Digital journalism gains shape as a distinct field with 58 academic articles as points on a map.
Editors Bob Franklin and Scott Eldridge II press the point that ‘digital’ can no longer be treated as a prefix in journalism. Nor should it be a proxy for ‘new’.
They argue the ways and means of digital journalism have matured to a stage of having conceptually distinct characteristics, issues, and manners of research, all of which merit the field being treated as a discrete specialty.
Within their view of digital journalism, AI and journalism is, so far, a sub-set. It is mostly noticed as automated journalism. Five of the 58 chapters touch on AI most directly:
- Automating Massive-Scale Analysis of News Content, Thomas Lansdall-Welfare, Justin Lewis and Nello Cristianini
- Automated Journalism: A posthuman future for digital news?, Matt Carlson
- Computer-Mediated Creativity and Investigative Journalism, Meredith Broussard
- Computational Journalism and The Emergence of News Platforms, Nicholas Diakopoulos
- Data, Algorithms, and Code: Implications for journalism practice in the digital age, John V. Pavlik
In the most forward-looking of the five, author Matt Carlson suggests a research agenda for automated journalism, expecting it will be productive in three areas:
- Business models, particularly affects on labour as well as on profitability
- Emerging practices within newsrooms
- Acceptance by audiences
The collection is weighty in volume, thinking, and price. It will be most useful to formal researchers. Certain sections will appeal to casual readers with a particular interest and a library card. There is a lot to choose from.
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Note: Searches for this book may show are a number of results with very similar titles, including another with these editors. Also, the e-book version is considerably less costly.
The posthuman future of journalism… suggests a hybrid state in which computer-and human-authored stories intermingle in ways yet to be developed.
Matt Carlson, in Automated journalism: A posthuman future for digital news?