Nick Diakopoulos on Automating the News

Nick Diakopoulos discusses his latest book, Automating the News: How Algorithms are Rewriting the Media . On this episode of Technology & Prose, Nick Diakopoulos, Associate Professor of Communication Studies and Computer Science at Northwestern University, joins host Nikita Aggarwal to talk about how AI is being used in the news media (1:43) the use of AI for story discovery and the Lead Locator project (5:15) hybrid human-AI journalism (8:23) defining “newsworthiness” and the risk of selection bias in data-driven journalism (10:53) data science skills and the need for more interdisciplinary journalism education (14:54) the impact of social media platforms and search engines on news curation and journalistic values (16:58) regulating social media platforms and the use of AI in the news (20:38) clickbait, virality and the values embedded in news algorithms (24:11) advertising versus subscription news business models (26:06) the opportunities of newsbots (27:56) mis/disinformation and the risks of newsbots (34:28) algorithmic accountability reporting, website scraping under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, platform APIs (38:09) the newsroom of the future and the impact of automation on jobs in the media (40:00). References The Computational Journalism Lab @ Northwestern Northwestern University Knight Lab Newsbots: @AnecbotalNYT ; @TrumpsAlert Bandy and Diakopoulos, Auditing News Curation Systems: A Case Study Examining Algorithmic and Editorial Logic in Apple News Bandy and Diakopoulos, : A Case Study of Algorithmically-Influenced Collective Action on TikTok Diakopoulos et al, Generating Location-Based News Leads for National Politics Reporting (The Lead Locator Project) Recorded on February 4th 2021

You can listen to Nick Diakopoulos on Automating the News online on Radio and Podcast. Open the player on this page to stream the available audio.

Nick Diakopoulos on Automating the News is an episode from Technology & Prose by Nikita Aggarwal.

This episode is 44:47 long.

This episode was published on Feb 25, 2021.

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