A few years ago, as the COVID-19 pandemic subsided, the editor of a high school newspaper at a parochial institution in Dallas took note of an escalating concern: reporters and assignment editors are expected to monitor an enormous number of government and agency sources, often with limited time and staff. Armed with ideas and a passion for a fix, Shreyan Daulat, now a senior at the University of Texas at Austin, teamed up with “the best coder he new” to build a software-as-a-service tool expressly for newsrooms.
Today, Daulat and co-founder Renil Gupta have what they believe is a solution. Two major-market broadcast TV newsrooms are live with the product. Once Daulat and Gupta graduate, the goal is for BeatNews to gain widespread adoption across the U.S. in an environment where getting pertinent source material reliably, swiftly and in a trustworthy way is more essential than ever.
As a BIA Local Media & Tech Daily reader, you get special access to RBR+TVBR Premium Content and a special VIP Membership offer, opening up RadioTVBiz.com and providing you with our quarterly Radio + Television Business Report magazine.
Take advantage of this special offer by clicking here.
A SaaS platform, BeatNews works primarily as a news scraper constantly searching sources that journalists rely on for coverage of municipal agencies and government activities. Given the narrative of late that TV newsrooms are in need of, or are undertaking, great transformations as part of a future-proofing effort, the timing could be perfect for Gupta and Daulat’s creation.
It’s a tool that was developed while Daulat and Gupta were each balancing a full load of undergraduate classes at one of America’s foremost public universities. What was the main driver for launching BeatNews while also ensuring their grades didn’t suffer?
“Renil and I both went to St. Marks School of Texas and while I was working at its newspaper, The ReMarker, even at that hyperlocal level, we still faced a similar problem that television stations and the biggest household names face today,” Daulat tells RBR+TVBR. “That is having to monitor and go across hundreds of local sources by hand. We would have our beat reporters assigned to 20-30 pages themselves and they’d have to go look at those sources each week. It was a big inefficiency.”
Then, during their senior year at the parochial school, artificial intelligence made its great leap into everyday use. For Daulat, recruiting Gupta, who had already proved his mettle as a programmer, to harness AI in creating a tool that would eliminate the inefficiency became a mission.
“In terms of impact, I knew that with the consolidation of the industry, you’re going to have fewer and fewer workers to cover the same footprint, or even a growing footprint across the country,” Daulat continues. “The concern there is that you don’t have the bandwidth to go into a 200-page document. Who is going to do that? This is public information, and it was really important for us to solve how to deliver it.”
For Gupta, creating a user-friendly application was a clear, top-of-mind need when building the platform. “When we looked at the workforce tools that a lot of these reporters and journalists were using, what we ended up seeing was that the research space has really been not up to par with where technology was at. We just saw it as a really great opportunity to bring some novel approaches to this entire problem space and revolutionize how the entire industry has been doing their research and how that leads into article generation and product workflow.”
Gupta adds that user experience is “key to everything that we’ve done,” and creating a tool that provides relevant updates to specific beats in the best way possible was Job One. Since the first version came to frution, Gupta and Daulat have been adding new features to BeatNews that add to the ease and efficiency a busy journalist needs today.
Already live with BeatNews are Nexstar Media Group-owned KXAN-TV in Austin and CBS Stations’ KCAL-TV & KCBS-TV in Los Angeles.
Daulat comments, “We started BeatNews by just giving it out to journalists — any journalist — at radio stations, and at newspapers. We interviewed 50-plus reporters across the Los Angeles Times, The Wall Street Journal, ABC affiliates and a lot of places across Texas. We pitched our product in its earliest form and we offered it as a test, to let us know what they thought so we could work together, grow it and improve it.”
After six months, Daulat and Gupta had enough insight to then suggest BeatNews be introduced to News Directors at the TV stations using the product. “We found a much stronger need and demand at broadcast stations than compared to our [newspapers] or local radio stations,” Daulat says. “And, at the broadcast TV level, they wanted a product for real-time sourcing immediately, so we shifted our efforts and our focus away from newspapers and radio.”
With graduation nearing, Daulat is confident that BeatNews “speaks for itself,” thus not requiring much time or investment in marketing the product. A product demo and materials sent to News Directors proved successful in terms of a positive reception, and phone meetings. “They at least want to take a demo or talk to Renil and our tech team, or they just want to talk with us to learn what these two college students are up to,” he says.
Booking demos around class times and rescheduling an exam or two has been seen for Daulat and Gupta as they look forward to earning their diplomas and having more free time come July. Meanwhile, they’ve added a local traffic scanner and a live data feed for accident reports to BeatNews. The Texas A&M [Forest Service] fire tracker in real time is also now incorporated into BeatNews.
“It’s been very important for us to nail this right from the beginning, because that’s the nature of any technology product. It’s getting it right,” Daulat concludes. “That’s how we build trust with our users.”
For now, English-language news organizations in the U.S. are BeatNews’ target. That’s not to say expansion to Latin America or Spanish-language newsrooms across the nation aren’t in the forecast. It simply depends on demand, Daulat says. If anything, offering the sports department a BeatNews tool could be next.
For now, Daulat and Gupta are focused on building the user base of what they’ve created before they’ve each turned 23, with the hope that TV news organizations like and embrace a product born out of necessity by a high school newspaper editor with a vision that has come to fruition thanks to AI.
Learn more at https://www.beatnews.ai/ or contact Shreyan Daulat at [email protected]
