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Data and AI are transforming news media

Monday, June 22, 2020

What opportunities and challenges does Data and AI-driven development pose for journalism and the media industry? This new report on AI in the media sector from the innovation program Media & democracy seeks answers from international research and unsuspecting innovative key people.

The focus of the report is data-driven development and artificial intelligence. This is partly based on AI's broad and rapid growth as a social phenomenon. The other part is specifically based on the media sector. 

The authors are Anders Thoresson, Project Manager for the project Media Industry and AI and Jenny Wiik, media researcher at Medier & demokrati and AI Innovation of Sweden.

- I hope the report is both easy to grasp and valuable. I think it's an important contribution that captures the fundamental effects of digitalisation and presents more pointed reasoning and findings, says Martin Holmberg, Programme Manager at Medier & demokrati.

Robotic journalism in majority by numbers

In the introductory chapter, Anders Thoresson welcomes the reader to the third decade of the IT boom. The next four sections contain interviews with people who work in AI development, not least related to the media industry:

  • AI expert Daniel Gillblad, Co-Director at AI Innovation of Sweden, offers his views on what journalists and media managers need to understand for the future. Among other things, AI is not a part of IT but part of business operations.
  • Sören Karlsson, CEO of United Robots, believes that based on the number of articles, robots will be producing the majority of content in an average Swedish morning newspaper in five years' time.
  • Isabelle Johansson, project manager at AI Innovation of Sweden tells more about the project  Swedish Language Data Lab in which linguistic industries can gain a lot from collaboration. Media is one of them.
  • Aleksander Lidén Pettersen from the analysis and automation company, Linkpulse, discussed how machine learning creates conditions for sharpening the news sites' relationship with their audience. 
  • In the final chapter, Jenny Wiik gathers knowledge and perspectives from a number of interesting studies concerning how journalism is being transformed and affected by automation and AI.

Take part of the report (in Swedish only)