At LA NACION, we are committed to innovation and to embracing AI as a tool to help us tell more detailed, insightful, and personalized stories. Throughout the year, we developed a range of journalistic initiatives that reflect this approach, combining technological advancement with editorial rigor to deliver high-quality content to our audience.
Regarding UX experience, since June 2024 we have clonated our main reporters’ voices so readers can listen to their columns. (Read more here)
Navigating the chaos: how Congress reshaped Milei’s ‘Make Argentina Great Again’ (MAGA) law
When Javier Milei took office as Argentina’s president, one of his first major moves was to send an ambitious reform bill to Congress. It proposed sweeping changes: overhauls to the electoral system, tax reforms and tighter restrictions on public marches and protests, among other measures.
The bill was massive — more than 180 pages and 664 articles, organized into multiple chapters. We designed a system to analyze the different versions, leveraging technology while maintaining strict journalistic oversight. This legislation became the centerpiece of a political battle in Congress — not just for its content, but for its political and symbolic weight. After six months of intense negotiations, the bill was finally passed, though not without significant changes.
We developed a Python-based comparator to track amendments between the Chamber of Deputies and the Senate. Our system—built on Python 3.8+, Google Sheets API (data storage), boto3 (AWS S3 integration), PyMuPDF and python-docx (text extraction), and Sentence Transformers (all-MiniLM-L6-v2 on Torch) for semantic similarity—uses regex for document structuring.
The result is an interactive web tool that highlights changes sentence by sentence, empowering journalists, lawmakers, and citizens to navigate complex legislative language.
Unpacking right-wing rhetoric: what data reveals about Milei’s discourse
Javier Milei rose to prominence in Argentine politics thanks to his command of rhetoric. His disruptive, fiery discourse—used as a weapon against his opponents—has been a key tool in solidifying his position as the country’s highest political authority and in framing a drastic austerity program as an epic undertaking. That’s why, to analyze his first year in office, we turned to his most distinctive weapon: his words.
In his first 365 days as president, Milei delivered a total of 142 public speeches: 58 long-form media interviews and 84 official statements. On average, he spoke publicly at least twice a week throughout his first year in office.
Every one of these interventions —amounting to 89 hours of audio and 23GB of data— was processed by an interdisciplinary team at LA NACION, leveraging artificial intelligence. The results, both qualitative and quantitative, revealed valuable insights into his disruptive approach to transforming Argentina. His speeches provided a detailed window into his thinking.
OlimpIA: Your Paris 2024 AI Guide
For the Paris Olympic Games, we created OlimpIA: an AI conversational assistant built with Google Agent Builder. Trained on curated editorial content and connected to real-time sports APIs, OlimpIA fields user questions about Olympic history, athlete profiles, schedules, and results in natural, engaging dialogue.
