ML and Journalism
In these SuperDataScience newsletters, we’ve often shared stories from The Guardian. This week, rather than just writing about the latest in AI, they are creating the news story by having their in-house data scientists collaborate with 19 other news organisations as part of the ‘2021 JournalismAI Collab Challenges,’ a global project designed to bring together newsrooms in helping to understand the role that AI can play in the future of journalism and how the technology can bring about improvements for the industry. In this article, The Guardian lays out its objectives in joining the project and details how they attempted to answer the question: “How might we use modular journalism and AI to assemble new storytelling formats and reach underserved audiences?” They then explain how they have been teaching a machine to understand what a quote is in an attempt to better understand and ultimately improve their own journalistic output.
Why this is important:
The Collab Challenges are a new series of collaborative experiments that bring together media organisations to explore innovative solutions that improve journalism via the use of AI technologies. A robust and healthy press is a cornerstone of democracy and it is exciting to see how data science skills are being used to improve it.