A Question of Design: Strategies for Embedding AI-Driven Tools into Journalistic Work Routines

Making newsworthy news: The integral role of creativity and verification in the human information behavior that drives news story creation

“…On the contrary, they reflected highly skilled practice and specialization. Like previous research, we found tight timelines often required journalists to pursue the “easiest information option” (Campbell, 1997, p. 60), and stick to the digital tools that they feel comfortable using (Gutierrez Lopez et al, 2022). However, this did not represent a way of obtaining “good enough” information by satisficing (Prabha et al, 2007), but a way of utilizing their specialist knowledge and previous research and writing experience to make information acquisition and use more efficient and effective.…”

“…This precarious situation may undermine trust in media (Newman, 2020). More positively, professional journalists now hold themselves to even higher standards when challenged by external influences (Elliott & Spence, 2018; Gutierrez Lopez et al, 2022; Newman, 2021). In particular, these pressures have enshrined truth as a non‐negotiable characteristic of news (Kovach & Rosenstiel, 2001).…”

The datafication of digital journalism: A history of everlasting challenges between ethical issues and regulation

“…The statement focuses on two elements: first, the editorial office should retain the journalistic decision-making power. This strong emphasis not to relinquish decision-making either to a machine or to technologists is in line with research findings that show how journalists, even if they are upbeat about the technology, are quite adamant about carefully automating selected journalistic tasks with tools they feel comfortable about (Gutierrez Lopez et al, 2023). It is ultimately the editor in chief’s responsibility to ensure that the algorithm adheres to journalistic standards regarding its content production.…”

“…However, it is all but clear “how humans and algorithms [should] be blended together in order to efficiently and effectively produce news information” (Diakopoulos, 2019: p. 8). To make things more complex, automation entails several challenges, not only when it comes to the design of the relation between human judgment and automation (Gutierrez Lopez et al, 2023, Gutierrez-Lopez et al, 2019), but in particular in relation to journalistic values and professional ethics in order to ensure an accountable use of algorithms, in particular because “algorithms are judged, made sense of and explained with reference to existing journalistic values and professional ethics” (Bucher, 2018: p. 129). Not only do algorithms raise ethical issues regarding the objectivity of their output (Steensen, 2019), but also regarding professional journalistic values such as transparency, accountability and responsibility (Porlezza, 2020; Komatsu et al, 2020, p. 3; Dörr and Hollnbuchner, 2017).…”

5th International Conference on Advanced Research Methods and Analytics (CARMA 2023)

“…Nonetheless, transparency is not always easy to implement in journalism, where practitioners often lack data and algorithm literacy to grasp how algorithms work (Porlezza & Eberwein, 2022), no more than it is easy to implement in deep learning models where even their creators need to learn how they operate because of the multiplicity of their parameters (Burkart & Huber, 2021). While a recognised need exists to blend AI-driven systems with journalistic values to fit professional practices (Broussard et al, 2019;Gutierrez Lopez, 2022), it should start with the data. If they are biased or contain errors, the system will likely reproduce these biases and errors (Hansen et al, 2019).…”