Journalism Practice

NEW ARTICLE OUT! AI in the Newsroom: Lessons from the Adoption of The Globe and Mail's Sophi By Alfred Hermida & Felix M. Simon https://lnkd.in/esHkx_Cr ABSTRACT This case study examines the relationship between artificial intelligence (AI) and journalistic values through an analysis of Sophi, an algorithmic recommendation engine developed by?The Globe and Mail?in Canada. As AI becomes more prevalent in newsrooms, there are debates ranging from concerns about journalist displacement to hopes for improved quality and economic sustainability. The study explores how Sophi's development, adoption, and reception showcase the interaction between technological capabilities and journalistic values. By analysing Sophi's implementation across various international news publishers, we investigate the conditions that foster the adoption of AI systems in journalism and the implications for future AI design and deployment within newsrooms. Our findings suggest that successful AI integration in journalism requires careful attention to organisational context, scope of automation and institutional origins. The story of Sophi highlights the need for a more granular investigation into how different news outlets balance economic imperatives with journalistic values when adopting AI technologies. KEYWORDS:?#ArtificialIntelligence #AIalgorithmicrecommendationsystems #innovation #journalisticnorms #localnews

NEW OPEN ACCESS ARTICLE OUT Developing Effective and Value-Aligned AI Tools for Journalists: 12 Critical Questions to Reflect upon By José Miguel Cordero,Theresa Henn,Frederik Holtel,José á. Sánchez Gómez,Diego Arenas,Andrea ?ipka &Sebastian Vollmer https://lnkd.in/e-3iBDyJ ABSTRACT Artificial intelligence (AI) is playing an increasingly prominent role in journalism, with emerging tools like large language models (LLMs) and other AI applications gaining traction. This paper explores the current landscape in adopting AI tools for the information gathering and story development phase in journalistic practice. We identify two contemporary challenges for implementing AI tools in journalism: effectiveness and value alignment. While the first challenge includes the issues of generalizability, costs, user-friendliness, and accuracy, the latter refers to adherence to journalistic values, independence from external actors, transparency, and data privacy issues. We reflect upon these challenges based on the development process of prototyping an open-access AI tool for classifying documents and prioritizing information-rich pages in collaboration with the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP), a globally recognized investigative journalism network. Based on the literature and our experience, we derive twelve critical questions that we deem important to guide the development of future AI tools for journalism. KEYWORDS: #JournalisticAI #generativeAI #investigativejournalism #computationaljournalism #documentclassification #machinelearning

NEW OPEN ACCESS ARTICLE OUT! Transitioning to Transparency: Footnote Journalism as a Novel Journalistic Practice By Lars-Ole Wehden,Bernadette Uth,Lea von den Driesch,Katherine M. Engelke & Nina Springer https://lnkd.in/ejd_q_sz ABSTRACT Objectivity as?the?professional norm of Western journalism has–for quite some time–been under scrutiny. Questioning a norm inevitably leads to a search for other normative anchor points. One guiding principle that is currently attracting much attention is transparency. Despite extensive research on audience perceptions of journalistic transparency efforts, less is known about journalists’ transparency practices and how they are embedded in journalistic content. This study investigates a novel practice of source transparency that we term?footnote journalism: the visually-emphasized use of scholarly referencing practices that substantiate news content by listing sources in the form of footnotes. Using quantitative content analysis, we assessed?N?=?2,588 footnote references embedded in?N?=?127 journalistic news items across three outlets to explore what types of sources were used, what types of statements were substantiated, and whether sources were specific, traceable, and accessible. We find that footnote journalism cites sources of high scientific quality to a substantial extent, but it is rather narrow in its thematic focus. The type of sources used depends on several factors, including the author’s profession, the nature of the statement, and the topic. The discussion addresses the theoretical and practical implications of footnote journalism. KEYWORDS:?#Contentanalysis #footnotejournalism #journalism #journalistictransparencypractices #news #scientificreferencing #sourcetransparency

WELCOME TO THE JOURNALISM PRACTICE EDITORIAL BOARD YAZAN BADRAN! Yazan Badran is an assistant professor in international media and communication studies and a researcher at ECHO: Media, Culture & Politics Research Group at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Belgium. His research focuses on the intersection between media, journalism and politics in Syria and the broader Arab World and within its exilic and diasporic communities. He was previously a Junior Postdoctoral Fellow of the Research Foundation – Flanders (FWO) (2022–2025) as well as a PhD fellow of the FWO (2016–2020). He has been a visiting scholar at different institutions including Kadir Has University (Istanbul, Turkey), and Centre d'Etudes Maghrébines à Tunis (CEMAT–Tunis, Tunisia). His work has been published in Media, Culture and Society, International Journal of Communication, Media and Communication, and Journalism Studies, among others. He regularly presents at international conferences and teaches undergraduate and graduate courses on communication, media, culture and globalisation.

NEW ARTICLE OUT Shadows of Deception: Unveiling the Dominance of Source Versus Recipient in the Perceived Credibility of Misinformation By Guang Yang, Liyu Zhao, Yuan Liang & Zhidan Wang https://lnkd.in/evAFiThQ ABSTRACT The perceived credibility of misinformation significantly enhances the public’s willingness to re-disseminate the misinformation, leading to severe social and economic consequences. Although previous studies have extensively analyzed how the source of the misinformation and its recipients influence the public's perceived credibility, which aspect has a greater impact remains to be explored. This study focuses on analysing 982 instances of misinformative microblogs, and uses Bayesian Networks to establish an evaluation system for assessing the public’s perceived credibility of their misinformation on the basis of the sources and recipients. The goal of this study is to explore the main aspects and factors that affect the credibility of the public perception of false information. Our findings show that recipients have a more significant influence on perceived credibility than sources. Additionally, the three most important indicators influencing the public’s perceived credibility of misinformation are the activities of the misinformation recipients, the attention duration given by recipients to the misinformation, and the format of the misinformation source. By identifying key factors influencing the public’s perceived credibility of online misinformation, this study can provide targeted guidance for reducing the public’s trust in misinformation. KEYWORDS: #Publicperceivedcredibilityofonlinemisinformation #Bayesiannetworks #misinformative #microblogs #sourcesofonlinemisinformation #recipientsofonlinemisinformation #Weibo

NEW ARTICLE OUT “More Than Just Talking Parrots”: Journalists Perspective on the Journalistic Voice in Reporting Political Utterances By Mia Schreiber https://lnkd.in/egRzXsXY ABSTRACT Political utterances are the foundations of political news stories, with journalists tasked daily to mediate them. These utterances include public speeches, press briefings, social media posts, private conversations with journalists, and more. Journalists covering the political field face crucial decisions on what to report, how to frame it, and whether to provide context or interpretation to what is said. Through semi-structured interviews with Israeli journalists, this study examines how journalists perceive the role and involvement of their own voices in reporting political utterances. The findings suggest that due to their mistrust of politicians’ words, journalists integrate their interpretation of what is said, to provide the public with the information it needs to evaluate “correctly” the reported words. That is, journalists’ voice is perceived as vital for delivering a reliable and neutral reporting of political utterances. By presenting this counter-intuitive view, the study illuminates how journalists’ deal with two conflicting objectives: the desire to maintain neutrality on the one hand, and the need to tell “the truth” on the other, which requires them to embed their own voice in the reported utterances. KEYWORDS: #Journalisticvoice #politicaldiscourse #newsreporting #reportedspeech #journalisticinterpretation #interviews

NEW ARTICLE OUT The “Journalistic I” in Multiplatform: A Comparative Study of Chinese Journalists’ Branding Practices By Jinghong Xu, Ziyu He, Xiaoshi Zeng & Yuhang Yuan https://lnkd.in/efaKpPqH ABSTRACT Taking Goffman’s theater metaphor as a theoretical perspective, this study explores how Chinese journalists engage in branding practices in a multiplatform environment through content analysis of profiles (N?=?34) and posts (N?=?506) from Weibo and Douyin. The results show that journalists tend to employ Weibo as a relationship-oriented platform, offering back stage insights, humor, and support for personal, organizational, and institutional brands. Conversely, Douyin is more understood by journalists as a content-oriented platform, favored for publishing matters related to public affairs and expressing personal perspectives on news topics. The results also reveal the platform preferences of Chinese journalists’ branding practices across media types. Journalists from party-oriented official media and market-oriented commercial media have balanced professionalism and individuality by flexibly applying platform logic, while market-oriented commercial media journalists have maintained a relatively consistent presentation of their identity on Weibo and Douyin. This study provides insights into the dynamics of journalistic branding and the concept of the “journalistic I.” KEYWORDS: #Theatermetaphor #journalisticbranding #journalisticnorms #Chinesejournalism #Weibo #Douyin

NEW OPEN ACCESS ARTICLE OUT! Analyzing the Analysts: Desired Skills of Commentators Based on a Delphi Panel By Oded Jackman & Zvi Reich https://lnkd.in/eGKe4Nid ABSTRACT Despite the “interpretive turn” in journalism, the essential skills of news commentators remain unclear. This paper offers a comprehensive map of commentators' desired skills, benchmarking them with news reporters' skillsets. Findings are based on a Delphi panel of Israeli news executives and experts. Commentators are expected to master critical and independent thinking, superior analytical and reasoning skills, advanced presentation and even forecasting skills. Although they are less expected than reporters to master reporting skills, according to our panelists, they cannot make do with armchair commentary. The paper combines four theoretical frameworks (role perception, boundary work, objectivity and sensemaking) making a threefold contribution: outlining a practical profile of commentators; highlighting their epistemic uniqueness; and offering a typology of commentators that may help restore order in the clutter of analysts flooding news industries. KEYWORDS: #Commentators #journalisticskills #pundits #interpretativejournalism #reporters'skills #newsreporting

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Welcome to the Journalism Practice editorial board Daniel C. Hallin! Daniel C. Hallin is a Distinguished Professor Emeritus at the University of California, San Diego, and is a Fellow of the International Communication Association. His books include The "Uncensored War": The Media and Vietnam, "We Keep America on Top of the World": Television Journalism and the Public Sphere, Comparing Media Systems: Three Models of Media and Politics, and Making Health Public, now in a new edition including a chapter on the CIVID pandemic. He is part of the executive committee of the Journalistic Role Performance project. His most recent work has focused on populism and the mediatization of the COVID pandemic and on media and politics in Latin America, including work on press freedom and on populism, anti-populism and the media.