Ryan Restivo created YESEO as a Reynolds Journalism Institute fellow and launched it in March 2023, a free Slack app that is available in the Slack App Directory which has been installed into over 400 workspaces and helped hundreds of journalists with over 8,800 stories to date. It can process stories in over 11 different languages including Spanish, Portuguese, German and Japanese.
When creating YESEO Restivo faced this question of how to use Generative AI and aimed to lower the barrier to entry by creating buttons to surface recommendations to users. All of YESEO comes back to the headline, where in research a user said that it is the most important factor in making sure your story is read. It pulls out keywords in the story to figure out how strongly or loosely they correlate with the headline. It runs Google Trends data on those keywords to give a user more information and then it uses Generative AI by generating headline suggestions. Where before a team would have to share headlines in a channel on their own, now they can share a story from YESEO, click “Suggest Headlines” and generate five suggestions that they could use to get to their best version for the story.
Since YESEO is free, Restivo needs to learn and find these users as they use the product and has been able to share six stories of newsrooms who have improved using YESEO. They range across radio stations, TV stations, universities, to nonprofit newsrooms and newspapers.
“It moved the needle immediately when our education reporter used YESEO to develop keywords for one of his stories,” WNIJ News Director Jenna Dooley said, adding they first learned about it through a partner station in their public radio network. “By adding keywords to that post, we saw our biggest digital engagement for a story in over a year. I recommended Ryan to run a demo to members of the Illinois News Broadcasters Association as part of our biannual professional development training.”
One of the pillars of Restivo’s work through YESEO builds on his time as an RJI fellow, to share lessons learned across podcasts, conferences, webinars and published stories.
“Having collaborated on programming for events like SRCCON, I’ve found Ryan’s perspectives incredibly insightful and valuable,” AI Journalism Lab Program Lead at Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at CUNY Nikita Roy said. “What truly makes YESEO stand out is its transparency. It’s the only Gen AI tool I know that provides a behind-the-scenes look at how the code works and what is being done exactly. This level of openness is crucial, ensuring that users understand and trust the technology they’re using. The focus on transparency, combined with your deep understanding of newsroom challenges, makes YESEO an exceptional tool in the industry.”
Restivo has worked with groups around the country to train and get them using this free tool. YESEO exists in the Slack App Directory to serve that purpose of being accessible to any newsroom.
