‘…journalists need to continue to develop their technical skills to become better tool makers rather than tool users. It is in this way that we control, we shape, our relationship to AI and can perhaps create an entirely new technical form, replete with our profession’s ethics and values.’
Any reader’s engagement with a story now constitutes data, writes THE TOW CENTRE and ‘every reporting beat is now a data beat.’
- Use of statistical methods is a long-standing journalistic practice. Predictions methods, often involving machine learning, are by comparison relatively new.
- Sophisticated uses are ‘not without growing pains.’
- Two of the difficulties can be (a) how to communicate the uncertainty of predictive results and (b) how to document the methods that were used in arriving at any conclusions.