In its latest edition of the Platforms and Publishers report, researchers from the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia Journalism School continue their decade-long look at how media organizations continue to adopt to emerging technology, such as artificial intelligence.
“Technology companies are leading the push around AI. News organizations are having to weigh how to navigate those relationships with technology companies,” says Pete Brown, director of research at the center.
The first Platforms and Publishers report came out in 2016, shortly after Brown joined Tow, was a way to map relationships between news organizations and technology companies. Since then, there have been three distinct phases in those relationships, he says.
“The first one, between 2015 and 2018, was the technology companies’ courtship of journalism and news organizations. This is when Snapchat Discover came out, Apple News came out, Twitter Moments came out. That’s when the promise of the platforms was that it would enable scale,” Brown says.
The second phase involved the onset of efforts like the Google News Initiative and the Facebook Journalism Project, in which technology powerhouses were “touting their competing $300 million commitment to journalism … as philanthropy. There was more direct involvement of platforms and news organizations often geared toward local news,” he says.
But now, starting in 2022, there has been another monumental shift, in which publishers are struggling to determine whether and to what extent to use AI tools in their reporting while technology companies are unleashing new AI programs and assistants at a rapid pace.
The Tow Center is utilizing a number of different methods in its research on this ongoing and complicated relationship, says Klaudia Jaźwińska, research lead for Publishers and Platforms.
The next update of the report will feature interviews with journalists, editors, technology platform executives and some academics.
“One of the things I do in a different research project is content analysis. Either we do computational data collection or manual data collection. I have collected AI guidelines that represent the approach that more than 300 newsrooms are taking, best practices basically, surrounding the use of AI,” she says. “That involved content analysis of a bunch of different policies written using different language and trying to identify key themes across all of those. Platforms are making it increasingly difficult to hold them to account. There are tools like CrowdTangle that were really useful to researchers that have been shut down.”
Still, the team persists in looking at the trends in how news organizations are using and working with social media, including the shift toward creators and influencers.
“If you look at the journalism project website, there was a long list of blogs and self promotion tagged as news. In the last couple of years, it’s all tagged as creators. That shows where priorities have gone,” Brown says. “Aside from that, it’s not particularly recent, but generative AI is completely inescapable. There’s a lot of talk about generative search as well. There’s a degree of deja vu around what we’re seeing with generative AI. That is a real sort of benefit of having done this project for so many years. We see now the companies touting the promises of this new technology even if it’s been kind of rushed out.”
Some journalists might consider AI an “existential threat” to their jobs, but Jaźwińska encourages a more moderate approach.
“If we’re talking about how do we meet in the middle, first we have to agree that it is important to maintain the information ecosystem and we don’t want to fall into a trap where all the information online is just being produced and regurgitated by AI systems and there’s nothing new and it’s impossible to tell what is of quality and what isn’t,” she says. “We have to work out some sort of arrangement where the value that journalists bring to the information ecosystem is supported.”
Klaudia Jaźwińska and Pete Brown of the Tow Center for Digital journalism at Columbia University, discuss the Platforms and Publishers project, which seeks to promote mutual understanding of how emerging technologies are impacting the practice and business of journalism.
