When Michael Ferro became the largest shareholder and non-executive chairman of Tribune Publishing in 2016, according to his Wikipedia bio, Ferro became determined to usher the historic company into the digital age, focusing on big data and artificial intelligence technology.
Ferro, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, owner of the Washington Post, and news publishers around the world are turning toward Artificial Intelligence (AI), to actually write news.
Charlie Firestone of the Aspen Institute explained, “The news business, like many others, has been…decimated by the digital revolution. Technologies have provided countless new choices for people, who often had limited access to information…There is…a huge fragmentation of information sources now competing with conventional journalism for people’s attention. The non-journalistic competitors include Facebook, LinkedIn, Snapchat and Twitter, as well as countless specialized websites and blogs that, arguably, have closer, more credible connections with a subject than do general-audience newspapers and broadcasts.”
More and more, interest shown by the public at these sites is determining the headlines we are focusing on in mainstream journalism. Donald Trump has bypassed traditional media outlets and gone straight to the public through Twitter. His tweets become raw news, consumed by millions, friends and foes alike.
How are journalists able to do quality reporting today? Good, investigative, fact-checked reporting can be expensive, and ad revenues are down. It takes a lot of hours and data power to do in-depth, quality reporting. New business models for news are emerging and AI is at the core of these new models. There are up sides and down sides to this marriage of technology and journalism.
THE UP SIDE
AI is fantastic for gathering information, sorting it, analyzing it and summarizing it. An app called Banjo can run through news feeds and social media feeds and identify important news stories faster than any human editor could. Banjo organizes real-time posts by location from people on the ground at events around the world. With its excellent, international data mining abilities, it is like having reporters all over the world.
A company called Narrative Science is a pioneer in AI Journalism. Their programs not only collect, sort and analyze information (data)…they also write summaries (stories) about that data. Intelligent Narratives has been writing published sports columns and financial columns for a few years now. In very natural language, AI articles can factually report a market crash or a World Series ball game, able to generate proper emotional content for devastating losses or heroic slides to home. The Associated Press recently “hired” a robot reporter from Automated Insights…and that thing is cranking out about 4500 earnings reports a quarter, complete with easy to understand summaries. The data is very factual, the analyses clean and information fact-checked at lightning speed.
THE DOWN SIDE
The down side of AI reporting starts with its personalization. It finds what is popular, what is of the most of interest to a particular audience. The algorithms that collect, sort and analyze usually include location, social media information and other demographic data. The AI program then writes for this click-driven environment. This can seriously degrade the journalism. Diverse viewpoints are casualties. We have talked about filter bubbles…this is quite troubling in AI journalism. Bots (fake identities online) can be produced to repeat misinformation, which drastically skews data that AI programs collect.
Of course, the biggest question is, who controls this automated curation (collection) and exclusion of information? Who is “instructing” the programs? That is a big, big question.
It is very special for me to hold a Mountain Messenger News in my hand, to sit down with it and have a cup of tea while I read about my beloved community and people I know personally. I love the feel of the paper in my hands. I love the familiar faces on its pages. I love seeing the new crops of children going about the business of growing up. I appreciate being up to date on local issues about resources we share. And I love that people are heard by editors who actually read their comments and letters.
What happens here in Topanga is very relevant to me. Perhaps, that is why local papers will last in their present formats, written by real people, much longer than the big giants. I hope they are around a long, long time to come.
But make no mistake about it. The Mountain Messenger News must be a paper of its time. It will have an online presence. It will include audio and visual news. Our little paper will reach far beyond our community as its articles show up in search engines around the world.
Today, all things really are connected.
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