A New Type of Journalist

The entire premise of The Rundown is based on how newsrooms, storytellers and communicators of all types will need the precision of algorithms and the creativity of humans to thrive over the coming years. We need to educate ourselves now, and understand the technology we are dealing with, and be comfortable in our ethics and values.

In a conversation with my brother @irfanverjee, we discussed how the story of AI is similar across the board, where "journalists who use AI will replace journalists who do not." These new types of journalists will be faster at getting to new stories, more accurate, more balanced.

Identify stories: There is so much noise on social media. How do we comb through crazy amounts of posts on various platforms, old and new, and make sense of it. How do we listen, structure data, and ensure we are moving with the social media curve as social media is the first source of data to break a new story.

Misinformation: The potential for AI in the media industry is also going far beyond just improving content creation processes. AI is also being used to combat the spread of disinformation and fake news. Innovators are looking to new ways of tagging meta data as content is being created, and allowing open source inspection of the authenticity of their content. Blockchain solutions are being explored with cryptography and NFTs.

With the rise of social media and the spread of false information online, the need for reliable and trustworthy sources of news has never been greater. AI is being used to analyse news stories and detect patterns of misinformation, helping to identify and combat the spread of fake news. This technology is already being implemented by major media outlets that use AI to fact-check news stories and ensure accuracy.

Journalists of the future will need new skills:-

- Prompt engineering 

- The ability to determine if news is real, fake, political.

- Reading the analytics on content 

- New partnerships. They will need to partner with large organizations who have access to the broadest range of data, with more sophisticated AI so they can develop better content.