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New Trends in Newsrooms report: The Rise of AI

Through case studies and interviews with individuals at the forefront of AI, the second 2019 Trends in Newsrooms report focuses on the rise of AI and offers an in-depth look at how AI is impacting and transforming the news creation process.

by Simone Flueckiger simone.flueckiger@wan-ifra.org | September 25, 2019

AI in the Newsroom” is available to WAN-IFRA Members for free downloading and can be purchased by non-members.

Thinking about introducing AI into your newsroom? The go-to-newsroom expert, the Wall Street Journal’s Francesco Marconi, offers guidance on things to consider before you do. He is just one of the strategists and newsroom managers we talked to for our latest Trends in Newsrooms report.

Over the past five years, AI has slowly been making its way into newsrooms, and its impact is continuing to grow. From creating news stories automatically to optimising content delivery, newsrooms are making use of AI to automate and augment their reporting and other newsroom processes, making work-flows more efficient, speeding up time-consuming tasks, and increasing the breadth of their coverage.

In Norway, business daily Dagens Næringsliv is combining human and artificial intelligence in a bid to improve content recommendations; Swiss publishing group Tamedia built an algorithm to take over the curation process for one of its news app to test whether it can successfully replicate a journalist’s ‘gut feeling’; and UK-based news service RADAR is marrying traditional reporting and automation with the goal of scaling up the production of local news reports.

AI systems have also shown huge potential for investigative journalism by helping reporters analyse massive amounts of data, and enabling them to quickly find relationships among different entities. For the collaborative teams probing the Panama and Paradise Papers, this proved to be an unquantifiable asset.

But AI is not without risks. Although it hasn’t brought about the job losses many feared (quite the opposite, in fact, according to some experts), conclusions drawn by machines are not always correct, meaning journalists need to continuously question outcomes, validate methodologies, and ensure explainability. Another emerging risk of AI-driven content generation has manifested itself in the form of so-called deepfakes. In addition to traditional fact-checking processes, journalists must now also be vigilant about the possibility that video or image evidence may have been falsified.

In addition to highlighting these controversial aspects of AI, the latest chapter of the Trends in Newsrooms report showcases numerous examples of how newsrooms across the globe are making use of AI, offers practical tips on introducing the technology, and addresses some of the ethical dimensions to consider when doing so.

AI in the Newsroom” is available to WAN-IFRA Members for free downloading and can be purchased by non-members.

Click here for the first report of Trends in Newsrooms 2019 “Audience and Community Take Centre Stage”.

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