Having outlined the range of ways in which artificial intelligence has been applied to journalistic investigations in a previous post, some clear challenges emerge. In this second part of a forthcoming book chapter, I look at those challenges and other themes: from accuracy and bias to resources and explainability.
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Investigative journalists have been among the earliest adopters of artificial intelligence in the newsroom, and pioneered some of its most compelling — and award-winning — applications. In this first part of a draft book chapter, I look at the different branches of AI and how they’ve been used in a range of investigations.
Continue readingEarlier this year I was asked to write a chapter for a book on the future of investigative journalism – ‘Investigative Journalism: Dead Or Alive?‘. I’m reproducing it here. The chapter was originally published on my Facebook page. An open event around the book’s launch, with a panel discussion, is being held at the Frontline Club next month.
We may finally be moving past the troubled youth of the internet as a medium for investigative journalism. For more than a decade observers looked at this ungainly form stumbling its way around journalism, and said: “It will never be able to do this properly.”
They had short memories, of course. Television was an equally awkward child: the first news broadcast was simply a radio bulletin on a black screen, and for decades print journalists sneered at the idea that this fleeting, image-obsessed medium could ever do justice to investigative journalism. But it did. And it did it superbly, finding a new way to engage people with the dry, with the political, and the complex.
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