Using the ‘Roganbot’ to Tackle a Journalism Blind Spot
“It’s not easy (for newsrooms) to keep up with content on these platforms. These are often hours-long, meandering conversations.”
How AI consulting lab Verso aims to help traditional journalism report on a seemingly infinite number of news influencers
In a media ecosystem increasingly shaped by popular podcasters, streamers and YouTube personalities, traditional journalism often finds it difficult to keep up. About 20% of Americans – including a much higher share of adults under 30 (37%) – now get information from news influencers who create and share their content on a seemingly infinite number of podcasts, YouTube channels and social media accounts, according to a Pew Research poll conducted during the 2024 presidential campaigns.
In its 2024 poll, Pew Research defined news influencers as “people who regularly post about current events and civic issues on social media and have at least 100,000 followers on any of Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, X or YouTube.” Most, according to Pew Research, are men, and have no affiliation with a traditional news organization. And, in an election year, politics and the election itself were by far the most common topic for news influencers in 2024.
“The journalism establishment sometimes looks over this non-journalistic world of creators,” says Kaveh Waddell. “Journalism has this blind spot that people were starting to identify before the election. And then we realized, okay, maybe it’s even bigger than we thought.” Waddell, together with Patrick Swanson, is co-founder of Verso, an AI consulting lab based in San Francisco that helps newsrooms implement AI and technology strategy. The two met as 2024 John S. Knight Fellows at Stanford University, where they studied and designed generative AI tools and strategy for newsrooms.
As a first step in understanding the way political ideas form and spread in the decentralized world of new media, Waddell and Swanson have developed the Roganbot, which uses AI to analyze episodes of Rogan’s lengthy podcasts. Fetching the episode, Roganbot turns it into searchable text, identifies key moments and emerging ideas, transforming sprawling conversations into data.
Read more about the Roganbot: Keeping up with Joe Rogan (Verso)
Why Joe Rogan?
Joe Rogan is by far the most mainstream and well-known news influencer, says Waddell. Rogan’s podcast, the Joe Rogan Experience, has more than 19 million subscribers and nearly 5.8 billion views on YouTube alone. Donald Trump’s 3-hour interview with Rogan on October 25, 2024 resulted in more than 50 million views on YouTube, plus many millions more on Spotify, which also distributes the podcast – a media event that should have been taken at least as seriously as the presidential debate, adds Swanson.
“When you listen to some of the Joe Rogan episodes, there are theories that come up again and again, famously in an Elon Musk interview, they talk about migrants being sent to swing states to vote in the election,” says Swanson. “(Rogan’s podcast guests) have all these conspiracy theories, and they're not taken seriously by legacy media for good reason, because often they are wrong, and yet millions of people get their information here.”
Swanson says the Roganbot allows newsrooms to “see how one theory bubbles up on one podcast that's maybe smaller that makes it down to Rogan, suddenly 10 million people are hearing about it.”
“It goes from (Rogan), down to smaller names that most people don’t know, and certainly aren't household names, but are still followed by millions of people,” says Waddell. “And often this audience is made up of younger people and younger men – a lot of people who ended up being pretty decisive in the November 2024 presidential election.”
The sheer variety and amount of news influencer content makes it difficult for traditional newsrooms to follow and report on what’s being said. “It’s not easy (for newsrooms) to keep up with content on these platforms. These are often hours-long, meandering conversations,” says Wadell. …. “If you're following a roster of news influencers, then, you know, good luck.”
Swanson says the project also grew out of a concern that legacy media may not be taking these creators seriously enough, or not thinking constructively about how to solve the problem of covering this media space. Roganbot is also intended to be the first step in a network of tools or AI agents, Swanson and Waddell say, that will help shed more light on the wider world of news influencers that hasn’t had much scrutiny..
Roganbot: More Than Just Fact-Checking
“Roganbot is a prototype designed to better understand the Joe Rogan Experience,” says Swanson. Verso’s AI-powered tool works by transcribing podcast episodes, identifying speakers, and analyzing tone and content to highlight controversial statements or themes that may need fact-checking. Roganbot is powered by a chained language model workflow, designed to handle long-form podcasts, and was coded by Verso in collaboration with Anthropic’s Claude 3.5 Sonnet language model, using the tool Cursor (more details can be found on the Verso blog).
Roganbot is also about more than just investigating claims and fact-checking podcasts, say Waddell and Swanson.
“This isn’t about policing creators; it’s about understanding them. The tool is intended to provide journalists with a way to keep up with the narratives shaping public opinion in spaces they typically don’t cover,” emphasizes Waddell. “Millions of people get their information from Rogan and similar creators. If journalism is to remain relevant, it must engage with these audiences and the content they consume.”
Roganbot is a fun start, but we want it to be the kind of tool that gives you the visibility that you need to understand what's going on in other spaces, says Swanson. For example, Roganbot can also be used to report on reporting on municipal and local news.
“There's only a handful of software providers in the United States that offer software platforms that cities and towns and sometimes states use,” says Waddell. “If you can interface with the ones that cover most cities, towns and municipalities, then you can offer something really powerful and to a newsroom, one of many ways to essentially multiply your newsroom and be in multiple places at once… you could be in 100 places at once.”
This tool can allow newsrooms to cover city council subcommittees, the school board, the police oversight commission and all these places, says Waddell. “Once, if you had a roster of 12 or 15 city hall reporters, you could send someone every evening.”
Now that's not the case, he says.
“It’s a visibility tool—a way for smaller newsrooms to multiply their presence and understand conversations they’re currently missing,” says Waddell. “Our goal is to make these tools reusable and adaptable across different beats, whether it’s pandemic reporting or election coverage.”
Verso is currently looking for partners, including newsrooms, funders and technologists — to help turn Roganbot and similar prototypes into fully realized products.