How Leading Media Companies Are Using AI to Transform Newsrooms, Sales, and Marketing

The news and media industry is facing serious pressure. Newsrooms are stretched thin while expected to produce more content across more platforms. Sales teams lose deals because they lack capacity to respond to RFPs. Marketing and audience teams support multiple markets with skeleton crews. There just aren't enough hours in the day to cover the stories in our communities with the level of depth we strive for. 

We've seen firsthand how news and media organizations like Boston Globe, McClatchy, Gray Media, Graham Digital, Morgan Murphy Media, Stacker, and others are using elvex to break through these constraints. This article covers real use cases driving value across their operations, from the newsroom to the sales team.

The Challenge: Doing More with Less

Media organizations today face operational challenges that directly impact their bottom line:

Newsrooms: Journalists spend 60-70% of their time on production tasks (formatting, versioning content for different platforms, copy editing) rather than actual reporting in their communities. Breaking news requires immediate web articles, social posts, broadcast scripts, and push notifications, but creating all these versions manually is impossible at the speed news demands.

Sales Teams: Media sales reps lose winnable deals because they can't respond to RFPs fast enough. They spend hours hunting through rate cards, building decks, and pulling audience data instead of talking to clients. When a prospect asks for category insights, competitive analysis, or a mock creative, the answer comes too late or not at all.

Marketing & Audience Teams: Lean teams supporting multiple markets or publications can't keep up with the volume of promotional content needed. Every campaign requires research, scripts, social posts, graphics concepts, and performance reports. The creative work gets rushed or simply doesn't happen.

"We were getting bogged down with process and toil work which stole time we should be using to cover stories that were important to our community. We needed a way to accelerate our work and tackle new projects more efficiently." ~ senior editor at a major news organization 

Real Results Across the Organization

Newsroom: Accelerating Content Production

Multiple news organizations have deployed elvex to help their editorial teams work faster without compromising quality. By creating custom AI assistants trained on their style guides, past articles, and editorial standards, journalists can:

• Transform TV scripts into SEO-optimized web articles in minutes
• Convert broadcast content into social posts, teases, and push notifications
• Generate story ideas from meeting agendas, press releases, and court documents
• Get real-time feedback on script clarity, impact, and journalistic quality
• Analyze large datasets to uncover unique story angles and trends
• Create data visualizations that help tell compelling, data-driven stories

"What used to take our team 2-3 hours per article now takes 30-45 minutes. We're publishing 40% more content with the same headcount, and our journalists actually have time to focus on the investigative work that matters." ~digital content manager at a regional news outlet

The impact goes beyond speed. Journalists who previously avoided data stories because they lacked technical skills can now upload datasets, ask questions in plain language, and get analysis that would have required a data scientist. One investigative reporter described it as "having a research assistant who never sleeps and has perfect recall of every document I've ever uploaded."

Sales: Empowering Revenue Teams

Media sales teams face their own challenges: understanding complex rate cards, analyzing advertising categories, and creating compelling client proposals, all while staying current on available inventory and audience insights.

Sales-focused AI assistants are transforming how media organizations approach revenue generation:

• Sales planning assistants brainstorm strategies and understand service offerings
• Rate retrieval tools pull current pricing information, eliminating manual research
• Category insight assistants provide quick analysis of advertising spend, advertiser counts, and digital tactic breakdowns
• Audience discovery tools surface trending topics and identify the best audiences for monetization opportunities
• RFP response assistants respond to more proposal, leading to more sales revenue
• Presentation builders create sales decks and campaign performance reports quickly

"Our sales team would spend hours preparing for client meetings. Now we can pull category insights, competitive intelligence, and campaign performance in minutes. They're spending more time with clients and less time hunting for data. We're also responding to twice as many RFPs as we did last year, which has directly impacted our bottom line." ~sales director at a national news organization

The RFP impact is particularly significant. One company told us their win rate on RFPs increased not just because they could respond to more, but because the quality of responses improved because there was more standardization around the data used for inputs, response style, and overall comprehensiveness.  

Marketing: Scaling Creative Production

Marketing and audience teams at media organizations must produce high volumes of creative content (social posts, promotional materials, research and analysis) all while maintaining brand consistency across multiple markets or publications.

Marketing assistants are helping teams:

• Generate and optimize multi-platform promotional content
• Brainstorm campaign concepts and craft emotionally resonant scripts
• Create commercial briefs and storyboards from creative notes
• Format social posts according to platform-specific best practices

"We're a lean team supporting multiple markets. Having an AI assistant that understands our brand voice in each market and can help us generate campaign ideas has been invaluable. It’s become a competitive advantage in our local markets.“ ~ marketing manager at a media group

The brand consistency benefit is often overlooked. When marketing teams support multiple stations or publications, maintaining a consistent voice while adapting to local markets is challenging. AI assistants trained on brand guidelines ensure every piece of content, regardless of who creates it, sounds like it came from the same organization.

Business Operations: Driving Strategic Insights

Beyond content and sales, media organizations are using AI to streamline business operations:

• Audience analytics assistants pull and analyze audience data for client requests
• Compliance tracking tools ensure marketing programs meet regulatory requirements
• Business writing assistants communicate more effectively across the organization
• Paid media reporting tools provide fast insights into marketing performance

These operational assistants free up specialized teams to focus on strategic work rather than routine data retrieval and reporting tasks.

Why the elvex Approach Works for Media

Media organizations have tried various approaches to AI adoption. Some experimented with consumer tools like ChatGPT but hit immediate roadblocks around security and data privacy. Others explored building custom solutions but found the technical lift too heavy. Point solutions for specific tasks created a fragmented tech stack with no central governance.

elvex takes a different approach:

Custom AI Assistants, Not Generic Chatbots: Every media organization has unique workflows, style guides, and data sources. elvex enables teams to build AI assistants trained on their specific content, connected to their data sources, and designed for their exact use cases. A sales assistant knows your rate cards. A newsroom assistant knows your AP style preferences. A marketing assistant understands your brand voice.

Enterprise Security Without Compromise: Media organizations can't risk confidential sources, unpublished stories, or customer data. elvex provides a secure, private AI environment with granular permissions, full audit trails, and the option to privately host models within your own infrastructure. You get AI capabilities without security trade-offs.

Centralized Platform, Decentralized Creation: Rather than IT building every AI tool, elvex empowers individual teams to create assistants for their specific needs while maintaining central governance and visibility. This means faster deployment, better adoption, and solutions that actually match how people work.

Dedicated Customer Success: The media organizations seeing the greatest results don't just get software; they get a partner. Our customer success team helps identify high-value use cases, design effective assistants, train teams, and continuously optimize implementations. 

Use Cases Driving Value

The most successful media organizations are deploying AI assistants across multiple functions:

Newsroom Operations:

• Content Versioning: Transform broadcast scripts to web articles, social posts, and teases
• Story Development: Generate story ideas from documents and localize national stories
• Quality Enhancement: Get feedback on script clarity, engagement, and journalistic standards
• FOIA Assistance: Draft open records requests and find records custodians
• Fact Checking: Verify information across multiple sources quickly
• Data Journalism: Analyze datasets and create visualizations for data-driven stories

Sales & Revenue:

• Sales Planning: Brainstorm strategies and understand service offerings
• Rate Management: Retrieve current pricing and billing information
• Category Analysis: Pull advertising insights and competitive intelligence
• Proposal Development: Create data-driven, high-conversion sales proposals
• RFP Responses: Respond to more proposals faster and more effectively
• Presentation Creation: Build sales decks and campaign performance reports

Marketing & Promotion:

• Campaign Development: Brainstorm concepts and craft campaign scripts
• Content Creation: Generate promotional content for multiple platforms
• Social Media: Format and optimize posts for each platform
• Storyboarding: Create production-ready storyboards from creative notes

Business Intelligence:

• Audience Insights: Analyze audience data and generate reports
• Performance Reporting: Track and report on paid media performance
• Compliance Management: Ensure marketing programs meet regulations
• Business Communications: Draft clear, effective internal communications

The Role of Customer Success

Technology alone doesn't drive transformation. The media organizations seeing the greatest impact work closely with our customer success team to:

• Identify the highest-value use cases for their specific workflows
• Design and deploy custom AI assistants tailored to their needs
• Train teams on best practices for working with AI
• Continuously refine and optimize their AI implementations

"There's no way we would have been as successful if we had just bought seats to ChatGPT off the shelf. You listened to our workflows, helped us build assistants that actually solve our problems, and continue to help us discover new ways to drive value. You’ve been true partners in our AI transformation." ~ chief digital officer at a media company

Security and Governance: Non-Negotiable for News Organizations

Media organizations handle sensitive information daily, from confidential sources to unpublished investigations to proprietary sales data to customer information. Every organization we work with emphasizes that enterprise-grade security isn't optional.

elvex provides:

• Secure, private AI environment that keeps proprietary content protected
• Option to privately host models within your own infrastructure
• Granular permissions and access controls
• Full visibility into AI usage across the organization
• Compliance with data privacy regulations

"We can't risk our sources, our unpublished stories, or our customer data. elvex gives us the AI capabilities we need with the security controls we require. It's not a trade-off." ~ Editor in Chief at a news organization.

Looking Forward

The news and media organizations achieving the greatest success with AI share common characteristics:

1. They start with clear problems: Rather than implementing AI for its own sake, they identify specific pain points and workflows where AI can drive measurable value.
2. They think beyond the newsroom: The most successful implementations span multiple departments (newsroom, sales, marketing, and operations).
3. They involve their teams: Successful implementations include journalists, sales professionals, and marketers from the beginning, ensuring AI assistants actually solve real problems. Some of the best use cases have come from the ground up, with early-career employees identifying innovative applications that leadership might not have considered.
4. They iterate and improve: The best results come from organizations that continuously refine their AI assistants based on user feedback and changing needs.
5. They maintain standards: AI accelerates work, but human judgment, creativity, and professional oversight remain central to the process.

Ready to Transform Your Media Organization?

The question isn't whether AI will transform how we work; it's whether your organization will lead or follow.

Want to see how elvex can help your media organization work smarter? Contact us to discuss your specific challenges and explore how custom AI assistants can drive value across your newsroom, sales team, and marketing department.

elvex is an enterprise AI management and enablement platform that helps organizations safely adopt and scale generative AI. Our platform makes it easy for anyone to create custom AI assistants while providing the security, governance, visibility, and training that enterprises require.

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