AI and Local Community Journalism in the UK: Opportunities and Challenges
The world of journalism is evolving rapidly, and the rise of artificial intelligence (AI) is set to have a profound impact on the way news is created, consumed, and distributed.
Here are some of the opportunities and challenges that AI presents for local community journalism in the UK and how the Ping! platform is leveraging AI to create a more diverse and informed news ecosystem.
Opportunities:
One of the main opportunities that AI presents for local community journalism is the ability to analyse vast amounts of data and identify trends and patterns that may have gone unnoticed otherwise. By using machine learning algorithms, AI can help identify connections between stories and topics, which can lead to more diverse and informed reporting.
Additionally, AI can help automate repetitive tasks such as transcription, data entry, and image tagging, freeing up journalists to focus on more creative and investigatory high-level tasks. This can result in faster turnaround times for news stories and increased productivity for newsrooms.
Finally, AI can help enhance the audience experience by providing personalised recommendations for news content based on user preferences and behaviour. This can lead to increased engagement and loyalty among readers and viewers.
Challenges:
One of the main concerns is the potential for AI to reinforce existing biases and inequalities in the news media. If algorithms are trained on data that is biassed, they may perpetuate those biases in their recommendations and analysis. This, along with generally perpetuating fake news could also add a considerable taxation on a journalist's time to unpick or fact check content generated via AI.
While automation can help with repetitive tasks, it cannot replace the creativity, judgement, and critical thinking skills that human journalists bring to the table. Nor is it any substitute for a journalist on the ground, in their community, talking to members of the public. The nuance and detail that a trained journalist can glean from just speaking to people is something that cannot be replicated by current AI models.
How Ping! will utilise AI
At Ping News, we believe that AI can be a valuable tool in creating a more diverse and informed news ecosystem, and we're leveraging AI to help identify connections between stories that have the potential to create much larger stories as they link themes or subjects. This can help our content creators to develop more informed, contextual, and diverse stories that resonate with their local communities.
Our content creators are already using AI in their own newsrooms to streamline their workflows - from translation services, to writing up press releases, to generating more User Generated Content.*
At Ping News, we’re also looking to automate content tagging and categorisation; analyse the sentiment of news articles to determine whether they are positive, negative, or neutral; and potentially use AI to transcribe audio interviews or videos into text, making it easier for hyperlocal journalists to create written articles from their interviews.
However, we're also aware of the potential risks and moral concerns associated with AI, and we're committed to using it responsibly and ethically. Our platform is built around the values of accuracy, transparency, integrity, accountability, and fairness, and we ensure that our algorithms and data are regularly reviewed and audited to ensure that they are not perpetuating any biases or inequalities.
Conclusion:
Ultimately AI does not have the personal relationships that a community journalists will have and cannot appreciate or connect the nuances and subtleties of human relationships and responses.
This is an exciting time but needs to be approached with caution while ensuring the ethics AI are inline with our own.
AI presents both opportunities and challenges for local community journalism in the UK, and it's up to us to ensure that we're using it in a way that enhances, rather than replaces, human journalism. By leveraging the power of AI to identify connections between stories, we can create a more diverse and informed news ecosystem that better serves our local communities. With the Ping! platform, we're committed to using AI responsibly and ethically, and we're excited to see how it can help our content creators tell better, more informed stories.
*This blog has been conceived by a human, 90% written by AI and then edited and uploaded by a human.
