AI Development Editor, Newsroom

Hearst•Norwalk, CT

1d•$90,000 - $130,000

About The Position

Hearst Connecticut Media Group is seeking an AI Development Editor to manage hands-on implementation and tactical execution of artificial intelligence across newsroom products, workflows, and reporting while ensuring appropriate use of AI. This editor role includes hands-on development responsibilities and reports to the Group Managing Editor. Working closely with editors, reporters, developers, and other senior leadership, the role manages daily AI initiatives to expand journalism, strengthen statewide coverage, and help reporters uncover stories that might otherwise go untold. The position builds, tests, and maintains AI pipelines; develops newsroom applications; and guides and trains journalists in the responsible and effective use of AI tools. It helps build and evolve databases that support reporting and designs and deploys agentic AI systems that monitor information sources, surface newsworthy developments, assist with research, and automate repetitive newsroom workflows while preserving human editorial oversight. The role combines technical expertise with journalistic judgment, operational guidance, and team management. It is responsible for newsroom AI standards and training, evaluating and integrating tools, collaborating on internal products, overseeing AI projects, and ensuring that AI applications align with ethical journalism standards and company policies. Success includes effective newsroom adoption, sound governance and infrastructure, improved reporting efficiency and story discovery, expanded statewide coverage, and innovative, transparent, responsible editorial projects.

Requirements

Demonstrated experience building applications with large language models, automatic speech recognition models, and prompt engineering.
Demonstrated experience designing or deploying agentic AI systems that perform complex workflows beyond traditional chat interfaces.
Experience working with structured data, databases, and APIs.
Ability to work with APIs, structured data, and scripting languages such as Python or JavaScript.
Familiarity with newsroom AI applications for transcription, summarization, and translation.
Experience building AI-assisted workflows for research, document analysis, summarization, or information retrieval.
Understanding of retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), embeddings, vector search, or similar AI architectures.
Familiarity with newsroom workflows and editorial decision-making.
Excellent communication and training skills, including the ability to explain technical concepts to nontechnical colleagues.
Ability to self-manage and prioritize multiple projects simultaneously, meeting tight deadlines without compromising quality.
Commitment to ethical journalism, transparency, and accuracy.

Responsibilities

Implement standards and best practices for AI use in reporting, editing, fact-checking, and audience engagement in consultation with executive leadership.
Lead newsroom training sessions and serve as the primary resource for editors and reporters using AI tools.
Partner with editors and editorial leads to identify beats and reporting areas where AI-assisted workflows can increase depth, speed, statewide reach, and coverage.
Foster experimentation, continuous learning, and responsible innovation in the newsroom.
Identify opportunities for AI to expand journalism and prototype, evaluate, and oversee new editorial workflows.
Track industry developments and assess emerging tools, vendors, and partnerships.
Collaborate with product and engineering teams on internal tools that improve efficiency and enhance storytelling.
Evaluate, pilot, and integrate AI and automation tools into the newsroom.
Help build and maintain the foundational editorial database, organizing structured and unstructured information for newsroom use.
Design, build, and maintain agentic AI systems and pipelines that support reporting and editorial projects.
Continuously evaluate AI models, frameworks, and development tools to improve newsroom capabilities.
Ensure AI applications align with ethical journalism standards and company AI policies.
Exercise senior-level authority over AI projects and oversee initiatives and training.
Develop guardrails for sourcing, transparency, attribution, and human editorial review.
Monitor newsroom AI usage, evaluate effectiveness, risks, and opportunities for improvement, and provide regular updates to editorial leadership.
Handle sensitive and confidential information.
Liaise with legal, HR, and executive leadership on responsible AI adoption.