AI improves publishing

“Robots will analyze complex editorial content of all lengths, and provide feedback to the humans sitting behind the keyboard.”

In 2017, artificial intelligence will slowly but surely make its presence known, both within newsrooms and to readers.

matt-karolianIn newsrooms, bots will start to produce more stories where structured data is readily available — think game recaps, weather run downs, and overviews of how the stock market performed. This will free up resources and reduce costs. Robots will analyze complex editorial content of all lengths, and provide feedback to the humans sitting behind the keyboard. Much like how Netflix used data to help fine-tune House of Cards, news organizations will have the opportunity to adjust editorial narratives to make stories more engaging.

Google and Facebook will use artificial intelligence to identify fake news and help stop the spread of it.

Apple, Google, and Facebook will merge their fragmented audio, search, and news ecosystems while leveraging artificial intelligence to make recommendations across content types. For example, if you read an article in The Economist, you might get recommended a similar episode of the Planet Money podcast. This approach keeps users engaged with their devices and services longer…something that is financially advantageous for Apple, Google, and Facebook.

Bots will replace publishers’ iOS and Android apps. Data shows that nobody uses publisher apps, while messaging apps are insanely popular and growing larger everyday. Publishers would be smart to migrate resources away from maintaining unused apps and redirect them towards the development of bots that push the most relevant news directly to the screens that readers most frequently look at.

Newsrooms should embrace artificial intelligence, just as they have embraced other technological tools. AI will help us become better storytellers while simultaneously ensuring our audiences are the right ones.

Matt Karolian is director of audience engagement at The Boston Globe.

Cory Haik   Navigating power in Trump’s America

P. Kim Bui   The year journalism teaches again

AX Mina   2017 is for the attention innovators

Geetika Rudra   Journalism is community

S.P. Sullivan   Baking transparency into our routines

Ariane Bernard   Better data about your users

Bill Keller   A healthy skepticism about data

Amie Ferris-Rotman   Вслед за Россией

Sydette Harry   Facing journalism’s history

Cindy Royal   Preparing the digital educator-scholar hybrid

Molly de Aguiar   Philanthropists galvanize around news

Zizi Papacharissi   Distracted journalism looks in the mirror

Ashley C. Woods   Local journalism will fight a new fight

Ernst-Jan Pfauth   Earn trust by working for (and with) readers

Libby Bawcombe   Kids board the podcast train

Dannagal G. Young   The return of the gatekeepers

Juan Luis Sánchez   Your predictions are our present

Claire Wardle   Verification takes center stage

Laura E. Davis   Show your work

Javaun Moradi   What can we own?

Andrea Silenzi   Podcasts dive into breaking news analysis

Felix Salmon   Headlines matter

Rasmus Kleis Nielsen   News after advertising may look like news before advertising

Amy Webb   Journalism as a service

Asma Khalid   The year of the newsy podcast

Sue Schardt   Objectivity, fairness, balance, and love

Kathleen Kingsbury   Print as a premium offering

Mike Ragsdale   A smarter information diet

Errin Haines   Chaos or community?

Rachel Schallom   Stop flying over the flyover states

Christopher Meighan   Unlocking a deeper mobile experience

Annemarie Dooling   UGC as a path out of the bubble

Dhiya Kuriakose   The year of digital detoxing

Francesco Marconi   The year of augmented writing

Andy Rossback   The year of the user

Jonathan Stray   A boom in responsible conservative media

Mario García   Virtual reality on mobile leaps forward

Dan Colarusso   Let’s make live video we can love

Vivian Schiller   Tested like never before

Dan Gillmor   Fix the demand side of news too

Maria Bustillos   “It’s true — I saw it on Facebook”

Lee Glendinning   A call for great editing

Gabriel Snyder   The aberration of 20th-century journalism

Adam Thomas   The coming collaboration across Europe

Alberto Cairo   Communicating uncertainty to our readers

Mira Lowe   News literacy, bias, and “Hamilton”

Sarah Wolozin   Virtual reality on the open web

Emi Kolawole   From empathy to community

Samantha Barry   Messaging apps go mainstream

Tressie McMillan Cottom   A path through the media’s coming legitimacy crisis

Swati Sharma   Failing diversity is failing journalism

Aja Bogdanoff   Comments start pulling their weight

Steve Henn   The next revolution is voice

Tanya Cordrey   The resurgence of reach

Sam Ford   The year we talk about our awful metrics

Robert Hernandez   History will exclude you, again

Pablo Boczkowski   Fake news and the future of journalism

Coleen O'Lear   Back to basics

Taylor Lorenz   “Selfie journalism” becomes a thing

Ken Schwencke   Disaggregation and collection

Reyhan Harmanci   Bear witness — but then what?

Liz McMillen   The year of deep insights

Umbreen Bhatti   A sense of journalists’ humanity

Rubina Madan Fillion   Snapchat grows up

Liz Danzico   The triumph of the small

Priya Ganapati   Mobile websites are ready for reinvention

Guy Raz   Inspiration and hope will matter more than ever

Ray Soto   VR moves from experiments to immersion

Joanne Lipman   The year of the drone, really

Lam Thuy Vo   The primary source in the age of mechanical multiplication

Amy O'Leary   Not just covering communities, reaching them

Mandy Velez   The audience is the source and the story

Jeremy Barr   A terrible year for Tiers B through D

Carla Zanoni   Prioritizing emotional health

Millie Tran   International expansion without colonial overtones

Jonathan Hunt   Measurement companies get with the times

Nushin Rashidian   A rise in high-price, high-value subscriptions

Richard Tofel   The country doesn’t trust us — but they do believe us

Hillary Frey   Forests need to burn to regrow

Alice Antheaume   A new test for French media

Margarita Noriega   From pinning tweets to tweeting pins

Tracie Powell   Building reader relationships

David Weigel   A test for online speech

Moreno Cruz Osório   The year of transparency in Brazilian journalism

Tim Griggs   The year we stop taking sides

Mary Meehan   Feeling blue in a red state

Elizabeth Jensen   Trust depends on the details

Ryan McCarthy   Platforms grow up or grow more toxic

Mathew Ingram   The Faustian Facebook dance continues

Corey Ford   The year of the rebelpreneur

Anita Zielina   The sales funnel reaches (and changes) the newsroom

Ståle Grut   The battle for high-quality VR

Nathalie Malinarich   Making it easy

M. Scott Havens   Quality advertising to pair with quality content

Helen Havlak   Chasing mobile search results

Carrie Brown   We won’t do enough

Melody Kramer   Radically rethinking design

David Chavern   Fake news gets solved

Keren Goldshlager   Defining a focus, and then saying no

Emily Goligoski   Incorporating audience feedback at scale

Julia Beizer   Building a coherent core identity

Nicholas Quah   Podcasting’s coming class war

David Skok   What lies beyond paywalls

Sara M. Watson   There is no neutral interface

Almar Latour   Thanks, #fakenews

Tim Herrera   The safe space of service journalism

Scott Dodd   Nonprofits team up for impact

Peter Sterne   A dangerous anti-press mix

Trushar Barot   API or die

Alexis Lloyd   Public trust for private realities

Megan H. Chan   Cultural reporting goes mainstream

Matt Karolian   AI improves publishing

Erin Millar   The bottom falls out of Canadian media

Mary Walter-Brown   Getting comfortable asking for money

Erin Pettigrew   A year of reflection in tech

Eric Nuzum   Podcasting stratifies into hard layers

Renée Kaplan   Pure reach has reached its limit

Laura Walker   Authentic voices, not fake news

Jim Friedlich   A banner year for venture philanthropy

Michael Oreskes   Reversing the erosion of democracy

Sarah Marshall   Focusing on the why of the click

Bill Adair   The year of the fact-checking bot

Juliette De Maeyer and Dominique Trudel   A rebirth of populist journalism

Ole Reißmann   Un-faking the news

Olivia Ma   The year collaboration beats competition

Doris Truong   Connecting with diverse perspectives

Caitlin Thompson   High touch, high value

Rebekah Monson   Journalism is community-as-a-service

Jon Slade   Trusted news, at a premium

Mark Armstrong   Time to pay up

Michael Kuntz   Trust is the new click

Andrew Ramsammy   Rise of the rebel journalist

Andrew Haeg   The year of listening

Kawandeep Virdee   Moving deeper than the machine of clicks

Rachel Sklar   Women are going to get loud

Katie Zhu   The year of minority media

Matt Waite   The people running the media are the problem

Andrew Losowsky   Building our own communities

Burt Herman   Local news gets interesting

Valérie Bélair-Gagnon   Truthiness in private spaces