DeeperDive, a new tool that converses with readers, is an effort to beat the AI industry at its own game. The publishing company behind USA Today and 220 other publications is today rolling out a chatbot -like tool called DeeperDive that can converse with readers, summarize insights from its journalism, and suggest new content from across its sites. "Visitors now have a trusted AI answer engine on our platform for anything they want to engage with, anything they want to ask," Mike Reed, CEO of Gannett and the USA Today Network, said at the WIRED AI Power Summit in New York, an event that brought together voices from the tech industry, politics, and the world of media. "and it is performing really great." Most publishers have a fraught relationship with AI, as the chatbots that trained on their content are now summarizing it and eating the traffic that search engines used to send them.

A week after being outed for stealthily using AI to produce high school sports reports and publicly "pausing" the project, mega-publisher Gannett has reportedly had to recheck each and every post the AI had written. Did we really learn nothing from CNET's ignoble AI escapades in January? Gannett operates a number of regional and national publications including USA Today, The Arizona Republic and The Detroit Free Press. The company devised its "Lede AI" as a means of automating the droll work of summarizing the box scores of local high school sports leagues -- a task the AI proved wholly incapable of. The Hardin County Tigers defeated the Memphis Business Execs 48-12 in a Tennessee high school football game on Friday.

Fox News correspondent Grady Trimble has the latest on fears the technology will spiral out of control on'Special Report.' Gannett, the parent company for USA Today and a number of local newspapers, has paused an artificial intelligence experiment following criticisms that AI-generated sports articles were awkwardly phrased and lacked details. A handful of Gannett-owned papers briefly published AI-generated sports stories this month based on box score data, Axios reported, which were quickly met with condemnation from social media commenters. The Columbus Dispatch is one of a handful of the newspapers that faced criticisms for awkward phrasing, such as describing a high school football game as "high school football action," which left readers calling the article "terrible." Other awkward phrasing included AI describing the Ohio game as a "close encounter of the athletic kind," according to Axios.

Well, that sure got weird, didn't it? Tribune's takeover of what used to be called Times-Mirror was messy when it started, a decade and a half ago, and has gotten worse every few years: This is the company, after all, that took over several great newspapers, crowed about "synergy," and made a few legendary editors so uncomfortable that they left their posts. And they sold their papers to Sam Zell, who had no background in newspapers and made an even bigger mess of things before filing for Chapter 11. Last fall, the company put Tribune Tower, where its original newspaper is based, up for sale. But now Tribune has a new trick: It has renamed itself tronc – a term that means, in French, "poor box," and if modulated to "trunk," something worse. According to Tribune's current chair, Michael Ferro – who was invited onto the board by former CEO Jack Griffin, whom he fired -- this is a bold step into the future.

After Thursday's annual shareholder meeting in downtown Los Angeles, LA Times' parent Tribune Publishing announced it would be changing its name to tronc Inc. and moving its shares from the New York Stock Exchange to the Nasdaq, effective June 20. In the release, the future consonant-heavy media organization describes itself as a "a content curation and monetization company focused on creating and distributing premium, verified content across all channels," or a news organization, in other words. It also "plans to launch www.tronc.com, "Our industry requires an innovative approach and a fundamentally different way of operating," Ferro said in the release. Earlier in the day, Tribune Chairman Michael Ferro won a big victory when he had his slate of board members confirmed.

It looks like USA Today is officially not going to be the Los Angeles Times' tomorrow. During its annual shareholder meeting here Thursday morning, Tribune Publishing, the Times' parent company, won a key victory. Its tech-entrepreneur owner fended off two takeover attempts from Gannett, publisher of USA Today, and won approval of his board slate. Before the meeting, Bloomberg reported, Gannett was likely to pull out of acquisition talks pending the result of the vote, an outcome that seems almost perfunctory at this point. Now all Tribune chairman Michael Ferro has to do is make the futuristic vision he and the company's new vice chairman and second-largest investor, biotech billionaire Patrick Soon-Shiong, have for the company -- which includes artificial intelligence, "machine vision" technology and new bureaus from Rio de Janeiro to Lagos -- a promising story about the future of news.

The newspaper business is shrinking fast. Print ad revenues keep falling, and cost-cutting is the mantra of the day. So why is Tribune Publishing fighting so hard to avoid the embrace of USA Today owner Gannett? It may come down to a clash of bean-counters against visionaries--assuming, of course, it's not just about holding out for the best price. Gannett wants Tribune--the company behind the Los Angeles Times, the Chicago Tribune and other major daily papers--because bigger is better in a shrinking industry.

The second-largest shareholder of Los Angeles Times owner Tribune Publishing said Wednesday that passing up a buyout offer from rival publishing company Gannett could "destroy enormous shareholder value." In a letter sent to Tribune's board and filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission, downtown L.A. investment firm Oaktree Capital Management made clear it wants the board to reconsider selling to Gannett and raised serious concerns about the turnaround plans of new Tribune Chairman Michael Ferro. The board this month rejected an offer of 12.25 a share from Gannett, which responded this week by raising that offer to 15 a share. That's a 99% premium to Tribune Publishing's stock price before Gannett went public with its proposal last month. Oaktree, which owns 14.8% of Tribune Publishing's shares, this month urged the company's board to negotiate with Gannett.