This article originally appeared on Northwestern University's Medill Local News Initiative website and is republished here with permission. This text was adapted from an introduction to Medill's report on the impact of AI on local news models. Download the full PDF version of the report here.
Journalism has undergone revolutions, from Johannes Gutenberg's invention of the movable type printing press in Germany in the 15th century, to the high-speed printing press in the 19th century, to the collapse of radio, network television, and cable television as the primary sources of live information. I've experienced it. ,breaking news. But even as competition increased and daily newspaper circulation declined, local news flourished as an industry. In a 1990 Washington Journalism Review article, former Chicago Tribune editor James D. Squires called the newspaper “America's most profitable legal business.”
Then along came the internet.
The World Wide Web opened to the public in 1991, making documents and other materials available through web pages and searchable through a web browser. Newspaper companies such as the New York Times, Washington Post, and Chicago Tribune launched websites in 1996, leading to a battle over whether and how to charge for online content.
The Internet has given news organizations instant access to audiences within and outside their communities, and has provided journalists with a variety of new tools to do their jobs more effectively. It also contributed to the collapse of the local news business model.
As more consumers choose to get their news for free online, print circulation and advertising revenues have plummeted, and paywalls, digital advertising, and online subscriptions have not been able to compensate. News organizations have found themselves relying on social media platforms that they don't own or control and can't generate revenue from them. The 2023 State of Local News Report, released in November by the Medill School of Journalism, Media and Integrated Marketing Communications, predicts that by the end of 2024, one-third of U.S. newspapers and nearly two-thirds of newspapers will concludes that it will be lost. She has been working as a journalist since 2005.
The collapse of mainstream news media's financial model is not just affecting struggling journalists and the people who consume their work. It could also pose a threat to democracy, creating vast news deserts and creating opportunities for malicious players to fill the void with misinformation and disinformation. Given these high stakes, philanthropists, business experts, politicians and others are devoting time, energy and hundreds of millions of dollars to help sustain local news.
In these challenging times, it's understandable that some in the industry are looking at the next technology-driven revolution with trepidation. Since Open AI published his ChatGPT on November 30, 2022, generative artificial intelligence has had an explosive impact on journalism and broader culture.
ChatGPT, which stands for Chat Generative Pre-Trained Transformer, is a large language model-based chatbot that can create content based on input prompts. ChatGPT has more than 100 million users signed in within its first two months on the market, and global financial firm UBS has made ChatGPT the fastest-growing consumer software in history. considered to be an application.
The project is based on interviews with journalists, academics, philanthropists, and technology experts around the world and aims to identify the potential risks and benefits of generative AI to local news business models and journalism itself. I am. Those…
AI in Journalism: Benefits
- Improving news organizations’ responsiveness to customers and consumers
- Supporting the efficient operation of news organizations
- Enable more personalization of news and how it is delivered
- Urging news organizations to rethink how to best serve their audiences
- Enables more effective targeting of marketing and advertising to consumers
- Create new tools to improve your storytelling and monetize your content
- Free up journalists to produce more original company reporting
AI in journalism: the dangers
- destroy an already broken business model
- The loss of web traffic is exacerbated as search engines train on news content and respond directly to search queries.
- Introduce errors into the story to undermine credibility.
- Leading to the replacement of journalists with machine-generated content
- Lack of guidelines regarding its use may raise ethical issues
- Limited resources may prevent smaller news organizations from taking advantage of them.
- Accelerate the spread of misinformation and disinformation
For many who practice or are interested in journalism, generative AI, with its ability to create content with little human involvement, could put the final nail in the coffin of local news. I'm concerned that it may have something to do with it. Given that some chain owners prioritize cutting costs and increasing profits over maintaining quality journalism, how can we stop them from replacing even more reporters and editors with robots? Can news consumers be trusted to distinguish between human-reported journalism and machine-generated content? And does it matter?
There is an additional danger. AI has shown a tendency to make mistakes early on, and may be prone to spreading misinformation and disinformation, either by accident or by design. And if Google could answer readers' questions by generating answers generated by AI and taken without attribution from online news coverage, instead of providing links to the articles themselves. , digital traffic to news sites may take a huge hit.
So, does generative AI pose an existential threat to journalism and the local news model?
That question is a huge dark cloud looming over this revolutionary technology. However, there is another view.
Generative AI is just the latest in a long line of technological advances that, when used correctly, can make work more efficient and easier. After all, computer layout programs have eliminated the need for T-squares, glue, and pasting departments to stick newspaper to pages. Mobile phones and email facilitated communication between editors, reporters, and readers.
Modems allowed writers to create articles from remote locations, and then high-speed cell phones allowed them to send articles from anywhere. Search engines have made it possible for journalists to conduct research with the click of a button, instead of courthouse or library visits or exhaustive phone calls. Spell checking programs help writers and editors spot typos and misspellings, and style check tools alert you to potential punctuation errors. The latter two are types of AI.
Few would argue that the use of spell check is a threat to journalism.
Therefore, AI is both a danger and an opportunity. How can this tool help news organizations improve their jobs? What can robots do to help humans do their jobs better?
Can AI help news organizations rethink what they do? Can AI help local news organizations solve business problems that have long plagued human experts? Industry Can the world of journalism win the battle against Big Tech over the use of its content to train its own models and respond to user queries? The world of journalism can only avoid the mistakes made with the advent of the Internet Instead, is it possible to create a new and better reality that leads to a more informed public, a healthier democracy, and a robust and sustainable local news profession?
“When the Internet came out, we were basically in fear and denial,” said Tom Rosen, professor of practice in journalism at the University of Maryland's Philip Merrill College and Eleanor Merrill Scholar in the Future of Journalism. Mr. Still says.
“This is as big as the internet, so now we have another chance.”
Download the full report.
