How the Minnesota Star Tribune used AI to bolster its shoe-leather reporting to background a mass shooter
Around 8:30 in the morning on Aug. 27, someone started firing bullets through the stained-glass windows of the Annunciation Catholic Church in Minneapolis. After killing two children and wounding 21 others, Robin Westman died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound.
As many of our journalists rushed to the scene, others jumped into researching the shooter. When Westman’s name surfaced, we did the standard journalistic blocking and tackling. We reviewed court records, requested police calls for service to her homes and scanned social media.
We then found a series of videos released the morning of the shooting.
The videos were chaotic, violent and, at times, incoherent ramblings of a person law enforcement later identified as Westman. But there was another difficulty for our reporters: The videos showed hundreds of pages of a text in another language that needed to be deciphered on deadline. Thankfully, we have a critical asset in our AI Lab, which experiments with using artificial intelligence technology to help our journalism.
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