Markets & Business
Symbolic.ai signs deal to bring AI tools to News Corp newsrooms
News Corp is set to integrate Symbolic.ai’s platform into its Dow Jones Newswires hub, aiming to move beyond experimental AI usage toward practical editorial workflows.
While newsrooms have been experimenting with artificial intelligence for several years, those efforts have largely remained limited to experimental phases. Symbolic.ai, a startup in the AI journalism space, intends to move newsrooms beyond these initial experiments. To achieve this, the company has secured a partnership with News Corp, the media conglomerate owned by Rupert Murdoch, to integrate the startup’s platform into its financial news hub, Dow Jones Newswires. Under the agreement, News Corp is set to begin using the platform with Dow Jones Newswires. This financial news hub operates alongside other News Corp assets, which include MarketWatch, the New York Post, and The Wall Street Journal.
Symbolic.ai was co-founded by Devin Wenig, the former CEO of eBay, and Jon Stokes, a co-founder of Ars Technica. The startup claims that its platform can assist in the production of quality journalism and content. To do this, the platform is designed to make editorial workflows more efficient. It provides improvements in several key areas of production, including newsletter creation, audio transcription, fact-checking, and search engine optimization (SEO) advice. Additionally, the platform features capabilities for “headline optimization.” According to Symbolic.ai, the implementation of these tools has already led to productivity gains of as much as 90% for complex research tasks.
The agreement highlights News Corp’s ongoing willingness to integrate artificial intelligence into its media operations. This strategy is not new for the company; in 2024, the media conglomerate signed a multi-year partnership with OpenAI, under which it agreed to license its material to the AI company. Following that partnership, last November, News Corp signaled that it was considering branching out further by licensing its material to other AI companies as well.
Why it matters
The deal marks a strategic shift for News Corp, moving from broad AI experimentation to integrating a specialized platform directly into its financial news operations at Dow Jones Newswires.