The primary challenge was a chronic labor shortage, leaving an insufficient number of reporters to manage the relentless cycle of daily coverage and drafting. This left virtually no time for proactive reporting—such as investigative journalism—which is essential for increasing the newspaper’s value. Furthermore, producing articles for lectures and roundtables was incredibly time-consuming, requiring extensive labor for everything from transcribing audio data to summarizing and final writing.

Fukushima Minpo developed "Minsuke," an AI-powered support tool for journalists that leverages Gemini to automate the entire workflow—from transcription and filler word removal to proofreading, summarization, and article formatting. Their validation showed that the production time for roundtable features, which previously took about 30 hours, was successfully slashed to around 5 hours (an 83% reduction). Journalists in the field have praised the tool for its high transcription accuracy and the quality of its summaries and drafts, noting that it leads to significant labor savings.