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We caught up with Restivo to learn more about how newsrooms are using YESEO.
This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
Can you share examples of how newsrooms are optimizing SEO with your app?
Restivo: The thing that surprised me the most when I put this out there was how much public radio newsrooms would want to embrace tools like YESEO. We have several success stories outlined on our site for generating keywords to maximize engagement. I’m headed next to PMJA in Kansas City in late June to talk to more of these newsrooms.
When I started building this, I did not appreciate or understand all the types of organizations that could be served from what I built, whether they are TV stations, public radio stations, small papers, nonprofit newsrooms. It was interesting to see how these users would embrace the use cases.
A lot of people come to my tool when they’re in a rut or think they have a lot to do and need to maximize their time. So if YESEO gives them five ideas, maybe there's one or two good ones in there to turn into something valuable for their audience. It’s in service of making people data informed to use new data — plus their intuition — to serve their users.
Hopefully this helps people get better context on what they should be seeing when they hit that “Suggest Headline” button, but also how they can think about what they're seeing and how they can make better evaluations on what they're seeing. (Click here for additional SEO tips from Restivo.)
AI continues to be a disruptor in journalism, like so many other industries. Can you share advice for journalists or newsrooms seeking to build or use AI products?
Restivo: A lot of it is thinking about how you want to use these tools to help. I didn't build YESEO because I wanted to embrace AI; I wanted to help people in newsrooms. It was always about using what was out there to help people do their jobs better.
On Tuesday, June 3, you are hosting a virtual training for the Online News Association on what you have learned about headlines since YESEO launched. Can you give us a preview of your top insights?
Restivo: Ever since I put the “Suggest Headline” button into the app, people love clicking on it, so it made sense to share what I’ve seen in this data.
I started to dig into this because I was seeing the word “discover” show up a lot, but what I found out was that it was not in the top 10 verbs that are used in headlines from Large Language Models (LLMs). Words like “reveals,” “exploring,” and “navigating” showed up more often than “discover.” But the most interesting thing is the verb that showed up the most was in less than 1% of real headlines the tool has processed. Questions like these took me down a bunch of rabbit holes to see what tendencies exist in the data and they have helped me make better product decisions.
I built this session to be interactive, while sharing learnings and where people can battle for bragging rights to identify what are real or AI headlines. Whether you love or hate LLMs, I hope that you can take something away from what I’ve learned that informs your writing. Plus, one audience member will receive a one year ONA membership! (Sign up for the session here.)
In our last interview, you gave advice for turning a big product idea into a reality. Can you tell us some of the challenges you have faced as YESEO has grown?
Restivo: The biggest challenge has been related to understanding the impact. A lot of users, surprisingly, are able to install this without even ever having talked to me — and that’s great. They don't have to worry about it, right? But I really want to understand how people can be helped by the things that I've built.
It’s been great to respond to people’s needs and understand the data in the nine different tests I’ve run when users hit the “Suggest Headlines” button. That — and these 60,000+ headlines [generated from the tests] — helped me create a new test, which I’m hoping will help people even further with their stories.
The most important thing is to make sure this grows and sustains over time. I built YESEO because I believe in helping newsrooms with practical innovation and using emerging technology to help solve inefficiencies and get their work seen and read. That’s why [during my ONA session], I’m also previewing new things I’m working on, where I hope to build more partnerships with newsrooms that want tools to help them do their jobs better.
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