Low engagement and news avoidance: Can AI help us imagine better products and experiences?
Concrete insights from the AI and news discussion I attended at the International Journalism Festival.
Hey y’all! I’ll be travelling a bunch in the next month, including two professional trips to Philly from Aug. 7 to 9 for the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication (AEJMC) Preconference and Conference; then to Chicago from Sept. 3 to 8 for LION Publishers’ Board meeting, Independent News Sustainability Summit (INSS) and LION Sustainability Awards (which I’ll be co-hosting!). Hit me up if you’ll be there, too — I’d love to chat. ✈️
Until then, I’m revisiting my trip to Perugia, Italy, back in April for the International Journalism Festival where I was invited to a discussion about AI and news hosted by Uli Köppen from Germany’s Bayerischer Rundfunk, International Center for Journalists fellow Mattia Peretti and the Associated Press’ Aimee Rinehart.
I had a blast exploring the following questions with thoughtful and ethics-minded journalists from around the world. So, I’m belatedly sharing their insights in case they might help you think through AI in your newsroom.
Low engagement and news avoidance: Can AI help us imagine better products and experiences? Written by Mattia Peretti:
The group started the conversation with the fundamental question of what problem we are trying to solve with our journalism, and the acknowledgment that we still don’t know much about our audiences. That is a problem because without understanding better what people want from journalism, we cannot leverage impactful methodologies — such as for example the jobs-to-be-done approach — to create content, products and experiences that are relevant to them.
The impact of AI on search traffic and overall news consumption modes makes building direct ties with our audiences an existential challenge for news organizations. Younger audiences especially are looking for genuine human connection and expect to be involved in a conversation rather than being talked to. Journalism as currently offered is rarely a conversation and tech companies will be offering that experience for us if we don’t start doing it now.
The point about human connection was expanded further to outline how it is not only a matter of serving audiences for their own good but also for ours: There is a market gap for human connection (Ed note: Here, Mattia is quoting something I said), a new path to sustainability for the news industry if we are able to fill that gap.
The group reflected further on the news experiences we currently offer to audiences, and how those are directly correlated with low engagement and news avoidance. We need to better understand, unpack and address the causes behind news avoidance if we want to be able to offer a net-positive news experience (a concept introduced by Sannuta Raghu of Scroll India).
Finally, and building on all of the previous reflections, the group explored a number of questions that ask, from different angles, how we might start rethinking journalism from the foundations:
How can we go beyond the creation of content as the default mode of doing journalism?
How can we advocate for journalism as more than just ‘“the chronicle of what happens”?
How can we marry a focus on user needs with the social mission of journalism?
Leveraging our global superpowers: How do we take our knowledge and expand into collective action? Written by Aimee Rinehart:
There were several points at which the approach to collaboration should be a positive one — what are we "for" instead of what are we "against." We should be for collaboration to inform audiences. By centring the audience in our collaborations, we'll remain focused and mission-driven.
Advances in technology have not affected the fact that people still want quality information. Journalists need to be better at articulating our value proposition: how we provide information and the impact our work can have.
The group also said we should look outside of journalism for ways other industries approach "radical" collaboration. In South Africa, competing accounting firms collaborate; in Argentina it was mentioned that farms work together to survive. The very nature of the word "radical" indicates that this collaboration is from the root up, and one collaboration breeds more collaborations once teams create a culture and reliance upon others.
While collaborating with other newsrooms can be important, it's equally important that newsrooms remain independent. IFCN was mentioned as a model where fact-checking agencies work together while maintaining their operational independence.
Future-proofing collaborations was mentioned: Collaborations are often not built with sustainability in mind. Collaborations are often paid with outside funding, but someone said that it sends a powerful message — we have literally bought into this idea — to the team if the newsrooms themselves allocate funding and resources to power a collaboration.
Newsrooms need more technologists and for collaborations to create a new/other story, rather than the press corps following the same story. Sometimes collaborations are too elaborate, and can alienate newsrooms that don't have the bandwidth or can't follow the intention of the project. It's critical to have a focused collaborative mission.
Bottom up or top down: What is best to organize AI in a newsroom? Written by Uli Köppen:
The group agreed that we need an interdisciplinary, rather non-hierarchical approach if we want to integrate AI into organizational structures. Tools like collective idea-gathering, building communities of practice or a collective strategic framework were best practice examples.
The group discussed different challenges as soon as those networks meet hierarchical structures in (legacy) organizations: How do you prioritize and how do you facilitate decision-making?
It was marked as decisive that prioritization is transparent to everyone in a media organization. This prioritization should ideally be done by an interdisciplinary steering group mandated to decide about projects. Possible prioritization criteria can be the scalability of projects if tools can be built directly into systems such as the content management system, if the project addresses pain points of the newsroom, and if it aligns with the overall mission of the news organization.
For change management within the news organization, different participants thought highly of interdisciplinary working groups that communicate both to the management, as well as to the newsroom. One participant suggested including “not only the willing” people but also “people who will be our biggest obstacle” to integrate their perspective, as well. This was reported to be decisive for the success of a project.
The group also touched upon technical infrastructure as the most important prerequisite for AI in news organizations. Our systems must be flexible, and we have to invest in new user interfaces for internal and external use of AI.
The Green Line opportunities: text/video pitches, full-time managing editor, part-time video editor, part-time social coordinator
The Green Line is looking for freelancers interested in short-form and long-form pitches for text-based articles, as well as videos, from experienced reporters based in Toronto that tackle systemic issues in the city through a solutions lens.
The Green Line is growing! I’m ready to hire a full-time managing editor who’s experienced and passionate about hyperlocal Toronto news, and who’ll serve as my right-hand. If you’re interested or know someone who would be, please inquire with me for more details.
We’re also looking for a freelance social coordinator and video editor. The Green Line offers highly competitive freelance rates. If you’re interested in pitching or applying, please email your resume, cover letter and links to three clips to hello@thegreenline.to.
Shout-outs
Many thanks to Paul Brent, my former fellow CTV Ottawa colleague, for this kind message about The Other Wave:
I enjoy reading the newsletter for the new views and ideas you bring forward. I hope The Green Line is bringing you the satisfaction you were hoping for. It could well change people’s views on how news gets done.
Quick and Clean
I highly recommend reading “Journalism Needs Cultural Adjacency” from Alex Perez’s Substack, which unpacks how the media’s failure to understand class is why it’s out of touch with the public (I relate so much to Perez in this piece, and up until “cultural adjacency,” have never been able to find a term for my weird ability to traverse different spheres).
With the U.S. presidential election looming, listen to this Fresh Air podcast on how today’s dictators are actually working together in a global fight to dismantle democracy, and the importance of not losing hope — because that’s how they win.
This LinkedIn post by Adam Thomas helped validate my approach to journalism The Green Line; specifically, he talks about “degrowth journalism” — something I and many other journalists refer to as “slow journalism” — which is a commitment to quality over quantity.
How you can support The Other Wave
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