It dawns on the Newsmaker that the real impact of these artificial intelligence tools is the way they change how she works as a journalist. The challenge for media organizations is not only about access to technology but about finding the right model for integrating it into the newsroom.
Modern news companies need to do more than just understand AI. They need to become equipped to adapt to the disruptive changes that AI will bring to journalism, moving from a siloed workplace to a more responsive and collaborative one.
Traditional editorial strategies often lock out consumers from participation. By contrast, iterative journalism deploys new technologies to make the news process highly responsive to the needs of its readers or viewers. By understanding consumption data and by putting the storyteller’s assumptions to the test, a newsroom can assess the value of a story before investing significant resources in it. This approach requires systematically integrating new technologies into traditional reporting processes at scale, rather than implementing new tools in one-off instances.
Iterative journalism is the idea of adjusting coverage in real time to serve the rapidly changing information needs of readers. This is possible by mixing editorial insights with audience feedback. Knowing which issues readers care about helps journalists to be accountable to them.
The iterative process starts with defining opportunities for news experimentation and identifying both the editorial resources needed and technical requirements. After launching a story prototype and measuring its audience impact, journalists evaluate whether the effort warrants additional commitment. If so, they can develop a scaling strategy, handing off the project to the proper group for the day-today management.
Implementing “minimally viable” stories, pursuing augmented audience understanding, and setting up research and development labs are three distinct strategies of iterative journalism that allow newsrooms to understand what variables of a story are most relevant to news consumers.
FIGURE 3.1: Iterative journalism is empathetic journalism. It uses audience interviews, surveys, experimentation, and observation to learn what readers care about.
“MINIMALLY VIABLE” STORIES
In 2018, Zurich-based media company Tamedia used text-generating bots to cover voting on various proposals across 2,222 Swiss municipalities. This type of reporting enabled the company to deliver updates customized according to a reader’s location and thus to capture a so-called long-tail audience, where the largest portion of their readership had diverse editorial interests depending on what voting result was relevant to them.1
This new way of working emphasizes the importance of feedback as well as the need to focus on the different information needs of audiences. Tamedia was able to increase user engagement because their coverage was personalized by location.2
A “minimally viable” story is an article or news feature developed with sufficient information to satisfy initial information needs. A broader and more and comprehensive journalistic piece is only developed after considering feedback from the story’s initial readers. Although this is an approach that can be effective for developing regular stories, it may not be applicable to some journalistic efforts, including investigations.
The Newsmaker regularly publishes automated stories and develops a sense of whether a particular topic is of interest to her audiences before investing too many resources into a broader journalistic effort. For instance, she used natural language generation and a dataset on recently released health indicators to produce hundreds of stories. From this, the Newsmaker notices that stories with information on childhood obesity appear to be important to her readers, based on high engagement metrics. The Newsmaker also implements the iterative approach by analyzing reader comments, to grasp how audiences engage with content published by her newspaper. Based on the data, she decides to further explore topics related to children’s health.
She also urges her colleagues to move beyond the “publish and forget” mentality. The Newsmaker learns from her past work by documenting the successes and failures of her experiments with artificial intelligence.
Audience feedback can even happen in real time. The Wall Street Journal collaborated with Guardian Labs to seek immediate feedback from audience members who engaged with new types of stories and alerts on the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics jobs report.3 Readers were invited to share their reaction to the Journal’s experiment by completing an online survey; the data collected from the survey was then used to improve the future strategy for live coverage as well as when to push out notifications.
These approaches have been difficult to apply in traditional journalism due to not only the limited opportunities for audience feedback but also the structure of work in the newsroom. Powered by new technologies and collaboration tools, iterative journalism can enable reporters to introduce their ideas to wider audiences without the risk of losing their scoop.
Still, applying iterative thinking to journalism is a balancing act. Technology usage and audience feedback can help journalists discover which stories connect most with news consumers without the risk of damaging journalistic integrity, voice, or message. At the end of the day, iterative journalism aims to empower news organizations to align their output with consumers’ needs.
At the Newsmaker’s company, this new approach is being tested with scheduled news events like election coverage and the Olympics. This gives her more time to listen to the audience, plan experiments, and bring colleagues into the process, without being tied to the daily news cycle.
RISKS FACING NEWSROOMS INTEGRATING THE ITERATIVE PROCESS
• Disruption of existing processes that are proven to work
• Pushback from colleagues who may be reluctant to change
• Lack of focus as a result of too much experimentation and testing
• A slower decision making process due to dependency on audience feedback
AUGMENTED AUDIENCE UNDERSTANDING
Iterative journalism begins with people but looks beyond demographic data to understand how individuals feel when they consume news. Knowing someone’s age or gender, or where they live, might tell journalists something, but it doesn’t tell them how to approach a story that is relevant for a certain community.
Traditional approaches to research and content development for online audiences lean on quantitative analysis. Newsrooms gauge the number of readers or viewers at different times during the day, access their basic demographic information, and see how they navigate the website. This might validate the Newsmaker’s assumptions, but it doesn’t actually tell her why her readers interact with stories and what they do with them. It’s important to understand the behaviors and values of our audience. Iterative journalism is also empathetic journalism: it supplements data with audience interviews, surveys, and observation to learn what readers care about, not just how many of them there are. Many of these tasks can be done with the aid of AI.
At the New York Times and the Washington Post, artificial intelligence prioritizes certain reader comments for moderation by automatically flagging those with toxic or offensive language and by clustering contributions with similar viewpoints, enabling newsrooms to both expedite the evaluation of hundreds of thousands of comments and, at the same time, develop a deeper insight into how their audiences respond to certain stories or topics. This data can be used to inform future coverage.
Grasping audience values requires moving beyond engagement data points. The goal is to identify the issues that truly matter to a reader and the context in which news can be most useful for the audience. In this new landscape, reporters are not only interviewing their sources; they are also focusing on integrating their audiences and their colleagues into the journalistic process.
For example, business news channel CNBC runs a series called Ask Kensho, where viewers can tweet a business-related question and get an answer in near real time.4 To accomplish that, the news station leveraged an AI-powered tool able to “find answers to more than 65 million question combinations by scanning over 90,000 customizable actions.” These questions could also be used to understand what topics are relevant to viewers.
In Germany, Die Zeit polls its online readers on a daily basis to understand how they are reacting to current events such as an election result or even a protest. The dataset generated, a kind of “mood index,” not only informs journalists about how readers feel but also forms the basis for new data-driven stories.5
By relying on both editorial expertise and reader feedback, newsrooms can put their audience at the center of the story development process.
This type of reader-centered approach in journalism is not without pitfalls. According to University of Oregon professor of emerging media Seth Lewis, inviting outside perspectives into the journalistic process can blur the lines between news professional and consumer, causing tension inside the newsroom.6
In fact, there is a danger of audience feedback having too much influence on what newsrooms decide to focus on. Stories of marginalized communities or complex subjects might not be of high interest to large numbers of readers but they are important issues to society as a whole.
To avoid the risk of losing sight of their own mission, newsmakers must create frameworks for audience participation that both take advantage of this new form of collaboration and maintain journalistic integrity.
RESEARCH AND DEVELOPMENT LABS
Implementing an iterative culture allows news organizations to quickly test new ideas and stay relevant. Many newsrooms are taking this principle to heart, setting up their own research and development functions to help journalists experiment with new approaches and disseminate best practices. Many of these new teams have been focused on artificial intelligence.
• BBC News Labs is set up as a multidisciplinary initiative implementing efforts such as semiautomated journalism and developing text-to-speech tools.7 Some of its recent projects include an audiogram generator (a tool that turns audio files into videos for social media distribution) and chatbots that give audiences a conversational mechanism to learn about a certain story.
• WSJ R&D develops AI-powered tools and implements new processes such as verification of deep-fakes and algorithmic transparency reporting. The team is also responsible for initiatives related to content automation using natural language generation and to text analysis tools using the latest developments in natural language processing.
• The New York Times’s research and development team focuses on areas including translation, computer vision, and sensors.8 Beyond AI, the group explores other emerging technologies, such as blockchain, which can be used to fight misinformation by watermarking verified content and give audiences insight into the origins of news.9
• Quartz AI Studio is designed to help journalists use machine-learning methods to develop new types of stories.10 One of those projects is Quackbot, among whose skills is that “given a topic, it can suggest some reliable sources of data.”11
• The Washington Post’s R&D lab was launched in the summer of 2019 to experiment with computational journalism techniques to bolster coverage of the U.S. presidential campaign in 2020.12
Such groups are often established as a shared resource, accessible to anyone in a given newsroom. They serve as an interface for meeting challenges and helping colleagues identify opportunities through data-driven research.
The Newsmaker’s editor recently created an internal fellowship program to give her colleagues the opportunity to spend two weeks working alongside technologists. Journalists are invited to submit proposals that are then reviewed by a cross-functional committee. Those who are accepted receive mentorship and get to develop projects related to areas such as AI.
COST-EFFICIENT WAYS TO SET UP AN R&D LAB
• Tour academic research labs outside the news industry to learn best practices and bring in new ideas.
• Organize workshops where cross-functional teams are empowered to identify challenges and given time to experiment with new approaches.
• Establish an internal-rotation program where journalists get to spend a certain amount of time working alongside engineers.
• Host brown-bag lunches with external speakers from universities, start-ups, and other media organizations to discuss the latest research and deployment of new projects.
The process of iterative journalism aligns closely with the attributes of artificial intelligence systems. Both begin with data collection. Then, AI expedites the process of observing and understanding context, which is also integral to the journalistic process.
Not only can AI help produce minimally viable stories for certain types of coverage, it can also assess the potential impact of a piece by gauging audience interest for a particular topic or theme. For example, while brainstorming stories about an election, the Newsmaker might turn to AI for surfacing insights about social media discussions. This can inform her about what topics are trending and what readers are interested in. By combining this information with her own journalistic instincts, the Newsmaker is able to find an angle that is both relevant and distinct. Data is everywhere but it’s not everything. New data approaches, rooted in solid journalistic methods, strengthen the newsroom’s understanding of the audience by providing the right context. This lets editors and reporters test the viability of a certain idea or news experiences before investing significant resources in pursuing it.
AI-powered tools such as NewsWhip have provided the Guardian, the New York Post, the Associated Press, the Huffington Post, and other news organizations with a deeper understanding of their audiences and an ability to anticipate their needs. Mining social media and running sophisticated analysis of news coverage, this technology can monitor the public’s curiosity about specific topics, then deliver that information to reporters via alerts and online dashboards.
The Newsmaker used a similar tool to identify a unique story angle after a politician announced a major tax break for multinational corporations. The machine learning system found that although there were hundreds of articles covering the politician’s speech, there was significant social media chatter by individuals seeking clarification on the impact of this policy on small business owners. The Newsmaker used this insight to research the topic further and write an article addressing those unanswered questions.
In both iterative journalism and AI, learning from data and observation is fundamental in the development process. Through AI analysis of extensive data about people and their contexts, newsrooms can enhance audiences’ experiences by understanding them better than ever before. In this way, both iterative journalism and machine learning incorporate human-centered design principles.13
As newsrooms become more comfortable with experimentation, they should also consider the desirability of their stories or news products, the feasibility of having newsroom technology help create them, and the financial viability of a new journalistic approach.
FIGURE 3.2: Iterative journalism borrows from design thinking methodologies, starting with the desirability of its audience, then answering questions related to feasibility of execution, and finally addressing its long-term viability.
QUESTION 1: DOES THE NEWS AUDIENCE DESIRE IT?
By better understanding the behaviors and interests of her readers and viewers, the Newsmaker is able to produce news relevant to them. Beyond testing audience interest through automated stories, it is helpful to invite news consumers to join reporters to discuss their changing information needs. These approaches can inject newsrooms with an audience-centric perspective.
To gauge audience interest in the topic of homelessness in the Bay Area, San Francisco public radio station KQED partnered with technology company Hearken to invite listeners to submit questions through an online tool.14 Over a thousand submissions were centralized in a database and displayed for public voting. Journalists then focused on the most frequent questions—for example, “What are the most common causes of homelessness?”—to report on the issue. By listening to their audience KQED generated high audience engagement and produced stories that mattered to the community.
QUESTION 2: IS THE NEWSROOM TECHNICALLY CAPABLE OF DOING IT?
It’s important for newsroom staff to understand the technical capabilities and limitations of technology. There are gaps in skill sets, of course, which can be addressed by hiring technical talent or through collaborations, but it’s not enough to hire technologists and journalists separately. Moreover, many newsrooms will not have the financial resources to do so. Increasingly, a journalist will need to have technology skills, while technologists must understand journalism.
The rise of the journo-coder is chronicled in the book Data Journalism: Inside the Global Future.15 Newsrooms are increasingly leveraging multitalented employees who understand both computer programming and investigative journalism. A case study of the New York Times’ Interactive News Technology Department titled “The Journalist as Programmer,” conducted by Cindy Royal, found that skills such as data analysis and statistics can augment traditional reporting techniques in an era where datasets are increasingly important to understand.16
But hiring technologists is not the only way to boost technical fluency. At the Wall Street Journal, editors sit alongside product managers. The goal: both teams collaborate and appreciate the other’s perspectives. As a result, the Journal has been able to launch products that take into account insights from both teams.
QUESTION 3: IS THE NEWS PRODUCT OR STORY METHODOLOGY FINANCIALLY VIABLE?
Experimentation for experimentation’s sake is a waste of resources, particularly for smaller newsrooms with financial and temporal pressures. The solutions developed in the context of iterative journalism must be financially viable. The Newsmaker understands that journalists today are more than storytellers—they need to understand how their organizations work and how their journalism is funded. But this doesn’t mean that journalistic output should be determined by its financial viability.
By understanding how to build a sustainable model for news, newsmakers can more quickly launch and scale new ideas. This requires an open dialogue across editorial, product, and business teams. Journalism is increasingly shaped by individuals who build news start-ups or create digital-transformation projects within large media organizations.
A news organization can assess whether a news product is viable by evaluating risks, competitors, and success factors. The Wall Street Journal, for example, uses a specific methodology for evaluating projects, known as Objectives and Key Results (OKRs).17 This approach, which is also used by tech companies like Google, Intel, and Amazon, establishes measurable goals that align with the broader newsroom strategy for each team and individual.
GUIDELINES FOR PAIRING JOURNALISTS AND TECHNOLOGISTS
• Meet regularly to explain how each side operates, as the workflows of journalists and technologists are completely different. For example, engineering teams operate with very clearly defined road maps, and any last-minute requests by the newsroom can have a big impact on the completion time-line. When working on a new product or tool, journalists should be comfortable with letting engineers complete their work before providing feedback.
• Develop a common language and avoid using specialized terms. An engineer might not be familiar with what “lede” or “kicker” means, and journalists might not know that AWS (Amazon Web Services) refers to a cloud computing platform. For the collaboration between teams to work, it’s important to simplify the language as much as possible. CONTINUED
• Define how each team will contribute to the project. It’s important to delineate which decisions fall to the newsroom, which to the technical team, and which are a matter of joint responsibility. For example, an AI-powered content recommendation tool on the website requires technical considerations in terms of how it’s built, but it also needs feedback from the newsroom to ensure the results are showing stories that are editorially relevant.
The Newsmaker worked with her editor to establish the following OKRs for her team in this quarter. She focused on a small number of quantifiable results and made sure they represented a realistic challenge. She set them up quarterly.
OBJECTIVE:
• Increase engagement with local news content.
KEY RESULTS:
• Increase content production of local stories by 30 percent.
• Attract five thousand new subscribers by the end of the quarter.
• Pilot ten new story types across web and mobile platforms.
OKRs are an efficient way to evaluate the viability of new efforts and can be established at the individual, team, and newsroom level. This approach is enabling the Newsmaker to feel ownership of the strategic direction of the company, as if she were the CEO of a start-up. The idea of the “journalist as entrepreneur” is so important these days that journalism schools are emphasizing courses and training in product development and business planning. Among many examples, the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism offers a program in entrepreneurial journalism that teaches students new business models for news;18 the Missouri School of Journalism runs an annual competition encouraging students to launch new start-ups that solve newsroom problems;19 and Columbia Journalism School, recognizing the importance of understanding the business of news, has made a business course a mandatory part of its program.
The iterative process demands a new way of working and organizing inside the newsroom. Adapting quickly to new technologies and workflows requires the formation of multidisciplinary teams, made up of people with backgrounds in journalism, data science, design, technology, and strategy.
But what does it mean to create a context for collaboration? How can newsrooms create an environment for working together that does not feel coerced?
A first step is to reduce silos. The newsroom cannot be departmentalized if we expect rapid testing and cross-pollination between teams. This means the newsroom should be designed so that people with different backgrounds and skill sets regularly bump into each other. Such layouts facilitate the serendipitous collaboration that is more in line with the new dynamic model for news described in the first part of this book.20
Newsrooms are already starting to adopt this model. For example, the Associated Press’s move to a new headquarters in downtown Manhattan in 2017 was marked by a drastic reduction in the number of individual offices and an increase in casual seating areas. The Washington Post’s new office features numerous huddle spaces designed for informal gatherings and group discussions. At the same time, it’s important to create spaces for people to be able to work alone when necessary. The Wall Street Journal installed phone booths throughout its offices so journalists could have privacy, and Quartz created café-style nooks ideal for private work sessions.
The point is that knowledge sharing involves more than explicit communication. It also calls for a culture where curiosity is not forced but surfaces organically, and an environment that encourages people to take risks such as implementing new AI technologies—which calls for collective trust, participation, and an expectation that the outcome may be imperfect.
Perhaps that is the most important thing to know about collaboration: it is messy and imperfect. But even if collaboration might sometimes seem counterproductive, because of clashes between personalities or a sense of bureaucratic delay, that doesn’t mean it’s not working. We tend to be focused on productivity, but the process of collaboration is often a sub-efficient process—we don’t collaborate to achieve speed or ease of implementation; we do it to build something that includes multiple viewpoints.
THE STORY AS THE UNIT OF INNOVATION
Technology is always changing, but the constant in newsrooms is the storytelling and analysis. Building an iterative culture starts with a collective acknowledgment that it’s okay to pilot, fail, and experiment.
Newsrooms that invest time in education become more flexible and continue to create storytelling that informs and delights their audiences. Building adaptability to new techniques depends on two core activities: training and research.
Newsroom managers can empower colleagues by providing them with new skills and a road map for creating change while eliminating internal constraints, for instance by allowing them to collaborate cross-functionally with other teams and, when possible, to work on the ideation of news products and tools. This empowerment includes exposing the newsroom to concepts like iterative journalism, but it could also involve teaching colleagues how to use new AI tools for data analysis or text and video generation.
Newsrooms will benefit from looking beyond their own walls for sources of inspiration. For instance, they might host an “innovator series” featuring speakers from outside the organization who can present fresh ideas related to media and journalism. But these training initiatives should not be top-down; the decisions about training should be sourced from journalists’ needs.
Such efforts can have tangible impacts: the Herald-Times in Bloomington, Indiana, cites the five-hour-a-week training program it had in place between 2003 and 2006 as a factor in a 10 percent increase in newspaper sales and an improved online experience.21 This initiative was successful because training activities were linked to very actionable goals.
Investing in training like this becomes paramount as AI rapidly changes the practice of journalism and affects how newsrooms are structured. In fact, training can reduce fears associated with the uncertainty of changing roles and inspire staff to become more enterprising in their work.
The professional organization Global Editors Network facilitates hackathons that bring together journalists from National Geographic, NBC News, the New Yorker, ProPublica, Vocativ, the Washington Post, and others to compete in the development of media industry innovations. Events like these offer an opportunity for reporters and editors to take a step back from the daily news cycle and think ambitiously about emerging forms of storytelling.
Working with universities and colleges can also enable newsrooms to develop new analysis and unique content. Take the New York Times’s collaboration with the Brown Institute at Columbia University, in an investigation of the emergence of bots across platforms like Twitter and Facebook. What initially started as a computational journalism classroom project led by Professor Mark Hansen later evolved into an immersive story that led federal authorities to investigate the sellers of fake followers.
