Sonali Verma, who joins News Decoder’s board of trustees, pioneered the use of artificial intelligence in gathering journalism data.
Photo courtesy Sonali Verma.
Sonali Verma reads about AI for fun.
Verma, peeling into laughter, doesn’t come across as funny. But she is, so long as one knows that Verma — an alum of the coveted Reuters Trainee Program with a slew of accolades as a journalist at Canada’s Globe and Mail — also came up with the idea for an AI program that has revolutionized journalism behind the scenes.
When Verma isn’t in the throes of a career dedicated to the meeting of human and machine writing, well, she is reading about it some more.
As a new board member of News Decoder’s governing nonprofit, Nouvelles-Découvertes, she reflects on the fact that, indelibly, journalism has long functioned as a technology itself.
“The newspaper is the original social media,” Verma said. She paused to give a cheeky smile. “Culturally, we sit down and talk about the news every day. You read a section of the paper and you pass it across the table and you say, ‘Hey, did you see this?’”
Creating data culture in journalism
But Verma is unique in that she has helped push journalism into a new level of technology like few before her: She helped develop an AI program for publishing, called Sophi.io, that reads audience analytics.
Verma was passing newspapers around her own table, but what about the other families in their homes? Were they passing the newspapers to their own kids?
When journalism evolved to the online website stage, Verma knew she could gather insight into those conversations by gaining access to how audiences engaged with the news: What stories they spent the most time reading, or what pages they clicked on next. Those were questions every journalist wanted to know how to answer. Verma figured out how.
Verma got her first bylines as a teenager, when The Times of India collaborated with her high school to produce a newspaper supplement entirely by students. Verma described the educational program as a precursor to her passion for initiatives like News Decoder — and journalism as a whole.
“I understand how the news business can really engage young people, and attract young people to do worthwhile work,” Verma said. “Because once you’ve done something like that, you kind of look deeply into it and you realize how important the news publishing business really is.”
Nelson Graves, the founder of News Decoder, was a mentor while Verma worked at Reuters in the mid-1990s in Delhi, India. “He taught me how to be a great journalist, but he also taught me about how to be a good colleague and a good leader,” Verma said.
In the right place at the right time
Now based in Toronto, Canada, Verma got back in touch with Graves a year ago, mentioning News Decoder. After they’d worked together, Verma joined The Globe and Mail in 2008. “The Internet was that thing over there in the corner that just kind of happened, right?” she said.
“I put up my hand and said, I would love to see the data,” Verma said. “Because for the first time, we can actually see how our audience interacts with the content we produce. You can’t really see with the print section. Whereas on the Internet, you can see everything: Where people came from, where they went next, how much time they spent on something, what caused them to subscribe.”
These questions were the beginning of what Verma would eventually go to describe as data culture.
“There was this one guy in the basement who had access to analytics, and I went and I fell at his feet and said, ‘Please, please, I really want to see the data,’” Verma said. “He said, ‘Okay, but don’t tell anyone I showed it to you.’”
Eventually, the social and financial impact of being able to glimpse audience news consumption — information that previously only existed in the moment when a family passed newspapers around a table — was too valuable to ignore. With no other tools available to gather the data in such a way, Verma and a team of data scientists at The Globe and Mail started to develop Sophi.io.
“I’m very lucky,” Verma said. “I was in the right place at the right time.”
The right place at the right time eventually proved that audience analytics would make the news more tailored towards what audiences cared about.
“If you’re only writing about stuff that you think is important and they don’t think it’s important, well, guess what?” Verma asked. “They’ll go elsewhere for news. So it’s really important to understand what your audience values.”
Fostering global citizenship with AI
“Unless you know what’s going on in the world, how can you have an intelligent opinion about what society should be?” Verma said. “Or about what you should do to make the world a better place?”
These are questions that Verma sees newspapers attempting to answer. “I use the word newspaper loosely, because it could be a news website, it could be a news app, it could be news on social media platforms,” she said. “It all depends on where you get your news, but the important thing is you get trusted information that shapes your worldview, because that’s the person you become.”
Such high stakes mean that gathering a news outlet’s data analytics can influence the type of content produced, such as more articles about the local government, or about environmental policies. AI can also mean translating news originally produced in one language, to another.
“I get information that I didn’t have access to earlier,” Verma said of these benefits.
Developing media literacy with AI — that Verma sees answerable around the table, when families pass around the news.
“It’s not just the job of an organization like News Decoder to raise awareness about this,” Verma said. “It’s actually come upon the grown ups in society to make the children in society more aware of what’s going on in the world. It’s definitely a group effort.”
Kaja Andrić joined the News Decoder team as an intern in January 2024. She is a second-year Journalism student at New York University. She is also studying Romance Languages with a concentration in French and Italian. Andrić has written for both NYU’s Washington Square News and Cooper Squared publications. Previously, she was a correspondent for the Florida Weekly newspaper’s Palm Beach community chapter. In 2022, she was Florida Scholastic Press Association’s Writer of the Year.