Gina Chua: Where Journalism’s Value Lives When AI Tells the Story

In this live episode, host Nikita Roy sits down with Gina Chua, Executive Editor of Semafor, recorded at an event at New York University hosted in collaboration with the AI networking group, Humans in the Loop. Gina brings a uniquely expansive lens to the AI conversation, grounded in her leadership across global newsrooms—from Reuters and The Wall Street Journal to the South China Morning Post. Now at Semafor, she continues to be a leading voice rethinking the information ecosystem for an AI-driven world.

In this wide-ranging and candid conversation, Gina explores how generative AI is reshaping the fundamental architecture of journalism—from editorial workflows and business models to the core definition of a story. She discusses her team’s experiments with building custom AI tools like Miso, a multilingual aggregation system powering Semafor’s Signals format.

Key topics include:

• How Semafor is using AI for multilingual search, editorial summarization, and style guide enforcement built directly into Google Suite workflows using App Scripts and Claude.
• The challenges of building durable AI products in newsrooms including unstable models, integration hurdles, and evolving use cases.
• Rethinking the role of journalists in an AI world: where value lies in asking the right questions, building audience understanding, and creating narratives only humans can shape.
• The importance of reframing journalism’s mission not as saving “journalists” or “journalism,” but as delivering information in the public interest.
• Behind-the-scenes on JESS (Journalist Expert Safety Support), a chatbot Gina prototyped and co-developed to democratize access to field safety guidance for reporters worldwide.
• Why the future of news depends on tight, authentic relationships with audiences and how startups like Semafor are designing for trust, voice, and community from the ground up.

The episode closes with reflections on Gina’s personal coding journey with AI including her work building an assistive tool for a friend with ALS.

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