media update’s Adam Wakefield spoke to Bertrand Pecquerie, CEO of the Global Editors Network, about the impact technology has on ethics in journalism, and what news organisations are learning about their changing audience.
What are the consequences of machine learning in journalism?
For journalism, machine learning can translate to using algorithms to parse through data, recognise patterns and then make predictions and assessments based on what the algorithms have learnt.
It can be used for anything from fact-checking and archiving to face recognition and in-depth investigative journalism.
Buzzfeed News trained a machine learning algorithm to recognise spy planes to gain more insights into how we’re being surveilled on a daily basis.
The Washington Post uses machine learning to moderate comment sections. This way, journalists are alerted to problems in comments more quickly, enabling them to carry out bulk actions.
In an interview with the Global Editors Network, Greg Barber, director of newsroom product, told us that this has led to commenters spending more time on the site. More than half of The Washington Post’s commenters are subscribers, so improvements to comments are a boost for its most loyal users.
The personalisation of news is another consequence of machine learning, and here the risk is to create a new ‘bubble filter’, coming from your own behaviour.
What are some lessons news organisations had to learn over the last decade in adapting to new digital technologies?
The main lesson news organisations had to learn is that users are going faster than publishers or editors. I remember discussions in 2013 about the date for mobile news to overcome desktop news.
Some people said 2020, some others 2025, but it happened in 2017. So when a new technology is offered, it only takes a few years to be adopted, and nobody in the news industry is prepared for that.
The next disruption is clearly artificial intelligence (AI): there is no AI literacy among the senior news executives and the whole news industry will suffer from this lack of understanding.
Collectively, they missed the Internet revolution and the mobile disruption, but they are ready to miss the shift to AI and blockchain. Here, no lesson learned – we find the same blockages.
The reality is that they will be hit by AI and blockchain by the end of 2018, with new players, new users and new ways to distribute and fact-check news.
Finally, not enough attention was paid to business models. I totally follow Amy Webb when she says: "While everyone acknowledges that the business model has been dying since the 1980s, little has been done to radically change the business model for news."
How can news organisations remain credible in an environment where partisan ideologies, opinions and fake news create distrust?
'Trust' has become a buzzword of late, with more and more trust initiatives springing up. Jay Rosen has talked in-depth about how to optimise a newsroom for trust, which includes some interesting ideas.
However, I am rather on Emily’s Bell line when she argues that trust is a bad metric for quality journalism. We must go ‘beyond trust’ because trust-building work is outdated nowadays.
Regarding transparency, many news organisations are opening up their reporting practices: this includes publishing video or audio interviews, or original documents. This invites the reader into the reporting process and might very well endanger credibility.
Last, but not least, transparency in ownership is still a challenge: You know who is behind RT in Russia or TRT in Turkey, but for many western media, it is still difficult to understand who the real owner is.
How do you believe virtual and augmented reality will change ethics in journalism?
Until 2018, the biggest change to journalism was immersion. But today, as seen with the latest developments at Apple and Google, AR is becoming more and more widespread. It is simpler, quicker, cheaper and still entertaining – and you only need your phone.
Nevertheless, 360-degree videos continue to thrive. Climate change reporting is doing particularly well with this technology – an excellent example of immersion to increase empathy and understanding of an issue is this 360-degree video showing the fight for survival in an expanding Sahara.
What is new is how The Washington Post used AR for the coverage of the Freddie Gray trial. The piece explores Gray’s interactions with the police that lead to his death and allows the reader to view it from several angles, giving the reader much more of an insight than they would have from simply reading the text.
For more information, visit www.globaleditorsnetwork.org.
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