Nick Diakopoulos on Automating the News

Technology & Prose

Nick Diakopoulos discusses his latest book, Automating the News: How Algorithms are Rewriting the Media.

On this episode of Technology & Prose, Nick Diakopoulos, Associate Professor of Communication Studies and Computer Science at Northwestern University, joins host Nikita Aggarwal to talk about how AI is being used in the news media (1:43) the use of AI for story discovery and the Lead Locator project (5:15) hybrid human-AI journalism (8:23) defining “newsworthiness” and the risk of selection bias in data-driven journalism (10:53) data science skills and the need for more interdisciplinary journalism education (14:54) the impact of social media platforms and search engines on news curation and journalistic values (16:58) regulating social media platforms and the use of AI in the news (20:38) clickbait, virality and the values embedded in news algorithms (24:11) advertising versus subscription news business models (26:06) the opportunities of newsbots (27:56) mis/disinformation and the risks of newsbots (34:28) algorithmic accountability reporting, website scraping under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, platform APIs (38:09) the newsroom of the future and the impact of automation on jobs in the media (40:00). References The Computational Journalism Lab @ Northwestern https://cj-lab.org/ Northwestern University Knight Lab https://knightlab.northwestern.edu/ Newsbots: @AnecbotalNYT ; @TrumpsAlert Bandy and Diakopoulos, Auditing News Curation Systems: A Case Study Examining Algorithmic and Editorial Logic in Apple News Bandy and Diakopoulos, #TulsaFlop: A Case Study of Algorithmically-Influenced Collective Action on TikTok Diakopoulos et al, Generating Location-Based News Leads for National Politics Reporting (The Lead Locator Project) Recorded on February 4th 2021