Employing chatbots for data collection in participatory journalism and crisis situations

Abstract

The journalistic profession has long since entered an age where technology and audience participation are two of its most defining factors. Changes that were brought about by the advent of WEB 2.0 transformed journalism – among other professions – fundamentally, and opened the gates to a more connected future, one in which the lines between content producer and content consumer are far less defined than they used to be. One of the more promising technologies of this new era is that of chatbots and conversational agents. These multifaceted programs have proven to be extremely useful in many aspects of modern journalism, with some of them getting used in scenarios that go as far as trying to replace the traditional role of the journalist as we know it. As such, the influence of these programs has also spread to the field of audience interaction and participatory journalism. This article aims to underline the integral role that chatbots play within the confines of the journalistic profession, while at the same time explore the significant effects they have in the field of audience participation and communication between the journalist and the public in general. To achieve this goal a model chatbot was created in order to demonstrate the benefits of automating the process of filing and transferring a report on account of the public to the news organization.

Integrating Chatbot Media Automations in Professional Journalism: An Evaluation Framework

“…These types of chatbots are also the most relevant ones to be examined for this study, as they are designed with the explicit goal of improving audience engagement and introducing more interactivity into news distribution [33]. This practice has transformed how media is shared and consumed since it was adopted by many prominent news organizations such as CNN, The Guardian, and The Washington Post, all of which created their own versions of news-sharing chatbots by the end of 2016, which was a year that saw a particularly large surge in chatbot creation in general [34]. Figure 1 reflects the current perspective of chatbots in the context of media automation in journalism in relation to the evaluation framework, which will be proposed later in the study.…”

“…Different parties have attempted Overall, a variety of literature exists in the realm of chatbot usage, specifically for journalistic purposes. Researchers over the years have covered a wide spectrum of chatbot applications in the field and have tackled issues like their usage in automated news dissemination [11,22,35], information gathering [34], user newsfeed personalization [23], as well as the use of conversational agents to establish a multi-media approach in the news [33,36], or as a means of studying the relationship between the journalist and the audience [37] as well as the cross-cultural social context those bots are being employed in [38]. Despite that, however, the majority of this research-with only a few notable exceptions-seems to focus more on the potential practical uses of these programs and less on a valid framework with which chatbot creation tools can be evaluated.…”

“…For example, the interactive platform provided by conversational agents can be used as a "news assistant" of sorts by transferring additional information to the reader regarding the topic of interest when they request it. This approach has been examined by embedding chatbots within news articles [33], and similarly, these applications can also be utilized in other creative ways, such as gathering information from the public [34]. It is possible to envision the usage of chatbots for other creative work as well, although in most cases, more advanced conversational intelligence would be required in order for these programs to present a compelling case for their usage in these scenarios.…”

Algorithmic Journalism—Current Applications and Future Perspectives

“…The case of "Quakebot" that was mentioned above also constitutes a very good example of data mining, despite the fact that it is mostly known to be an instance of automated content production, since the program was able to single out and use information form a much larger dataset (which was all of the data provided by the US geological survey). Chatbots and other similar automated agents have been utilized extensively in these procedures (Veglis and Kotenidis 2020).…”

Challenges and Opportunities for Main Stream Media and Journalism in a Digital and Social Media Environment: Perspective from Israel

“…The capacity to productively incorporate individual payments within conventional media spaces is coming to be an important skill. Until lately, the working routines and also worth of journalistic culture had actually remained very stable for practically a century (Veglis & Kotenidis, 2021), also after being declared in dilemma (Blumler & Gurevitch, 2016;Dahlgren, 2016). Commonly, journalism has actually been attached to the organization of the media, based on the manufacturing of information by dedicated paid work, the journalists.…”