Digital Journalism, Drones, and Automation: The Language and Abstractions Behind the News

The lure of big data and analytics has produced new partnerships between news media and social media and consequently a fragmentation of digital journalism. The era is coupled with the rise in fake news and controversial data sharing. However, creative mobile reporting and civilian drones set new standards for journalist during the European asylum seeker crisis. Yet the focus on data and remote cloud servers continues to dominate online news and journalism, alongside new semantic models for data personalization. News tags that define concepts within a news story to assist search, are now monetized abstractions in accelerated data processing that enables automation and feeds advertising. Can journalism compete with this by defining its own concepts with ethical values named and embedded in algorithms? Can machines make sense of the world in the same way as a traditional journalist? In this book, Cate Dowd analyzes the tasks and ethics of journalists and questions how intelligent machines could simulate ethical human behaviors to better understand the dizzy post-human world of online data. Looking to digital journalism and multi-platform news media, from studios and integrated media systems to mobile reporting in the field, Dowd assesses how data and digital technology has impacted on journalism over the past decade. Dowd’s research is informed by in-depth participation with investigative journalists, including images drawn and annotated by industry experts to present key journalism concepts, priorities, and values. Chapters explore approaches for the elicitation of vocabulary for journalism and design methods to embed values and ethics into algorithms for the era of automation and big data. Digital Journalism, Drones, and Automation provides insights into the lasting values of journalism processes and equips readers interested in entering or understanding online data and news media with much needed context and wisdom.

Cate Dowd is Media Studies Lecturer at the University of New England in Australia.