Generative AI for publishers: How a specialist title used AI to rocket editorial output and quality

Using a small team to punch above its weight, video games site AltChar found Glide AI Assistant helped turn the tables on bigger rivals.

Published: 01:50, 15 January 2025

Last updated: 19:05, 15 January 2025

As a consumer interest website dedicated to covering the latest news in video games, AltChar faced real issues in keeping up with the fast-moving and dynamic nature of the biggest entertainment industry in the world. 

With a small editorial team of only three writers, producing the volume of news stories, guides, updates, and reviews to meet audience demand and compete commercially proved to be a constant challenge.

The editorial team had to balance:

• Time Constraints: The need to quickly summarise events, news, and reviews to stay ahead of competitors.

• Consistency: Ensuring that articles maintained a high level of quality and consistency in tone and style.

• Resource Allocation: Limited resources meant the AltChar editorial team often had to prioritise fast-changing topic trends, making constant adjustments on which topics to cover or highlight.

Against this background, AltChar Editor Semir Omerović explored the use of Glide AI Assistant (GAIA), a set of AI tools natively integrated into their content management system, Glide CMS to streamline their workflows, enhance coverage levels and boost daily output.

AI for publishers and media projects

With the increasing popularity of AI tools across media and publishing, Glide Publishing Platform was quick to develop and release Glide AI Assistant (GAIA), a set of AI-driven text, image generation, and language and audio tools natively integrated into the Glide CMS. 

The release of GAIA was the perfect opportunity for AltChar, a long time Glide CMS user, to get early hands-on experience with the tools and choose what best fit their needs. 

Omerović explained: "The natural ideal was for us to leverage AI tools within the CMS we already used, so when Glide released its AI system, GAIA, it was easy to start experimenting and seeing what it could do for us."

"The goal was to get more bandwidth to better cover stories and increase our overall output by cutting time on tasks that were repetitive but still had a lot of impact. We had no lack of ideas on what to write about or what topics to cover, but the one thing we were missing was the time to do it as well as we wanted."

Implementing GAIA was seamless, a matter of simply toggling ‘On’ in Settings, selecting where GAIA would be used, and confirming the desired settings for each user or use case. Adoption was speeded by editorial staff and admins receiving training on how to leverage GAIA most effectively and started using the new tool consistently in a few hours. GAIA Article Summary proved to be a perfect solution to offering summaries to readers quickly and efficiently. With GAIA Article Summary, AltChar’s editorial team is able to simply click a button to summarise even the most complex stories in moments, saving precious time in fast-moving news scenarios. 

What's more, with their ability to break down complex stories into bite-size chunks, summaries are being used to attract readers on site and in other channels including newsletters. 

Better quality, consistently

With GAIA, AltChar has quickly been able to better enforce a consistent tone and style that aligns with their editorial standards across all site summaries. 

Omerović explained: "GAIA Article Summary has been a great addition to the CMS. We've freed up time from the repetitive process of creating summaries so we can do more of the unique stuff our readers want, and at the same time help raise reader engagement and improve our SEO."

"What the team liked too was that the summary is drawn only from things they have already written, so it's not adding anything new, which feels like a great safety net. That's really important for me as editor to know they are comfortable with it."

The impact GAIA Article Summary has had for AltChar’s editorial team has been:

• Increased efficiency: The time required to publish an article with an accompanying summary was reduced on average by 15 percent, allowing the team to cover more topics and updates every day.

• Improved engagement: The consistency and quality of the summaries improved with a noticeable increase in reader engagement.

• Enhanced focus: With time saved in the production phase, the editorial team could allocate increased time to creating more in-depth articles and exclusive content, differentiating AltChar from competitors.

• SEO optimisation: By automatically packaging the concise info beloved by search engines into one place, Article Summary helped create a better understanding of site pages and content relevant to search queries.

• Better social: GAIA Article Summary allowed AltChar to streamline its social media workflow, freeing up time to cover the secondary channels the team have identified as critical to growth.