Marisa Porto, Knight Chair in Local News and Sustainability in the UNC Hussman School of Journalism and Media, on the challenges and opportunities that AI presents to newsrooms.
Before joining academia, Marisa Porto spent the majority of her career in local newsrooms – first as a journalist, then running newsrooms and finally working in the business divisions of news organizations. She now uses her deep understanding of the industry to lead research that can help news organizations succeed during a time when they face many new and complex challenges.
Porto’s research focuses on helping news organizations develop sustainable business models to adapt to technology changes, maintain editorial independence, and use artificial intelligence tools effectively and ethically. This is increasingly important, with at least 70% of newsrooms already using AI in some capacity and the technology rapidly transforming how audiences consume news and other content.
How is AI affecting newsrooms?
A: AI is revolutionizing the news industry. It is transforming tasks like content generation and data analysis, and it can be used to boost production and operational efficiencies in news organizations. AI can improve how data is collected and can be leveraged to improve sales and personalize content for audiences.
AI poses challenges, too. There are also ethical business concerns around the need to re-skill employees, transparency of use and the potential erosion of public trust. There is a significant challenge around copyright. News organizations are facing copyright infringement as machine learning tools access news content, ingest the information, and then share it with consumers, without giving any credit to the original news sources. It will be interesting to see how this plays out in court, particularly internationally, because there are global copyright treaties, but the public policy around copyright varies from country to country.
There are many ways in which journalists are currently using AI. These include using tools to translate and transcribe interviews, outline content, analyze large amounts of data, and even take written content and create podcasts featuring the same information. But as journalists adopt these tools, they still have the responsibility to make certain the content they create is accurate.
In my journalism classes, we discuss the ethics of AI use at the beginning of the semester, and students are required to provide a statement describing how AI tools were used in assignments (even basic tools like Grammarly for proofreading services).
AI is going to continue evolving. To adapt and remain successful, news organizations will need to have a strategic plan in place for how they can use AI to grow their audience, increase efficiencies, and improve their bottom line, while being prepared to adjust along the way. It will be vital that news organizations have strong leaders who are committed to the ethical use of AI, not just in the newsroom but in the business as well.
As told to Audrey Smith
Photo submitted by subject
Related Stories
