Author Archives: Paul Bradshaw

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About Paul Bradshaw

Paul teaches data journalism at Birmingham City University and is the author of a number of books and book chapters about online journalism and the internet, including the Online Journalism Handbook, Mobile-First Journalism, Finding Stories in Spreadsheets, Data Journalism Heist and Scraping for Journalists. From 2010-2015 he was a Visiting Professor in Online Journalism at City University London and from 2009-2014 he ran Help Me Investigate, an award-winning platform for collaborative investigative journalism. Since 2015 he has worked with the BBC England and BBC Shared Data Units based in Birmingham, UK. He also advises and delivers training to a number of media organisations.

Teaching journalism students generative AI: why I switched to an “AI diary” this semester

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The Thinker status
Image by Fredrik Rubensson CC BY-SA 2.0

As universities adapt to a post-ChatGPT era, many journalism assessments have tried to address the widespread use of AI by asking students to declare and reflect on their use of the technology in some form of critical reflection, evaluation or report accompanying their work. But having been there and done that, I didn’t think it worked.

So this year — my third time round teaching generative AI to journalism students — I made a big change: instead of asking students to reflect on their use of AI in a critical evaluation alongside a portfolio of journalism work, I ditched the evaluation entirely.

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Why I’m no longer saying AI is “biased”

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TLDR; Saying “AI has biases” or “biased training data” is preferable to “AI is biased” because it reduces the risk of anthropomorphism and focuses on potential solutions, not problems.

Searches for "AI bias" peaked in 2025. In March 2025 twice as many searches were made for "AI bias" compared to 12 months before.
Click image to explore an interactive version

For the last two years I have been standing in front of classes and conferences saying the words “AI is biased” — but a couple months ago, I stopped.

As journalists, we are trained to be careful with language — and “AI is biased” is a sloppy piece of writing. It is a thoughtless cliche, often used without really thinking what it means, or how it might mislead.

Because yes, AI is “biased” — but it’s not biased in the way most people might understand that word.

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Google Sheets has a new AI function — how does it perform on classification tasks?

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A new AI function is being added to Google Sheets that could make most other functions redundant. But is it any good? And what can it be used for? Here’s what I’ve learned in the first week…

The AI function avoids the Clippy-like annoyances of Gemini in Sheets

AI has been built into Google Sheets for some time now in the Clippy-like form of Gemini in Sheets. But Google Sheets’s AI function is different.

Available to a limited number of users for now, it allows you to incorporate AI prompts directly into a formula rather than having to rely on Gemini to suggest a formula using existing functions. 

At the most basic level that means the AI function can be used instead of functions like SUM, AVERAGE or COUNT by simply including a prompt like “Add the numbers in these cells” (or “calculate an average for” or “count”). But more interesting applications come in areas such as classification, translation, analysis and extraction, especially where a task requires a little more ‘intelligence’ than a more literally-minded function can offer.

I put the AI function through its paces with a series of classification challenges to see how it performed. Here’s what happened — and some ways in which the risks of generative AI need to be identified and addressed.

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How do I get data if my country doesn’t publish any?

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Spotlight photo by Paul Green on Unsplash

In many countries public data is limited, and access to data is either restricted, or information provided by the authorities is not credible. So how do you obtain data for a story? Here are some techniques used by reporters around the world.

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7 prompt design techniques for generative AI every journalist should know

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Tools like ChatGPT might seem to speak your language, but they actually speak a language of probability and educated guesswork. You can make yourself better understood — and get more professional results — with a few simple prompting techniques. Here are the key ones to add to your toolkit. (also in Portuguese)

Prompt design techniques for genAI Role prompting One-shot prompting Recursive prompting Retrieval augmented generation Chain of thought Meta prompting Negative prompting
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De vanligste vinklene journalister bruker når de forteller historier med data

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7 vanlige vinkler for datahistorier_ Omfang, Veksling, Rangering, Variasjon, Utforske, Relasjoner, Dårlig/åpne, + saker

Datadrevet historiefortelling kan deles i syv hovedkategorier ifølge en analyse av 200 artikler. I den første av to poster vil jeg demonstrere de fire mest brukte vinklene i nyhetshistorier, hvordan de kan gi deg flere muligheter som reporter, og hvordan de kan hjelpe deg med å arbeide mer effektivt med data.

De fleste datasett kan fortelle mange historier — så mange at det for noen kan virke overveldende eller forstyrrende. Å identifisere hvilke historier som er mulige, og å velge den beste historien innenfor den tiden og de ferdighetene du har tilgjengelig, er en viktig redaksjonell ferdighet.

Mange nybegynnere innen datajournalistikk søker ofte først etter historier om sammenhenger (årsak og virkning) — men disse historiene er vanskelig og tidkrevende. Du kan ønske å fortelle en historie om ting som blir verre eller bedre — men mangle dataene for å fortelle den. Hvis du har svært liten tid og vil komme i gang med datajournalistikk, er de raskeste og enkleste historiene du kan fortelle med data, historier om omfang.

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What are we talking about when we say the “ethics” of AI and journalism?

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A path forking into three
There are three broad paths in ethics. Image by pfly CC BY-SA 2.0

Many people — including me — are quite uncomfortable with generative AI. Most of this discomfort can be traced to the various ethical challenges that AI raises. But an understanding of the different schools of ethics can help us both to better address those challenges and what to do about them.

Three different ethical approaches

The first thing to say about the ethics of AI is that there is no single ‘ethics’. When we engage with ethical issues there are typically at least three different systems that might be in play:

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The Art of Disagreement — lessons for journalists

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Why Are We Yelling? Learn the life-changing art of productive disagreement.

Journalists are no strangers to disagreement: the job regularly involves reporting on conflicts, putting one party’s point of view to another, or engaging with audience challenges around bias and veracity.

So I was curious whether Buster Benson’s book, Why Are We Yelling? The Art of Disagreement, might have some lessons to offer for reporters.

Spoiler alert: I think it does.

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Niamh McIntyre: tips from a career in data journalism

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Niamh McIntyre

The Bureau of Investigative Journalism’s Big Tech Reporter Niamh McIntyre has been working with data for eight years — but it all stemmed from an “arbitrary choice” at university. She spoke to MA Data Journalism student Leyla Reynolds about how she got started in the field, why you don’t need to be a maths whizz to excel, and navigating the choppy waters of the newsroom. 

Starting out on any new path can be daunting, but in the minutes before my phone call with Niamh McIntyre, I’m acutely aware that upping sticks to Birmingham and training in data journalism at the grand old age of 29 is nothing less than a tremendous luxury.

A younger me might have — would have — quaked at such a scenario, so I’m keen to know more about Niamh’s work, which ranges from investigating the gig work industry to private children’s homes.

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