Collective behavior provides a framework for understanding how the actions and properties of groups emerge from the way individuals generate and share information. In humans, information flows were initially shaped by natural selection yet are increasingly structured by emerging communication technologies. Our larger, more complex social networks now transfer high-fidelity information over vast distances at low cost. The digital age and the rise of social media have accelerated changes to our social systems, with poorly understood functional consequences. This gap in our knowledge represents a principal challenge to scientific progress, democracy, and actions to address global crises. We argue that the study of collective behavior must rise to a “crisis discipline” just as medicine, conservation, and climate science have, with a focus on providing actionable insight to policymakers and regulators for the stewardship of social systems.
As journalism has grappled with the potentials and boundaries of AI within the industry, journalists have produced plentiful articles detailing experimentation and potential consequences of AIdriven journalism (see, GPT-33, 2020). Accordingly, this article analyzes media coverage (N ¼ 95 articles) of AI in journalism over a 5-year period, starting in 2016 and ending in 2020, to examine prominent themes related to uses, roles, and concerns regarding AI in the newsroom. We sample coverage from 20 US and UK news media outlets representing a diversity of media with regards to media type and partisan leaning. We employ a thematic analysis on the media coverage of AI as it relates specifically to its use and application in journalism. Our exploration uncovers a tension between the industry and profession of journalism in highlighting the hopes and pitfalls of AI. It also allows for a discussion on assessing the place of AI in news making, especially with regard to the economic and contextual complexity in which news stories operate and the normative ideals of journalism in the digital era.
Given the necessity of trust to the fulfillment of the news media’s democratic and civic roles, the decline of trust in the news has become a major theme in journalism and communication studies, with researchers typically focusing on news audiences and measuring attitudes toward news products. Alongside the importance of reception, this paper advocates for conceptualizing trust not solely as a response to news, but as a key component in the infrastructure that makes news possible. Through an exploration of the role of trust at every stage of the newsmaking process, we argue that trust structures and underpins news funding, production, circulation, and audience measurement. Expanding the conceptual framework through which trust is assessed to consider its infrastructural role affords greater clarity on the consequences of distrust in news. We highlight future research directions and areas of inquiry made possible by theorizing trust in news in this way.
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