AI Development Editor - Newsroom

AI Development Editor, Newsroom

Position Overview

Hearst Connecticut Media Group is seeking an AI Development Editor to manage the hands-on implementation and tactical execution of artificial intelligence across newsroom products, workflows, and reporting and ensure the appropriate use of AI. This is an editor role with hands-on development responsibilities. Reporting to the Group Managing Editor and working in close alignment with other senior leadership, this role manages daily AI initiatives to help expand our journalism, strengthen statewide coverage, and enable reporters to uncover stories that would otherwise go untold.

The successful candidate will work closely with editors, reporters and developers to execute and oversee tactical AI projects and manage day-to-day newsroom workflows. They will build, test, and maintain AI pipelines, develop newsroom applications, and guide and train journalists to use AI tools responsibly and effectively.

A core responsibility of this position is helping build and evolve databases that power our reporting. This individual will also design and deploy agentic AI systems that can monitor information sources, surface newsworthy developments, assist reporters with research, and automate repetitive newsroom workflows while maintaining human editorial oversight.

The ideal candidate combines technical expertise with strong journalistic judgment, operational guidance, and team management to support newsroom innovation along with other senior editorial leadership.

Key Responsibilities

Collaboration + Evangelism

• 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 to identify reporting areas where AI can increase depth, speed and statewide reach.
• Partner with editorial leads to identify reporting beats where AI-assisted workflows can expand coverage (e.g. civic meeting monitoring, local guides, data-heavy investigations).
• Foster a culture of experimentation, continuous learning and responsible innovation.

Innovation + Strategy

• Proactively identify where AI can meaningfully expand journalism in new ways.
• Prototype, evaluate and oversee new editorial workflows.
• Stay ahead of industry developments and assess emerging tools, vendors, and partnerships.
• Collaborate with product and engineering teams on internal tools to improve efficiency and enhance storytelling.

AI Infrastructure + Development

• Leverage AI in the building of editorial products that provide greater value to Connecticut readers.
• Evaluate, pilot and integrate AI and automation tools into the newsroom.
• Help build and maintain Hearst Connecticut Media Group's foundational editorial database, organizing structured and unstructured information for newsroom use.
• Design, build and maintain agentic AI systems and pipelines that support reporting and projects.
• Continuously evaluate new AI models, frameworks and development tools to improve newsroom capabilities

Oversight + Governance

• Ensure AI applications align with ethical journalism standards and company AI policies.
• Exercise senior-level authority over AI projects.
• Oversee initiatives and training.
• Develop guardrails for sourcing, transparency, attribution and human editorial review.
• Monitor newsroom AI usage and regularly evaluate effectiveness, risks and opportunities for improvement, providing regular updates to editorial leadership.
• Handle sensitive and confidential information.
• Act as a liaison with legal, HR, and executive leadership on responsible AI adoption.

Qualifications

Ideal candidates will demonstrate many of the following qualifications. We do not expect candidates to possess expertise in every area.

• 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 (Python, 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; able to explain technical concepts to nontechnical colleagues.
• Ability to self-manage and prioritize multiple projects simultaneously, meeting tight deadlines without compromising on quality.
• Commitment to ethical journalism, transparency, and accuracy.

Success Metrics

• Adoption and effective use of AI tools across newsroom teams.
• Well-documented AI standards, governance and technical infrastructure.
• Deployment of agentic AI systems that measurably improve reporting efficiency and story discovery, without loss of quality.
• Increased statewide coverage through AI-assisted reporting workflows.
• Positive newsroom feedback on training, collaboration and technical support.
• Editorial projects that demonstrate innovative, transparent and responsible use of AI.

Base Salary Range: 90000 - 130000 USD