July 15, 2023

Established on 15 July 1845, The Straits Times has evolved over the years alongside other news companies to redefine how news is produced and consumed, across traditional print and digital platforms. In today’s big data age, automation seems to be the next biggest transformative force for newsrooms because it helps them manage the data deluge. How do the technology firms driving these digital innovations see themselves and their influence on the field of journalism?

In ‘When Journalism and Automation Intersect: Assessing the Influence of the Technological Field on Contemporary Newsrooms’ (Journalism Practice, 2019), Dr Wu Shangyuan (NUS Communications and New Media), Associate Professor Edson C. Tandoc Jr., and Associate Professor Charles T. Salmon (both from NTU Wee Kim Wee School of Communications) explore how the extent to which technological firms are able to influence journalism through automation, thereby becoming a potentially transformative force that challenges traditional ideas of what journalism is.

Automated journalism has become an emerging practice in newsrooms, where automated technologies can be used to generate news output automatically through rigorous data analysis and machine-written narratives, at greater speeds and at lower costs. Technologists have a good understanding of the journalistic field’s current situation of falling revenues and competition from social media platforms. This allows them to position automation as a potential solution and as a tool that can help news organizations meet audience demand even as their resources become increasingly limited. Many technological firms also have a “Silicon Valley ethos” of focusing on understanding their audience, which appears to be a common ideal with news organisations that see catering to audience preferences as tied to their bottom line.

In this symbiotic relationship, technologists also understand journalism’s ability to reach the public, with news output serving to increase public digital literacy and elevate a technological firm’s position across multiple fields. Even with the influence they wield over the journalistic field, technological firms do not appear to have an imposing attitude towards newsrooms but want to foster greater collaboration and co-development of ideas and innovations. By aligning themselves with journalists’ desire to automate menial work and pursue deeper journalism and more creative work, technologists are able to offer data literacy training as a new skillset for successful newsrooms, thereby ensuring the long-term acceptance and use of automation. They also insist that influential journalists, not technologists, are the ones who will be the most effective in driving change.

Due to the journalistic field’s overall susceptibility to external influences from other domains, it is likely that the technological field, through automated journalism, will be able to redefine what “journalism” is in the long run. “Good journalism” is projected to be seen as well-researched, evidence-centric and analytical reports. As news organisations jump on the digital bandwagon and set up digital teams in-house, this also means the infiltration of more technology practitioners into the newsroom, with more technologists seeking jobs in journalism. With the right digital skillsets to climb the organisational hierarchy, these technologists may indeed be the ones driving change in the future.

Read the article here.