Relevance of AI in Accelerating Journalism and Newsroom Workflow

AI is already a significant part of journalism today, but as it stands now the technology is unevenly distributed. Newsroom activities based on technology including search, complex algorithms drawing upon deep learning to create text or videos, all fall under the innovative umbrella of AI.

AI in journalism is developing at a fast pace while bringing about radical changes in media production and its business models. Although its futuristic impact is uncertain yet it has the potential for wide-ranging and profound influence on how journalism is done and spread.

The technology is a part of this sector since the newsrooms have gone digital. The adoption of social media as a source, production tool, and as a distribution and engagement medium is one of the major drivers of this digital trend. Moreover, AI possesses the potential to accelerate journalism throughout the process in significant ways which may have creative structural effects in the coming years. However, it has been discovered in a report, that the use of AI in this field is as additional, supplementary and catalytic factor rather than completely being a transformational driver.

In such an advanced world, there is a range of approaches to AI adoption. Artificial Intelligence should be aimed at providing more direct, meaningful, and engaging experiences in its main services. It should be employed to empower journalists in their news reporting and storytelling. The industry needs to create new methods and tools to better understand journalism and the world around it. AI can be employed to increase the capability for investigations by looking at big data sets, to be faster in finding news and to improve fact-checking / fight disinformation.

The media industry today not only sees AI as a tech-benefactor but also consider it beneficial in the economic context. The rising new organizations are fighting for attention and revenue with everything else online. Here AI is placed as a potential catalyst for renewal and to avoid being left behind or staying irrelevant in the news market.

As the industry is undergoing a crisis, AI facilitates every measure that might provide a competitive advantage to various organizations. In today's digital era, it is difficult for news to survive without technology.

As technology has transformed many industries, in the same way, spreadsheets, databases, and mapping programs have ventured into the newsroom. Also, ML methods are becoming more accessible to motivated journalists and enabling them to use that power for their reporting into stories that would otherwise be difficult or even impossible. This significantly marks the upsurge of next-gen data journalism.

Below are the 10 ways in which AI can reshape the newsroom and journalism as a whole:

•  Better personalized distribution of content

•  More efficient, automated production of content

•  Dynamic pricing both for ads and subscriptions

•  Find more stories in data; find more data in stories

•  Better automated transcriptions

•  Make content moderation manageable

•  Fake news/deep fakes recognition

•  New tools for debunking

•  Enhanced image/video search

•  Deeper sentiment analysis on content

Several media professionals strongly believe that AI is there to make journalists more efficient and to increase capacity for – firstly, to free up journalists to work, with or without AI, on creating better journalism at a time when the news industry is struggling for economic sustainability and public trust and relevance; secondly, to help the public deal with a world of news overload and misinformation and to connect them in a convenient way to credible source and content that is relevant, useful and stimulating for their lives.

It is high time that media organizations should adopt AI strategy, change their workflows, systems and recruitment process. They can't go alone in this race. They need to embrace AI as the technology is shaping the information ecosystem for new generations of citizens. The news-organizations need to find ways to tap into the resources and expertise of others while encouraging the healthy development of this media industry with this technology.

*Based on the insights from the Charlie Beckett's Report