News site Semafor has teamed with Microsoft to create a new breaking news product called Signals it says is a template for “the newsroom of the future.” Using AI tools from Microsoft and OpenAI to assist its journalists, the multi-source Signals will offer “perspectives and insights on the biggest stories in the world as they develop,” Semafor says. Microsoft simultaneously announced deals with the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at CUNY and the Online News Association. “In a year where billions of people will vote in democratic elections worldwide, journalism is critical to creating healthy information ecosystems,” Microsoft says.

Signals will offer a daily feed of about a dozen stories, focusing on breaking news and analysis on the major topics of each news cycle. “The goal is to offer different points of view from across the globe — a key focus for Semafor since its launch in 2022,” writes Financial Times.

Semafor co-founder Ben Smith writes in a news announcement co-authored by executive editor Gina Chua that journalists will do all the writing at Signals, and remain at the core of Semafor.

“Our journalists around the globe identify the central facts of a story, then curate the key analysis and insight from a global range of news sources — including different, sometimes opposing, views on the same piece of information,” notes the announcement. “In this, they’re aided by AI tools that help them search news sources across multiple languages and geographies, allowing them to extend their reach.”

“As social traffic collapses and Google makes ominous AI-powered sounds about search, publishers across the board have started to reemphasize their websites as destinations, and that means there are a lot of new ideas about what makes websites valuable again,” is the take from The Verge, which describes Semafor as “fundamentally a collection of links to stories from around the web about a topic, curated and summarized by a Semafor reporter.”

“The twist is that Semafor built an AI-powered search tool called MISO (for ‘multilingual insight search optimizer’),” according to The Verge, “to help those reporters find a broad range of stories in various languages to make that curation process more efficient.”

“Semafor and Microsoft are also partnering on research to figure out how journalists can use AI responsibly — one of several media partnerships Microsoft announced,” writes The Verge.

Semafor was founded by former BuzzFeed editor Ben Smith and Bloomberg Media Group’s erstwhile CEO Justin Smith.