THE LONDON SCHOOL OF ECONOMICS AND POLITICAL SCIENCE – 18/02/2020
This article was written by Atte Jääskeläinen and is part of a JournalismAI series in which we invite industry experts to share case-studies of newsrooms experimenting with AI technology.
At some point, all traditional newsrooms that experiment with data and AI seem to hit a wall: the newsroom is not producing the content that the algorithm says the audience would like to read.
You may define this problem as a commercial one. If the newsroom earns its living in the marketplace, then serving the audience’s needs matters, whether you like it or not. But it also matters from a social point of view. In the UK, only around one third of the audience thinks that the media pick the right subjects and only about half thinks that the media help them to understand the news. In the 2019 General Election, only a third of the population thought that the media did a good job. Luckily, across countries, a bit more than half of the audience think that media keeps them updated.1