What does your newsroom need? 👨🏻💻
Hi,
My name is Sara Forni, AI Product Manager at Atex, and this is MyType, a newsletter dedicated to journalism, innovation and artificial intelligence.
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What does your newsroom need, for real? When we find ourselves designing digital (and other) solutions to be implemented in newsrooms, it happens that we want to implement something just because it is the trend of the moment. Generative AI is a prime example of this. It is even more evident in the field of journalism, where many functionalities are only amazing on paper while in practice they are of little use or performance. This is why the 'product design' approach is slowly entering journalism as well: thinking in terms of needs, not solutions.
We talked about this with Mattia Peretti, Learning Experience Designer & AI Consultant, who has given valuable advice, on artificial intelligence and much more, on how to approach the world of journalism 'tomorrow'.
Enjoy the reading!
2023 was marked by the boom of Generative Artificial Intelligence which, as expected, also characterized the journalism sector. In this particular field, opinions are divided: is it an opportunity or a threat?
The answer that never satisfies anyone is: both things. AI applied to journalism can represent both an opportunity and a threat. We don’t need to approach the issue as a football derby in which we need to support only one side. It’s important to accept that you must understand what the risks, limitations and possible consequences of use are. However, it would be equally useless to deny that there is a huge opportunity to be taken advantage of, in a responsible way.
There is a lot of talk about Generative AI but technological solutions cannot and must not be limited to this field. What would you advise an editorial team that wants to approach this world to do?
First of all, the fact that a thousand million things can be done with AI and technology should be accepted; therefore, it is important to shift the focus of the question from “What can I do?” to “What do I need to do?”. I often recommend not approaching your strategy by thinking “Wow, everyone does these wonderful things” or rather, “Everyone says they are doing these wonderful things”. It is a very dangerous point to start from because we risk wasting resources and attention on a thousand million things on which we are not going to create real value or from which we do not get what we expect. What I do in my consultancy job is to convince people to start from needs.
To go back to your question, opportunities are found throughout the news production process and therefore AI tools can be used to support the news gathering work, namely the research of news and, therefore, both the social media monitoring work and the ‘dirty’ work, i.e. using tools to analyze large amounts of data. Subsequently also to follow the whole production work, so at the level of content, research, editing and so on and then also at the level of distribution once the content is finished. Finishing up the cycle with monetization, so for example the development of dynamic paywalls with a lot of machine learning work to also seek value from a business point of view.
Very useful use cases could be applied to journalism, such as transcription, summary or translation which, however, precisely because of their simplicity are perceived as uninteresting or boring. So tell us about a couple of experiences that struck you.
I agree with you, those you listed are very useful features but are perceived as boring or now 'obvious' and within everyone's reach. Not to mislead your question, however, I think that the greatest opportunities are found in the news gathering part, especially in investigative journalism. We often find ourselves managing infinite amounts of data which means hours and hours spent sifting through documents that perhaps arrive in a roundabout way. For example, it happened in a major case like that of the Panama Papers where a great deal of manual work was carried out to understand which parts were more interesting and relevant.
There are Artificial Intelligence tools today that can help, and the example of the Panama Papers fits perfectly. I had the opportunity to work with journalists who participated in that enormous investigative work, and, at the time, they had very rudimentary tools. I have heard them say several times "if we had had the tools we have today, we would have found even more information" and in fact a series of additional work done in recent years has been supported by these tools. All in all, tools that are quite accessible to editorial staff.
The second, which is my fixation in this period, is to abandon the idea that the journalist's job is to write the article and once written the work is done. Now we have huge opportunities to understand that our readers don't necessarily want to read the whole article. Maybe they are looking for an answer to a single question and that answer is enough for them, or they don't have time and in that little time they prefer to read ten paragraphs of ten different article rather than dedicating the same time to read one in depth. So, in this case, I'm talking about using Generative AI to create 'content packaging' work. Therefore, the articles are written in the same way, but one should no longer limit oneself to saying, "Ok my work is finished". Instead, one should also think that a summary can be generated from that article, taking out three bullet points to make it clearer and maybe change the format of the article depending on the target audience. All this formatting work is not particularly sexy but if it is accompanied by research and selection of what the needs of the audience or the target segment are, it can bring great value to the content, with positive consequences also on monetization.
Over the course of your career, you have (also) specialized in training courses, including online courses on AI and machine learning. If a journalist today could have the opportunity to train on just one topic, what should it be? Why?
I think there is an ever-increasing need for journalists to accept the fact that we are in an era where things are changing so quickly, both technologically and socially, that the need to keep up with the times it is more essential than ever. At the same time there is also a certain amount of pressure, because there are a lot of things to learn and little time to do it. We are no longer in the era in which, at least in anglosaxon journalism, it was said that all journalists had to learn to do a bit of coding or that everyone had to become excellent data journalists. Data understanding part is certainly important and necessary and, perhaps, this is the first answer I would give to your question. However, I don't think having technical skills is necessary for all journalists, I think it is more important to understand the dynamics by which the journalist's work is changing, which are not only technological but also linked, for example, to audience engagement. Another skill on which to train could be the ability to create community engagement; it’s fundamental to learn to develop a relationship with readers from the moment after the content is published. In that part we need to do extra training and understand that the publishing part of the content is almost the beginning of its in digital ‘life’, no longer the end of the work we do on that article.
A few days ago you published a post on Linkedin in which you expressed your intention to start mentoring younger people who are building their careers in media and journalism. Start by answering this question.
Choose three key pieces of advice for a young journalist who wants to start a career in journalism today.
There are many I could say, but I will choose the three most important.
The first is that working in journalism does not simply mean 'being journalists' and writing. You shouldn't think that to do this job you only have to be a writer or anchorman, but there is a myriad of roles that could be even more interesting for some people. It is necessary to have the curiosity to discover these roles and perhaps understand that it can be very interesting to work in journalism also as a product editor or audience engagement editor, for example.
The second piece of advice concerns entering the work market. Over time I understood that the best jobs are not found among job offers. I would really encourage anyone looking to break into this industry to participate in online groups and communities where you can meet others and find inspiration. It is essential to let yourself be carried away by curiosity, participate in events and meetings, online and not. Be careful, it shouldn't be done just for networking but with the idea of being inspired and contaminated.
Another useful element is to create an online image through social networks where we can talk about the interesting things we have discovered and learned from these meetings, from the readings and studies we do every day. From all of these, many interesting things could arise.
From personal experience, good things come if you have this positive outlook towards the world of work and, thank goodness, I see that this is more and more common among the younger generations.
A series of readings suggested by Mattia Peretti:
There would be no 'digital joynalism' without sharing. If you like this newsletter you could share it with colleagues, friends and family :)
For any ideas, suggestions and thoughts on the subject, don't hesitate to email me at sforni@atex.com.
Have a good weekend,
Sara