This article analyses the response of European Public Service Media to the crisis caused by Covid-19, especially the impact of the pandemic on Europe’s major public broadcasters, with a particular focus on technical and professional constraints, alterations in audience volume and habits, production strategies, type of broadcast content and journalists’ routines. The research is based on public information from the European Broadcasting Union (EBU) and 19 in-depth, structured interviews with a convenience sample of innovation and strategy managers from public broadcasters in Austria (ORF), Belgium (VRT and RTBF), Denmark (DR), Finland (YLE), France (France TV), Germany (ARD and ZDF), Great Britain (BBC), Ireland (RTÉ), Italy (RAI), Netherlands (NPO), Portugal (RTP), Spain (RTVE), Sweden (SVT), Switzerland (RTS) and the European Broadcasting Union (EBU). The results indicate that the corporate projection of PSM was increased by emphasising their role as essential services and their defence of the values that characterise them. The pandemic forced the adaptation of programme production from technical standards to an emotional approach, accelerating a formal hybridisation with native online contents. Dependence on software grew and newsmaking processes were altered towards ‘remote journalism’. Changes are drawn that may be maintained in the future.
Artificial Intelligence (AI) is one of the most promising innovation frameworks with the potential to transform our relationship with technology. Particularly in journalism, AI is beginning to make its way transversally into the news production process and into the structure and functioning of the media. This article aims to anticipate how AI will impact on the Spanish media ecosystem and explain the medium-term transformations that are already being felt. The research approach is of an exploratory and descriptive nature, with a qualitative methodology based on Delphi-like in-depth interviews, encompassing an intentional sample of academic representatives, relevant associations and leading companies in the field of technology and communication. The results point out that AI will allow the extension of the current automated text news to audio and video on demand, it will favour that news can have a non-linear unstructured consumption, it will promote changes in the business model through new ways of relating with the audience and distribution of the product. Also, variations in the professional profile with a less operative journalist who will avoid routines –even of personal nature– that can be imitated by the machine and increase its cognitive contribution to the news production.
El uso de la inteligencia artificial en el newsmaking es una práctica pujante que requiere la adaptación de los planes curriculares en la enseñanza del periodismo. El objetivo de esta investigación es identificar, desde una perspectiva exploratoria, la oferta formativa relacionada con la automatización de contenidos en los grados y másteres en Periodismo y Comunicación de las universidades públicas españolas. Se analizan 768 asignaturas de 17 planes de estudios de grado y 116 materias de 8 másteres oficiales. Se recaba, también, la percepción de expertos en inteligencia artificial sobre los cambios que la aplicación en la enseñanza va a producir en la relación con el alumnado universitario, especialmente en Comunica-* Este artículo forma parte de las actividades del proyecto de investigación Nuevos valores, gobernanza, financiación y servicios audiovisuales públicos para la sociedad de Internet: Contrastes europeos y españoles (RTI2018-096065-B-I00) del Programa Estatal de I+D+i orientado a los
As artificial intelligence (AI) gains space in the media, public broadcasters are testing and experimenting with these technologies to raise their services to the new standards of the audiovisual ecosystem. From algorithms that help recommend the most suitable content for users, to others that detect news and automate some of the tasks of journalists, these tools are increasingly present in public audiovisual corporations. The data were obtained from semi-structured in-depth interviews with a convenience sample of 15 corporations from 12 countries. The results reflect a heterogeneous application of artificial intelligence in corporations, oriented towards the automatic creation of content from structured data, the improvement of audience interaction through chatbots, and personalisation or verification. The implementation of these technologies also poses major challenges. Firstly, the economic cost of adapting these systems to each corporation and the difficulties in hiring experts to develop AI solutions prevent a complete deployment of these tools in public broadcasters. As main conclusions, we have understood that AI as a “culture” is believed to be vital for the public audiovisual services of the future, although its application is still far from being a standard and generally does not occupy a relevant strategic position in the innovation departments of corporations.
La proliferación de noticias falsas en el renovado contexto digital se erige como uno de los problemas centrales a los que se enfrentan los medios de comunicación. Se ha comprobado que, para atajar la desinformación, no basta con la aplicación de soluciones tecnológicas, ya que se trata de una cuestión estructural que debe ser contenida desde la raíz: la alfabetización mediática desde la juventud para el desarrollo de un pensamiento crítico. Con todo, el uso de herramientas basadas en la automatización o la inteligencia artificial (IA) simplifica la tarea de verificación de contenidos y de rastreo de falsedades, permitiendo un análisis inmediato de grandes volúmenes de información. En el caso concreto de las radiotelevisiones públicas europeas, las 8 entrevistas en profundidad realizadas para el presente estudio a responsables de innovación e inteligencia artificial en radiotelevisiones públicas revelan que ya han comenzado a implementar estas soluciones en sus procesos de producción, lo que supone un paso adelante hacia una mitigación efectiva de la desinformación.
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