For six years I have been investigating the value of artificial intelligence for news publishers with our global JournalismAI project at the LSE, supported by the Google News Initiative. It’s been an exciting journey that has been shared by hundreds of journalists around the world who are intrigued by the benefits of machine learning, automation, and data discovery. But in the last 18 months the technology has made a leap and suddenly everyone is talking about and playing with ‘generative’ AI such as ChatGPT and DALL-E.  So what happens next and what should you do about it? This article ..read more

This article is based on a speech given by me to a journalism conference in Kuching, Sarawak, Malaysia Pretty much everywhere around the world indicators of trust in authority: politicians, business, journalism –  appear to be heading down. I don’t think you should pay too much attention to those headline figures. But that does not mean we should not strive to build and maintain more confidence. If we want to improve public participation, then improving confidence in journalism is key.  I was a journalist for 25 years before joining the LSE in 2006. So I am old enough to know ..read more

My prediction (or rather hope) for 2024 is that journalists will realise that ‘trust’ is a useless metric of their work. Ok, I am kidding. I have no expectation that the news media will cease its pointless obsession with trust surveys. It’s not only a distraction but actually harmful. As Noble Prize winner Maria Ressa has pointed out, authoritarian politicians and corporate giants love to highlight how surveys of trust regularly put journalists at or near the bottom of the league. [This was first published as one of the Nieman Lab predictions for 2024] I don’t have a particular problem with ..read more

Human behaviour is very much driven by emotion. So it follows that emotions also influence our media consumption – such as in how we decide what we want to watch on video streaming platforms. There is currently a great deal of talk about sentiment, emotions, feelings and mood when it comes to analysing and curating streaming platform video content. Understanding the emotional effect of content supports improvements in both content recommendation and engagement as well as content development. Viewers of streaming services often use their feelings to describe the content they find most relevan ..read more

We are delighted to publish a new research article by Alyssa Zeisler. “The Great Audience Experiment” provides an historical perspective on the collection and use of audience data across American news organisations, highlighting the intersections of audience data and journalism practices. The author contends that a better understanding of the effects of the use of audience data has implications for both the business of news and the mission of journalism that are of critical importance as our news organisations strive to shape their future in a period of dramatic reconfiguration. Since the be ..read more

The current crossroad of journalism in the face of Artificial Intelligence generates a certain deja vu. Perhaps the scenario from which we can learn the most is the emergence of journalism in the first years of the World Wide Web. What if we were facing a situation comparable to the early 90s? What if we had the opportunity to learn from the mistakes, and of course, the successes that took place? The popularisation of the internet soon led to the generation of digital media and journalists, and widespread change in the profession. In that germinal crossroads between the web and journalism, t ..read more

Over the last few months, newsrooms and media organisations from around the world have been completing the second iteration of our JournalismAI survey. We conducted the first one in 2019 and published our findings in a report; New powers, new responsibilities. A global survey of journalism and artificial intelligence. So much has happened in the world of AI since then and we’re excited to share with you some of our preliminary findings in this new and updated research. This year, we made it a point to reach a more diverse group of participants in terms of size, we invited small and large new ..read more

We are thrilled to announce the 2023 cohort of the JournalismAI Fellowship programme, conducted with the support of the Google News Initiative. We’ve selected 32 journalists and technologists from 15 news organisations across the world to take part in the second edition of the Fellowship programme. Fellows will collaborate in six self-selected teams, working to use AI to enhance reporting and other journalism processes. We received nearly 170 applications from around the world and shortlisted candidates from 31 news organisations in the initial application phase. Candidates then self-select ..read more

With artificial intelligence having its moment in the spotlight, largely thanks to the fast-changing development of generative AI, we will be working on behalf of journalists around the world to help them understand this technology and to use it to support their work. We are excited to share that for the fifth consecutive year, the Google News Initiative is supporting JournalismAI, a global initiative by Polis – the journalism think-tank at the London School of Economics and Political Science – that empowers news organisations to use artificial intelligence responsibly.  For the past fo ..read more

“The course helped me understand some concepts about AI – which is what I expected – but not with this kind of precision and simplicity. Now I really understand the power of AI, as well as the limitations of some technologies that came up in the last couple of years. I decided to go deeper and keep studying this field after this course.” When you create a learning experience, like an online course, this is exactly the type of feedback you hope to receive from participants. When I started designing the JournalismAI Discovery course, I wanted to build a learning experience that journalists – b ..read more