This research analyses the organization, work processes and quality of the information produced by Narrativa Inteligencia Artificial, the only company in Spain that writes journalistic texts using ...the software known as Gabriele for distribution to various media. The study was conducted over a six month period using in-depth, semi-structured interviews with four company professionals with complementary profiles, as well as participant observation during the process of creating an automated news item, and an online questionnaire filled out by 145 journalists (N=145) to assess the quality of the texts produced. The results show that the start-up company fulfils the demands of different sectors such as communication media, and has been increasing the productivity of its content, although it still does not generate complex texts, as this is one of many human qualities that robots continue to lack.
Over the last decade, Artificial Intelligence (AI) has become gradually more prevalent in mass media and news agency newsrooms. This growing tendency has prompted intense debate about the negative ...impact on journalism, particularly on quality standards and ethical principles. Taking an explorative approach, this study aims to analyse the application of AI in newsrooms, focusing on the impact on news-making processes, media routines and profiles, highlighting the benefits and shortcomings, and finally, analysing the rise of ethical dilemmas. For this purpose, 15 in-depth interviews were conducted in two rounds, in 2019 and 2021, with a sample of journalists and other media professionals, academics, experts on the media industry, and providers of technology leading the work on AI. The international sample includes interviewees from the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany and Spain. The interviewees agree that AI will enhance journalists’ capabilities by saving time, augmenting the efficiency of the news-making processes and, therefore, increasing mass media industry productivity. However, a change of mind-set in the media environment is needed, and training on the use of these tools must be a priority given the lack of knowledge observed. Finally, the emergence of ethical issues underlines the need for continuous control and supervision of the processes undertaken by AI.
In October 2016 the New York Times announced new content personalisation features for its websites and mobile apps, with the promise of "much more to come". This article examines such developments ...via a quantitative content analysis of personalisation features at 15 major news outlets in the United Kingdom, the United States, and Germany and via interviews with senior editorial staff at some of those outlets. Both websites and mobile apps were studied, allowing comparisons to be made across platforms as well as geographically. Longitudinal comparisons were also made against an equivalent survey conducted in 2010. The results reveal significant changes over the last six years with, for example, rises in personalisation on mobile platforms, falls in the use of recommendations by friends, and convergence and commodification in content recommendation platforms. This study provides evidence to support continued debates on classical concerns such as selective exposure, but also raises new concerns about the effects of personalisation, including data protection and security issues.
Se analiza la percepción que existe en el sector profesional y académico sobre el uso de inteligencia artificial en periodismo. El trabajo se ha desarrollado a lo largo de once meses mediante ...entrevistas a responsables de innovación de varios medios nacionales (N=10) y a docentes universitarios (N=10) y cuestionarios a periodistas (N=251) y a estudiantes de Periodismo y Comunicación Audivosiual (N=194). Los resultados muestran una coincidencia en ambos discursos en que esta tecnología no tendrá un impacto negativo sobre el mercado laboral periodístico. También existe consenso en que la calidad de las noticias automatizadas presenta algunas carencias importantes, así como en la necesidad de apostar por una sólida formación de los periodistas que integre el uso de las tecnologías emergentes.
Journalism, more so than other professions, is entangled with technology in a unique and profoundly impactful way. In this context, the technological developments of the past decades have ...fundamentally impacted the journalistic profession in more ways than one, opening up new possibilities and simultaneously creating a number of concerns for people working in the media industry. The changes that were brought about by the rise of automation and algorithmic technology can mainly be observed in four distinct fields of application within journalism: automated content production, data mining, news dissemination and content optimization. This article focuses on algorithmic journalism and aims to highlight the ways that algorithmic technology is being utilized within those fields, as well as pointing out the ways in which these developments have altered the way journalism is being exercised in the modern world. The study also discusses challenges related to these technologies that are yet to be addressed, as well as potential future implementations related to algorithmic journalism that have the capacity to improve on the foundation of automation in the news industry.
News has long been a contested concept but in the digital era it has become increasingly fractured and multidimensional. This discursive article explores some of the ways in which the news has been ...disrupted by technological and economic tensions and argues that the social value of news is worth articulating and, where necessary, struggling for. News values have never been universal or unproblematic, and the tension between commercial and social ways of valuing news is intensified today. News values are not fixed and must be open to critique as to how they are meeting citizens’ needs. Societally useful news may be at risk of being marginalized as news organizations struggle to survive, but it is not inevitable that disruption and digitization should undermine journalistic ethics and the social value of news. In arguing that scholars ought to approach news more holistically, to defend it as well as critique it, the article attempts to synthesize what typically appear as discrete approaches to studying news. The article concludes that, if the social value of news is not to suffer further diminution, there is a need to view news through a lens of struggle; a struggle in which journalists, audiences, scholars and, indeed, all citizens have a part to play.
In this article we consider automated journalism from the perspective of bias in news text. We describe how systems for automated journalism could be biased in terms of both the information content ...and the lexical choices in the text, and what mechanisms allow human biases to affect automated journalism even if the data the system operates on is considered neutral. Hence, we sketch out three distinct scenarios differentiated by the technical transparency of the systems and the level of cooperation of the system operator, affecting the choice of methods for investigating bias. We identify methods for diagnostics in each of the scenarios and note that one of the scenarios is largely identical to investigating bias in non-automatically produced texts. As a solution to this last scenario, we suggest the construction of a simple news generation system, which could enable a type of analysis-by-proxy. Instead of analyzing the system, to which the access is limited, one would generate an approximation of the system which can be accessed and analyzed freely. If successful, this method could also be applied to analysis of human-written texts. This would make automated journalism not only a target of bias diagnostics, but also a diagnostic device for identifying bias in human-written news.
Newsrooms are a social context in which numerous relationships exist and influence news work—be it with other journalists, the audience, and technology. As some of these relations change due to ...technological innovations, new hybrid contexts—technologies that are interwoven with newsroom values, routines, and socio-cultural experiences—can emerge. One key question is how journalists conceptualise and interact with such technologies, and to what degree they retain (creative) agency in the process. Therefore, this study evaluates the intersection of automated journalism and journalistic role conceptions. Using Hanitzsch’s and Vos’s circular model of journalistic roles (2017) and Deuze’s understanding of journalism as an ideology (2005) as a theoretical framework, this study examines some of the discursive aspects of automated journalism by asking: To what extent are journalistic roles (a) challenged or (b) advanced as a result of automated journalism? Our findings more closely align with the latter, pointing to a strong sense of discursive maintenance of journalists’ roles and their core skillset and thus suggesting a high degree of ideological continuity in the face of industrial disruption. It concludes with an agenda for future research and stresses that at times when journalism and automation intersect, the field would benefit from incorporating emerging conceptual frameworks such as human–machine communication.
This study examines how algorithmic processing affects structures and practices in sports journalism in Germany. A multi-level perspective is used to determine which strategies data providers, ...software providers, and media outlets use to develop automated reporting, which compiles perspectives across the entire line of news production. The results of 11 in-depth interviews show that non-journalistic actors are vital partners in the news production process, as all actors work together in data handling, training, and software development. Moreover, automation can generate additional content such as match and historical coverage to help address shortfalls in capacity. However, given the business case for automation, amateur football (soccer) is currently the only viable candidate for its use. Many actors involved in the process argue that automated content is an added value for their readers, but claim that content quality has to be put before quantity. This means that some media outlets edit automated articles to increase the quality of their sports journalism, but that this is done only on a small scale. Media outlets do not perceive their roles to be changing, but see automation as a helpful tool that complements their work; a few use automatically created articles as a baseline for in-depth reporting. Moreover, the so-called ‘meta-writer’ has not become a reality yet, as data-processing and news writing are still kept separate. This article sheds new light on the use of automation in the sports beat, highlighting the growing role of non-journalistic actors in the news production process.
News recommending systems (NRSs) are algorithmic tools that filter incoming streams of information according to the users’ preferences or point them to additional items of interest. In today’s ...high-choice media environment, attention shifts easily between platforms and news sites and is greatly affected by algorithmic technologies; news personalization is increasingly used by news media to woo and retain users’ attention and loyalty. The present study examines the implementation of a news recommender algorithm in a leading news media organization on the basis of observation of the recommender system’s outputs. Drawing on an experimental design employing the ‘algorithmic audit’ method, and more specifically the ‘collaborative audit’ which entails utilizing users as testers of algorithmic systems, we analyze the composition of the personalized MyNews area in terms of accuracy and user engagement. Premised on the idea of algorithms being black boxes, the study has a two-fold aim: first, to identify the implicated design parameters enlightening the underlying functionality of the algorithm, and second, to evaluate in practice the NRS through the deployed experimentation. Results suggest that although the recommender algorithm manages to discriminate between different users on the basis of their past behavior, overall, it underperforms. We find that this is related to flawed design decisions rather than technical deficiencies. The study offers insights to guide the improvement of NRSs’ design that both considers the production capabilities of the news organization and supports business goals, user demands and journalism’s civic values.
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