Welcome to the latest Newsroom Initiative newsletter.

More this week from the International Journalism Festival, one of the most inspiring and educational events in the calendar for our industry.

As so often at the moment, the standout questions and presentations for me were about generative Artificial Intelligence and its uses or potential misuses in the newsroom as well as the traditional fears of publishers at the risks the technology and its creators may pose.

I wrote in the last newsletter about some powerful newsroom use cases for various ChatGPT tools from OpenAI presented at the Perugia conference. I also did an additional spot story on the fears the chief executive of the Associated Press voiced about the threat to publishers from the tools built on vast quantities of copyrighted material ingested by Open AI.

Some of the best thinkers in journalism were there and talking about this fresh challenge from technology and also the potential it has to unlock time and effort from our workflow. So, here’s a selection of what I found to be the most interesting elements in the sessions on AI.

There’s also a shout-out to Pulitzer Prize winners at The Alabama Media Group, who talked to the Newsroom Initiative about shifting from print to digital and who will speak in an INMA Webinar on the same topic next week. Register now.

Experimentation, imagination are vital to learning about generative AI now

Artificial Intelligence — and its uses and risks in journalism — was the stand-out topic at the Perugia International Journalism Festival, and it was far from a gloomy outlook with leading practitioners seeing opportunities for newsrooms to embrace the technology and innovate to create better journalism that engaged with audiences.

Gina Chua, the executive editor at Semafor, reminded the Perugia audience what large language models were good for and what they were not intended to do.

“They are not fact models. They are not verification models. What they do is they do language incredibly well,” she told a panel.

She gave the example of experimenting with stories and asking ChatGPT to change the style and tone to that of a different publication, the racy New York Post.

“The key point is I wasn’t asking for facts. [I asked it to] take this single story and rewrite it in different ways. It did not introduce error because it was working on a story,” she said. “We can think about how to regenerate news and reach people in ways we haven’t even thought of.”

A good example of this is the series of experiments journalists at Schibsted ran.

Semafor was using AI chatbots to proofread stories, Chua said. The tools had the potential to generate new story ideas and story types, to fire imagination in the newsroom and deliver new products to readers. For average journalists, it could offer a competitive advantage to improve the quality of their writing and the impact of their work.

“We desperately need more imagination … we need to stay current because we need to understand how it’s being used elsewhere,” she said. “One of the most interesting things we don’t talk about enough is this a tool that will both level up and create a different kind of competition … . This could improve their output dramatically.”

In the same session, Lisa Gibbs, director of news partnerships at the Associated Press, dealt with the question of the potential threat to journalism jobs in the emerging era of generative AI.

“I have always said that AI will not replace journalists, but they make really good assistants. And I think today we are poised even more to realise this vision of AI truly being an assistant,” she said, referring to existing AP use of Artificial Intelligence to analyse company earning reports and experiments the organisation is running to extract information from documents.

Gibbs suggested that journalists experiment with the various models but take extreme care not to go live with what they truly didn’t fully understand.

“I am concerned that the rush to sound smart and try things with ChatGPT is leading journalists to rush into some things they don’t have the knowledge of,” she said. Apart from the question of inaccurate or “hallucination” in some of the tools, the question of copyright and where responsibility might lie for incorporating copyrighted material into articles derived from AI.

She suggested the industry needs a framework to understand how to apply generative AI.

“We need a framework to help identify when should we be using automation and AI. We really need to make sure we are applying the same values and ethical frameworks to the use of these technologies as we have been to transcription and automatic stories for years,” she said.

See also AP CEO warns of “existential threat” to publishers from generative AI. The Economist covered the same session, calling out the “remixing” of journalism that generative AI would allow — creating a new “soup.”

Chris Moran, head of editorial innovation at The Guardian, said newsrooms needed to get familiar fast with the tools their journalists were probably already using: “Even if you’re an editor who thinks you hate this stuff ... your editors and staff may be doing this already.”

In a separate session, London School of Economics professor Charlie Beckett — whose Polis think tank has been working on Artificial Intelligence for years — said generative AI had the potential to free journalists from labourious tasks and challenged them to do better work. It offered relief from “boring repetitive labour you don’t want to do as a journalist, weather and sports results [for example]. Your time is better spent doing something else.”

In one of the closing sessions at a conference rather obsessed with Twitter and the evident loss of credibility on the platform under the ownership of Elon Musk, Emily Bell, director of the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia University, said Twitter under Musk was no longer a safe space for journalists. As a public company, Twitter had worked to understand journalists.

“They understood what it was to be a journalist, what it means to have pro-democratic platforms … . It is no longer a safe platform for journalism,” she said. “It’s vandalism of infrastructure and that is what dictators do as well.”

The next International Journalism Festival in Perugia is scheduled for April 17-24 2024. 

New INMA report on newsrooms

Just today, INMA released a report based on our 18-month-old Newsroom Initiative. “Bringing Newsrooms into the Business of News” is available free to INMA members. Check it out. I’d love to hear how you’re bringing your newsroom into the company’s business.

Big Pulitzer wins for Alabama Media Group as it closes print titles

Alabama Media Group took home two Pulitzer Prizes, demonstrating the local focus and commitment to investigative journalism that underpins its journalism-led shift to solely digital platforms over the past year — documented in this Newsroom Initiative analysis.

John Archibald, Ashley Remkus, Ramsey Archibald, and Challen Stephens won the 2023 Pulitzer Prize in Local Reporting for an investigation of predatory policing, an investigation that led to removal of police officers, changes in state law, dismissal of court cases and people freed from jail. (John is the father of Ramsey and was a previous Pulitzer winner.)

Columnist Kyle Whitmire won the other AL.com Pulitzer for a year-long exploration of how the myths Alabama tells itself about the past still shape the state today.

“It’s humbling to be recognised in this way,” Kelly Scott, editor-in-chief, told AL.com. “We’re honored and in awe of the other journalism recognised today across the country.”

When we spoke in March, Scott told me the savings from the shift to digital had been ploughed into more local investigative journalism, and the Pulitzers seem to vindicate that strategy to super-serve audiences with stories about where they live and what matters to them.

“That’s ultimately what this is about: creating memorable work that has an impact and has as many people as possible reading it. That’s a pretty appealing mission to get people on board with if you think about it that way,” Scott said at that time.

She and Alabama Media Group president Tom Bates are due to take part in a Newsroom Initiative Webinar next week on how best to drive a shift to digital from print. I suspect we may also take a moment for a little applause for the editorial team at AL.com.

Recommended follow

Rafat Ali @rafat, founder and chief executive officer of travel news site Skift.com, is one of the most acute thinkers in media to my mind. Rafat, whom I interviewed for a previous newsletter, is on the panel for the Newsroom Initiative workshop as part of the INMA World Congress in New York next week. He founded and sold media site PaidContent.org and then turned his attention to the travel industry.

His comments on leadership, business models, and the mistakes our industry keeps repeating are valuable.

Talk back

Tell me what you want to read and what you like or don't like in this newsletter, please. E-mail: peter.bale@inma.org. There’s also an INMA Newsroom Initiative Slack channel.

About this newsletter

Today’s newsletter is written by Peter Bale, based in New Zealand and the U.K. and lead for the INMA Newsletter Initiative. Peter will share research, case studies, and thought leadership on the topic of global newsrooms.

This newsletter is a public face of the Newsroom Initiative by INMA, outlined here. E-mail Peter at peter.bale@inma.org or newsroom@inma.org with thoughts, suggestions, and questions.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .