in the Global South, which surveyed more than 200 journalists. A majority of respondents said their newsrooms had no formal AI policy despite regular use. This gap raises concerns about potential bias, factual inaccuracies and reputational harm. Ethical risks were a consistent theme across ecosystem feedback, underscoring the need to help newsrooms implement AI responsibly.
In response, and with support from Microsoft, the Foundation launched a four-month program to support four South African newsrooms: the Mail & Guardian, AmaBhungane Centre for Investigative Journalism (amaB), Briefly News and Pondoland Times. The initiative focused on helping participants integrate AI tools while establishing editorial guardrails and policies.
Developing AI Tools for Real Needs
Each newsroom received tailored mentoring from AI and journalism experts to build adoption strategies, set policy frameworks and identify practical AI use cases that aligned with editorial and business goals. The participating outlets developed tools that improved workflows, increased audience reach and enhanced content delivery. Among the results:
- Briefly News created “Editorial Eye,” an AI tool that assists with proofreading, grammar and style. Output increased from 80–90 stories a day to 150–200, contributing to a 22 percent rise in page views over six months.
- AmaBhungane built a tool to repackage investigative content into more accessible multimedia formats, streamlining scriptwriting and helping reach new audiences.
- Pondoland Times launched an auto-posting tool for social media and is developing an AI-generated avatar to deliver news flashes. Website impressions increased from 2.4 million to 10 million over three consecutive months, leading to a one-month revenue gain of R20,000.
- Mail & Guardian designed a sub-editing tool that automates grammar checks, headline suggestions and hashtag recommendations, cutting editing time in half.
Building Skills and Understanding Ethical Use
Throughout the program, participating journalists gained confidence using AI tools and developed a deeper understanding of editorial oversight, job roles and ethical considerations.
“Our primary goal was to ensure that the tool would assist our team rather than replace them, and ensure our readers continued to get content that was thought out from a human perspective,” said Douglas White, circulation and subscription officer at Mail & Guardian. “The sub-editing function is marking your homework effectively. It is backstopped by human intervention and requires human creative capacity.”
A New Culture of Collaboration
The initiative also encouraged collaboration among newsrooms that typically view each other as competitors.
“It was an amazing opportunity to meet people from other newsrooms and share in a safe and conducive space,” said Rianette Cluley, director and media project manager at Briefly News.
“For too long we’ve viewed each other as adversaries in this space. When you come together like this, you realize it’s not adversarial. It’s collaborative,” White said.
The program demonstrated that peer learning, mutual transparency and shared experimentation are essential for responsible and sustainable AI adoption in the media.
