2024

  • Talk Summary: Dr. Vishwanath on Science Communication & Misinformation

    Notes from a talk By Vish Vishwanath (Harvard School of Public Health; Dana-Farber Cancer Institute), hosted by David Lazar and the Internet Democracy Initiative, December 18, 2024.

  • AI-Powered Content Audits for Local News

    Organizations across the news industry are exploring ways to use generative AI to support their storytelling (many shared on this very blog). A growing trend is to use these new tools on the other end of the production cycle, to support content audits that assess a large set of stories ...

  • Computation + Journalism 2024 Symposium wrap-up

    We recently co-hosted the Computation + Journalism Symposium 2024 at Northeastern, bringing together academics, journalists, data scientists, editors, and more to explore innovate work at the intersection of fields. Keynotes from Julia Angwin, Aaron Sankin, and Alan Mislove.

  • Pre-print: Comparing Author Extraction Libraries

    How effective are existing tools for extracting author information from global online news? Author extracton is a key task in media research that supports a number of different types of research questions. We’ve hesitated to support this broadly in Media Cloud, because our past evaluati...

  • Your Early Fall AI+Journalism Updates

    Welcome back from the summer. So much has happened at the intersection of AI and journalism while you’ve been at the beach. Here’s my latest summary of what caught my attention.

  • Pre-print: Testing Generative AI for Source Audits in Student-Produced Local News

    We recently shared new work at the AEJMC 2024 conference on prototyping an AI-assisted audit of gender representation via quotes in The Scope. We’ve published it as an under-construction pre-print to share the work and find related research to collaborate with.

  • Grant to support AI monitoring of news for human rights violations

    So excited to announce that we’ve received a grant to support our work on the Counterdata Network from the Data Empowerment Fund. Our project builds on a powerful legacy—think of Ida B. Wells using news to expose lynchings in the late 1800s. Today, we’re continuing this tradition by dev...

  • Media Cloud Receives Major NSF Grant!

    We’re thrilled to announce that Media Cloud has secured new NSF HNDS-I grant to take our global news archive and director to the next level! This grant enables us to extend and enhance our searchable news database, which currently includes nearly 2 billion documents. With this funding, ...

  • New Strategies for Using Artificial Intelligence in Journalism

    Here’s the fifth in my series of round-ups on the latest in artificial intelligence and journalism. This time around it feels like the rubber has really hit the road, with lots of work on strategies and examples being shared around the web.

  • How can AI help us study the news? Here are my experiments with LLM-based query generation.

    To understand politics, economics, events and health communication in the news, researchers study large sets of articles from online news sources. Media Cloud, a project that I co-lead, holds a historical archive of over 1.5 billion stories from over 100,000 sources and has been used to...

  • Spring updates on artificial intelligence and journalism

    Here’s the fourth in my series of round-ups on the latest in artificial intelligence and journalism. Budding uses of AI in newsrooms

  • Your start of the year updates on artificial intelligence in journalism are here

    This is third in my series of round-ups on the latest in artificial intelligence and journalism. Here are some recent links you might want to read.

2023

  • Here are the updates you need on artificial intelligence in journalism

    I’m continuing my series of round-ups on artificial intelligence and journalism. Here are some recent links you might want to read.

  • Here are the latest updates on artificial intelligence in journalism

    It seems like artificial intelligence is everywhere in the news, particularly in digital journalism circles. I’m keeping an eye on ongoing developments and will share an occasional round-up of links that might be relevant to you. Here’s what was happening in the last few weeks.

  • A New Tool To Help Understand Partisan News in the US

    The latest Zelda game is being covered a lot more in Democrat-serving online news sites. That’s one of the first random tidbits I noticed in “On Our Own Terms”, a new tool built by Claire Pan and I as part of the Media Could project.

  • Data journalism? You can do it.

    Data is still hot, but the new skills, math, and technologies can feel overwhelming. In my experience journalism students and professionals approach learning data journalism with both excitement and trepidation. However, over a decade of teaching data literacy to many types of learners ...

  • Digital Storytelling to Support Connective Journalism

    Journalism serves many roles in society - informative, investigative, normative, and more. As the tools and pratices of interactive digital storytelling continue to grow, how can they help the connective role journalism plays in society? Read on for some background and a recent experim...