Two components of AI, natural language processing (NLP) and machine learning, are being applied to challenges in a variety of industries, including the media sector. Together they are helping newsrooms create content at a faster pace, and uncover trends in data.
media update considers four ways in which AI will change the way news is reported:
1. It will help journalists identify hot topics
AI-powered engines have the ability to process mountains of data at high speeds to find trends and common themes within the information. An AI engine can, for instance, scan thousands of recent posts in an online forum and find the topics being discussed most frequently.
The AI platform, IBM Watson, was put to a similar task in 2016. The technology was roped in to analyse hordes of social media posts during the Wimbledon tennis tournament.
With the insights IBM Watson provided, Wimbledon’s digital team was able to pick up on popular sports themes being discussed on social media at the time of the tournament. The information allowed the team to create content that enticed the social media users, who were discussing these topics, to read Wimbledon’s content.
At the time, IBM's Sam Seddon
was reported as saying: "We can come up with insights much faster than humans can and inform the media team so they can decide what kind of content they should be offering."
Media intelligence companies like Newsclip Media Monitoring use a combination of NLP and machine learning to identify trends within media coverage from a variety of media channels.
With information about topics that are trending on print and digital channels, journalists will be able to create more content that taps into these conversations – serving audiences with information they want.
2. AI will free up time in newsrooms
Numerous major publishers, including
Los Angeles Times and
Associated Press in the United States, have announced that machine learning-powered algorithms will be responsible for some of their journalistic reporting.
AI technology was used by The Washington Post during the 2016 US presidential election to automatically create articles from the data that was generated by the election. The result was a huge number of stories targeted at niche audiences. The system also alerted journalists of unusual data.
A system like this could, in future, take care of repetitive, labour-intensive tasks like reporting on election results. This could free up time for journalists, who previously had to do these tasks to write content that require their specialist skills – investigation, in-depth analysis, and creating stories that have context.
3. AI will serve readers more relevant content
Digital marketers are looking into AI as a way of identifying individual consumer preferences in order to serve up content that is tailored to each of those readers. The concept could easily be applied in the media.
Francesco Marconi, strategy manager and automation co-lead at the
Associated Press in the US,
explained at the FIPP World Congress 2017 that the personalisation of content is an important use of AI.
“If you can track how consumers behave online and communicate with each other, then you can personalise their content – choosing tone, locality, etc. and this will generate a lot of engagement”.
4. Machines will uncover more secrets in data
In the same way that AI engines can find trends within forums or social media posts, these systems can also find anomalies and patterns within data.
Jeff Jarvis, director of the Tow-Knight Center for Entrepreneurial Journalism, recognises
the potential of AI to find newsworthy information. In a Medium post, he points to the ever-increasing amount of data being created by humans. This data, he says, is “available to analyse, looking for patterns and anomalies, pictures of how we live and
the correlations and exceptions that can make news”.
He mentions the Panama Papers, a collection of 11.5 million documents, which were analysed by 400 journalists from 100 news organisations in 80 countries. The collection was 2.6TB in size. In future, machine learning could be used to find patterns within data like this and pass the information onto journalists so they can get to the important work of investigating and reporting on these facts.
All these current and potential applications of AI could see journalistic content become more relevant, more impactful, and more immediate.
Curious about the impact of AI in other sectors? Read our article, Three industries AI will change in 2018, to learn what to expect.
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