The annual International Journalism Festival is currently underway in Perugia, Italy. Some of the key discussions on Thursday focused on how computer technologies can be used most effectively in newsrooms and the values that underpin new forms of journalism.
The Death of Journalistic Objectivity session took up Dan Gillmor’s 2005 call to “to say a fond farewell to an old canon of journalism: objectivity.” Gillmor argues that objectivity is a construct of the past half-century - arising from the consolidation of newspapers. Essentially, objectivity made good business sense but not good journalistic sense. In place of objectivity, he proposes four alternative pillars of good journalism - thoroughness, accuracy, independent thinking and transparency - which add up to something better than objectivity.
For moderator Charlie Beckett, director of Polis, “objectivity in its most pure form never existed” while journalists increasingly rely on emotion as a tool to engage readers. The Independent columnist Yasmin Alibhai-Brown also pointed out that objectivity is a limiting value especially when writing about contentious subjects like Israel-Palestine. Similarly, for Gillmor, much of what passes for objectivity is stenography: “writing stuff down from two different people is not objectivity but stenography”. The main take away from the panel was the value of transparency in terms of overcoming bias and establishing the credibility of journalists.
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A Draft Manifesto for European Data Journalism: Daniel Grasso of Medium presented a draft manifesto for data journalism in Europe. Noting how data journalism contributes to openness and transparency, the authors argue that it has the potential to reinforce the role of journalism as the fourth estate and to increase public trust in journalism. The manifesto seeks to define and measure the quality of European data journalism projects as collaborative, cross border, multi-lingual initiatives.
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The Online Communities Session discussed approaches to managing reader communities and comments. Nicholas Diakopoulos, University of Maryland, suggested that news organisations are struggling to find appropriate strategies for their online communities as they manifest in the short and long term. While pointing to algorithmic moderation as a useful approach, he cautioned that news organisations must first decide what they expect from comment communities before devising a system to regulate it.
Mary Hamilton, The Guardian’s executive editor for audience, explained the paper’s decision to constrain readers’ opportunities to comment on contentious subjects – particularly in relation to race and migration. As Hamilton summarised in a recent Guardian article, the aim is to enable better management of readers’ comments. In her presentation, Hamilton drew on gamer psychology to conceptualise the kinds users that appear in online comment communities: “it’s important to think about what your audience wants from that community”.
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The Hacking The Newsroom Session explored how journalists and computer programmers are shaping the future of journalism. The web developers suggested that news organisations should be competing for stories but not the technology that underpins those stories. Basile Simon, BBC News Labs, explained how the corporation uses “hack days” to see what journalists can learn from coders and programmers and vice versa.
More broadly, the panel considered how hackers and programmers make great investigative journalists. Sylke Gruhnwald suggested that journalists should develop coding skills to better understand the process of working with data. Ultimately, she argued that it’s about teamwork between journalists and coders: “communication is key because it bridges the gap between technical skills, ethics and different backgrounds of teams”.
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Automated Journalism: Andreas Graefe outlined the current state of automated journalism: the use of algorithms to automatically generate news from structured data. Presenting findings from a recent Tow Report, Graefe noted that automated journalism is currently in a “market phase” but some leading publications - Associated Press, Forbes, The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, and ProPublica – have already begun to automate news content. The report concludes that automation will become a mainstream feature of newsrooms to generate routine news stories for repetitive topics for which clean, accurate, and structured data are available.
The International Journalism Festival runs until April 10th.
