After Attending the #JournalismAI Festival… I Learned Journalism is a Collaboration not a Competition

On Thursday, December 10, I was listening to Anna Vissens talking at the JournalismAI Festival. The topic of that panel was about careers in journalism and artificial intelligence.

Anna talked about the journey she went through to become a data scientist, and work at some of the biggest newsrooms in the world.

I will quote Anna here:

“Although I have spent many years working as a journalist, I am a physicist by trade. When my son was born, I left my job at an insurance company, and started working as a freelancer, writing articles to different magazines and newspapers.. It’s very convenient when you have kids, so I decided to stick to the media for a while, so I moved from one role to another as a correspondent, multimedia producer, social media editor, and I have truly enjoyed everything I have done, but I always missed academia and science, so when I was working as a product manager at the BBC, and I was introduced in to analytics. That’s when I said: this is what I want to do!”

Listening to those words by Anna made me realize that I have gone through the same journey: studied something that has nothing to do with journalism, had my kids, went into freelancing, changed between writing, multimedia production, social media, and finally reached to a point where I wanted to do something different, something needed in the newsroom, but people in this part of the world don’t realize how important it is… DATA!

I watched every single session at the JournalismAI festival held recently by Polis, the London School of Economics journalism’s think tank, and the Google News Initiative. Beside the fact that this festival improved my understanding of how AI could be used within various newsrooms, here are also a few takeaways:

• Words, such as “Artificial Intelligence” and “Machine Learning”, are big and scary. But, we should never fear reading and learning about them. Previously, we have seen new concepts, such as social media, non-linear video editing… etc, get introduced into our work. We embraced them, learned the basics, and now could not imagine our work without them. The same thing should be applied to AI: abolish the fear, embrace and learn.
• “We don’t have a stable internet, and we see electricity cuts more than anything else… How can we talk about AI”.. a sentence I have heard many time in the newsrooms I visit. And they are right! But, sooner or later, I think AI would become part of all our newsrooms, and maybe they can become part of solving the problems mentioned above. So, until that becomes reality, journalists should work hard in training and familiarizing themselves with this new technology, otherwise, one day, they would find themselves out of the game!
• “AI cannot grow in isolation” a sentence mentioned by Korey Lee in the session “How Newsrooms Might Use AI to Increase Loyalty in Your Audience”, meaning that even if AI takes over a lot of our tasks, journalists are still needed in the newsroom for the human touch, and the creative aspect of work. So, don’t feel threatened that AI will take over our roles, and will leave us unemployed. The introduction of AI will actually create new jobs and roles for journalists, something you can learn more about in this session.
• “Learn.. Learn… Learn”… When talking about AI in journalism, currently it’s not about reinventing the wheel. The idea here is to look at other experiments and collaborations, learn from them, and choose whatever is applicable to your newsroom. JournalismAI has many collaborative projects between different newsrooms, which you can read more about here.
• I also think universities and J-schools are an important part of this process. Many universities still adopt the old classic approach of teaching journalists that was applied to print. Things have changed, and so should the way we teach journalism to students.
• AI technologies are there to solve a one boring long problem you suffer from in the newsroom. To start with, pinpoint that particular problem and begin with it.
• I think this festival has also changed the way we look at technology in newsrooms. Its not a competition.. It’s a collaboration! I believe at the end of the day, its not about who comes up with the technological concept (thats still important though), but its also about who is able to adapt the concept to their audience and journalists needs, continues experimentation, reaches the goals, assesses, and finally repeats until the results are close to perfect.

Unfortunately, journalists with long years of experience, resist change, at least that is what I know happens in this part of the world. But, the coming few years will prove to us that if we resist the change, the industry will resist our presence, and our experience “alone” will mean nothing.

There are many ways to start familiarizing yourself with AI and Machine learning. The first step is to try the 2 courses offered by the Google News Initiative. You can also explore the JournalismAI festival website which has also a number of resources that you can visit.

So, start the learning process, and join the conversation on journalism and AI!