It’s becoming increasingly easy for newsrooms to develop their own automated tools. In Argentina, Brazil and Mexico, some have turned those tools into sources of revenue.
Argentine fact-checking outlet Chequeado created Desgrabador in 2016, a web application that transcribes audio from YouTube videos, to streamline its newsroom’s fact-checking process.
Three years later, Chequeado made Desgrabador freely available to the public, eventually attracting more than 200,000 monthly users, said Franco Piccato, Chequeado’s executive director. The growth increased the cost of maintaining Desgrabador, prompting Chequeado to turn it into a commercial product and optimize it with artificial intelligence.
Then, in 2025, Chequeado launched a “freemium” version(opens in new tab) of Desgrabador, offering free access with a monthly usage limit, as well as more intensive use and advanced features through a membership program. With this strategy, the organization has not only covered the tool’s costs but also generated revenue.
“Desgrabador more or less sums up our strategy, which started with solving a problem in Chequeado’s newsroom,” Piccato told the LatAm Journalism Review (LJR). “Over time, it is becoming a source of sustainability for us.”
¿Cuánto tiempo te lleva desgrabar un video?
Spoiler: más del necesario.En Chequeado armamos algo para eso: el Desgrabador .
Subís el link al video y en segundos tenés el audio en texto.¡Gratis, para empezar! pic.twitter.com/n0UbsDE3MI
— Chequeado (@Chequeado) April 13, 2026
Chequeado’s experience reflects a trend among some Latin American news outlets that have turned tools developed to address their own newsroom needs into products capable of generating revenue, at a time when advances in AI and automation are making it easier to develop these kinds of solutions.
Chequeabot is another Chequeado tool that generates revenue. It’s a suite of AI applications that includes an assistant bot, a specialized version of Desgrabador and a tool that transcribes events in real time and identifies potentially checkable claims.
Chequeabot generates revenue through licenses sold to other fact-checking organizations and news outlets, as well as through external funders that sponsor access to the tool for smaller media organizations, Piccato said.
Although technology monetization still represents a small share of Chequeado’s revenue, the organization aims for the business to contribute at least 10% of its annual budget.
“[The goal is] to ensure that, in addition to the traditional international cooperation and philanthropic funding that supports our work, technology becomes a way to diversify our revenue, while also supporting our journalistic independence and all of Chequeado’s programs,” Piccato said.
Brazilian investigative journalism and fact-checking agency Aos Fatos has also developed an AI-powered transcription tool that streamlines its newsroom’s work and generates revenue.
Escriba is a platform that transcribes audio in 99 languages, with accuracy of up to 97%, according to its website. Launched in 2022, the tool now has more than 10,000 individual users and corporate subscribers.
But unlike Chequeado’s Desgrabador, Escriba was designed from the outset to be a source of revenue.
“When Aos Fatos was created, in 2015, it was born as a journalism-tech organization”, said Marcela Duarte, Aos Fatos’ director of innovation, in an interview with LJR. “The strategy was to have tools that, from the beginning, were designed to be monetized.”
Ahead of Brazil’s presidential election in October, Aos Fatos is working on ways to monetize another of its platforms, Busca Fatos, which can transcribe live events and detect verifiable claims.
Você conhece o Escriba (https://t.co/KnhiC5gm9K), nossa ferramenta de transcrição automática?
Ele funciona em 99 idiomas, tem precisão de até 97%, detecção de falantes e um editor de texto interativo.
Mas por que nós temos um serviço de transcrição?
Segue o fio. pic.twitter.com/hgqnrWHt0O
— Aos Fatos (@aosfatos) October 25, 2023
Duarte said Busca Fatos could generate revenue by providing services to other news outlets and organizations.
Duarte believes Escriba has the potential to attract thousands of subscribers among individuals and organizations. Busca Fatos could also develop a subscriber base, she said, although it would likely be smaller and made up primarily of other news organizations.
Technology monetization currently accounts for more than one-third of Aos Fatos’ total revenue, Duarte said.
In one of the AI courses he teaches at La Salle University in Cancún, Mexico, journalist and educator Abraham Torres demonstrated one of the automated tools he developed for his news outlet, El Zenit. The tool generates and publishes an Instagram carousel featuring the five most important stories of the day, according to the outlet’s website.
One student became interested in using the tool to improve the social media presence of her own business, a curtain and blinds shop. Torres adapted the automation to the business’s needs and, rather than charging her a fee to develop it, opted to rent the tool to her.
“That’s how I started renting out the ‘robot,’” Torres told LJR. “Since people don’t know about these technologies, it made more sense for me to rent out the workflow on a monthly basis.”
Torres said his client pays $300 a month for the tool, which consists of an automated workflow using AI agents to generate and publish up to 10 images a day on the business’ Instagram, Facebook and TikTok accounts.
Since then, Torres has added two more clients: a restaurant in Cancún and a local U.S. news outlet, both of which rent tools he originally developed for El Zenit. Those revenues have helped the news outlet come close to reaching sustainability less than a year after its launch in November 2025, Torres said.
“That was when I said, ‘Of course, I can apply [these tools] to journalism, but can also make money,’” he said. “That’s how I pay my guys’ salaries, my server and all the AI tools I use professionally and for the news outlet. So it’s a win-win.”
Torres said he taught himself to create automated workflows using platforms such as Make and n8n, which require little or no coding.
Mexican journalist and professor Abraham Torres teaches courses on ways to leverage AI in newsrooms. (Photo: Courtesy of Abraham Torres)
“Vibe coding” — a term used to describe developing applications through natural-language instructions that AI converts into code — is lowering the technical barrier for journalists without programming experience to build their own tools.
“That empowers all of us, not just organizations that perhaps didn’t have a development team, but also those that already did,” Dolores Pujol, Chequeado’s director of innovation, told LJR. “It empowers them to do more or do it faster.”
Still, Piccato emphasized the importance of collaboration between journalists and developers to apply technology to journalism in a sustainable and ethical way.
“AI speeds up many processes and amplifies others,” he said. “But it also creates new challenges, particularly when it comes to content production, which can often be low quality and where verification and accuracy require a lot of human oversight.”
This article was translated with AI assistance and reviewed by Jorge Valencia
