Robot Journalism

Can Human Journalism Survive?

Noam Lemelshtrich Latar

• Publisher: WSPC
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9789813237353
• Topic: Technologie et ingénierie
• Subtopic: Robotique

-->

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is changing all aspects of communications and journalism as automatic processes are being introduced into all facets of classical journalism: investigation, content production, and distribution. Traditional human roles in these fields are being replaced by automatic processes and robots.

The first section of this book focuses on a discussion of AI, the new emerging field of robot journalism, and the opportunities that AI limitations create for human journalists. The second section offers examples of the new journalism storytelling that empower human journalists using new technologies, new applications, and AI tools. While this book focuses on journalism, the discussion and conclusions are relevant to all content creators, including professionals in the advertising industry, which is a major main source of support for journalism.

--> Contents:

• Preface
• About the Authors
• Acknowledgments
• AI and Journalism:
  • Introduction (Noam Lemelshtrich Latar)
  • Are AI's Limitations Creating New Opportunities for Human Journalists? (Noam Lemelshtrich Latar)
  • Robot Journalism (Noam Lemelshtrich Latar)
  • Big Data and Advanced Analytics (Amir Ruskin)
  • Automatic Newsrooms (Noam Lemelshtrich Latar)
• New Story Telling in the Age of AI:
  • "The New News": Storytelling in the Digital Age (Gali Einav and Nathan Lipson)
  • Immersive Journalism: The New Narrative (Doron Friedman and Candice Kotzen)
  • New Journalistic Story Telling Covering Conflict Zones (Noam Lemelshtrich Latar)
  • Evolution, Revolution, or a Real Game Changer? Artificial Intelligence and Sports Journalism (Yair Galily)
  • Cybernetics and the New Storytelling of Government Decision Making in the Age of AI (Noam Lemelshtrich Latar)
  • Conclusions
• Index

-->
--> Readership: Journalists and content creators in all media platforms as well as students of media studies and journalism. -->
Keywords:Artificial Intelligence;Communications;Journalism;Content Production;Media;StorytellingReview:0

Section Two:

New Story Telling in the Age of AI

Chapter 6

“The new news”: Storytelling in the digital age

Gali Einav and Nathan Lipson

“I know only one thing about the technologies that await us in the future: we will find ways to tell stories with them” — Jason Ohler, author of Digital and Traditional Storytelling and Four Big Ideas for the Future.

The media industry has been undergoing accelerated change, driven largely by the proliferation of digital platforms. This transformation is sometimes referred to as the “Third Technological Revolution”, following the printing press and the industrial revolutions. Its enormous impact transcends technology and engenders substantial changes across society [Einav, 2014], as new digital media platforms, including Smartphones and social networks, fundamentally affect the way we communicate with one another. In this chapter, we argue that the adoption of digital technologies and the resulting media habits have not only transformed interpersonal communication norms, but have also transformed storytelling as we know it. We refer to the new approaches to storytelling adopted by brands, advertisers, news platforms, and journalists, as the “New News Story”. We begin this chapter by exploring the key consumer behavior trends related to the sweeping adoption of digital media platforms and their impact on how brands communicate with their consumers. The second part of the chapter focuses on how adoption of digital media platforms has transformed storytelling in the news industry.

1. Key Consumer Behavior Trends

The most significant changes in media use patterns are clustered in the age groups referred to by marketers and researchers as “Generation Y”, born between 1977 and 1992, and younger generations, referred to as “Generation Z” or “digital natives” [Zickuhr, 2010]. Daily time spent on digital platforms more than doubled between 2014 and 2016, reaching more than four hours a day, driven mostly by mobile phone use, which is dominated by these groups: Younger users (18–24 year olds) spend roughly half of their time (49%) per day on mobile devices compared to 13% of the day among 65+ year olds. Young people spend half as much time watching television as older viewers over age 65 (21 versus 46 hours per week, respectively), yet twice as much time online and mobile video viewing [Nielsen, 2015].

Since 2005, social networking use has leaped from 10% to 76% of Internet users, with close to 90% penetration among users between the ages of 18 and 29, although use by older age groups has also grown [Perrin, 2015]. The substantial increase in time spent on social media has been attributed mainly to the increasing accessibility afforded by mobile devices. Across social media, online video usage, which includes messaging platforms such as Instagram, Facebook, WhatsApp, and FB messenger, has also skyrocketed, fueled mainly by the increasing popularity of posting and sharing of user-generated video, and photo sharing, reaching more than 3 billion photos shared per day over various messaging platforms [Meeker, 2017].

Additional technologies and platforms are seeing increased use, again mostly by younger generations. The Virtual Reality (VR) market, for example, is predicted to reach $38 billion by 2020, 20 times its value in 2016 [Super Data, 2017]. Although the relatively high cost of dedicated virtual reality hardware is a deterrent to widespread adoption, consumers are showing considerable interest in using VR for travel, entertainment, events, home design, and education [Greenlight Insights, 2016]. Another technology trend with broad implications is voice-activated AI platforms such as WhatsApp Voice, Google Voice, Amazon Echo, and Apple’s Siri. The increased ease and convenience of voice-based social search represents a new form of communication that is improving in accuracy and predicted to grow [Meeker, 2017]. Gamification is becoming more of a mainstream practice as gamified content has become recognized as a driver of consumer engagement and loyalty across digital platforms [Mak, 2016]. As a result, the gamification market is estimated to have increased tenfold since 2015.

While Facebook remains the largest global social network, with almost 2 billion monthly active users [Zephoria Digital Marketing, 2017], younger users have shifted to other platforms such as Instagram (which was acquired by Facebook in April 2012) and Twitter, and messaging platforms such as WhatsApp (acquired by Facebook in October 2014) and Snapchat, which is discussed further later. As Facebook became the “platform for everyone”, including parents, grandparents, and bosses, the ubiquity of the platform gradually reduced its appeal for younger users.

Other main drivers of this shift include a desire, particularly among younger consumers, for greater control, privacy, and instantaneousness of their communications. For example, new definitions of privacy emphasize controlling who will see the message, rather than the content of the message itself [Boyd, 2014], a task that becomes increasingly complex in view of Facebook’s continually evolving algorithms that determine content exposure. Sensitive to users’ desire to control multiple aspects of their content, mobile-based messaging platforms such as Instagram, WhatsApp, and Snapchat have built sizable networks by empowering users to control their audience and effectively control distribution. Snapchat, the ephemeral social network on which short video messages or “Snaps” disappear after they are viewed by recipients, offers a new level of control, immediacy, and privacy. Consumer appreciation of these features spurred Snapchats’ rapid adoption, and daily active users now surpass 150 million [Smith, 2017], with the majority of users under age 25.

Driven by Snapchat, the emphasis on protecting privacy norms is now reproduced in competing platforms that cater to older demographics. For example, Facebook has incorporated a Stories feature into Instagram, WhatsApp, and Facebook Messenger, and now, Instagram’s private messages also vanish after 24 hours. Facebook also incorporated features similar to Snapchat Lenses, which offers an additional avenue for self-expression through photos [Heath, 2016].

Storytelling formats, including many that evolved over the last 100 years, are also in transition [Weiler, 2015], as messaging and texts have fundamentally affected our approach toward self-expression. For example, attention spans of young people are 60% shorter than those of the previous generation. Digital natives increasingly focus on new forms of self-expression built around consumer media and use trends that are mostly visual, brief, and often short lived, such as Twitter (originally limited to 140 characters and recently increased to 280), and employ a short-form communication messaging style used on platforms such as WhatsApp or WeChat. Equally transformative has been the role of emoticons as replacements for word descriptions of emotions, and the more general use of visual representations to replace text [Meeker, 2017] that younger generations may regard as “TLDR” (“too long, didn’t read”).

Although older generations might tend to judge these formats critically, these changes are not necessarily a negative trend for social communication. The new communication language used by digital-savvy audiences brings with it new meanings and contexts. Harper [2010] argues that texting represents an authentic expression of the true self, rather than a manifestation of narcissistic “Me Generation” behaviors. Katz and Crocker [2015] found that Snapchat selfies and selfie-related practices enabled meaningful “language games” that use images as both grammar and vocabulary, and as such, “constitute a major step forward in visual communication within contemporary culture” (para. 5).

Communication trends associated with the younger demographics are gradually being adopted by older audiences. Since the media consumption habits of younger generations generally gain mainstream acceptance, it is not surprising that the “New Normal” is a world in which people are constantly connected through devices and social networks and in which the expectation of choice, control, and personalization are a given. There is, however, little stability in this new norm, as “technological generations” may be overtaken within as few as five years due to the accelerated pace of technology adoption.

2. Reinventing Storytelling: Brands Rise to the Challenge of the “Snapchat Generation”

Snapchat is an excellent example of a platform that incorporates many of the emerging consumer behavior trends, including direct messaging, brief visual communications, video and photo sharing, as well as a new sense of privacy; yet Snapchat’s 10-second framework for telling a story requires a new form of narrative. Brands that seek to reach a young digital-savvy demographic and establish an emotional connection with them, must communicate with them in their own language [Marci, 2015]. As the adoption of such platforms expands, brands that are unable to tell their story in 10 seconds may lose relevance. Similar storytelling frameworks include Vine (which ceased operations in 2016), a platform on which users share 6-second messages via Twitter, which is used by brands to quickly disseminate messages. For example, during the 2016 Super Bowl, Tide supplemented its traditional commercials with 20 6-second Vine stories that conversed with the aired TV commercials (such as a Vine story on how to remove ketchup stains following a Heinz Ketchup commercial; Cream, 2014).

Another example of how brands are communicating in the new digital language is YouTube’s 6-second un-skippable mobile video “bumper ads” that were introduced in 2016 and defined as “Little Haikus of Video” [Johnson, 2016]. Like the short-form story format introduced by Snapchat, this format takes into account that content is accessed on mobile devices, which are characterized by shorter attention spans.

A more direct use of the new forms of storytelling can be traced to the 2013 introduction of “Snapchat Stories”. Each story comprised a series of images or short video “snaps” of up to 1 minute long that disappear within 24 hours. The launch of “Our Stories”, which offered brands and publishers a platform to reach a large audience of younger users, primarily under age 25, expanded storytelling from individual accounts to publishers. “Discover”, introduced by Snapchat in 2015, created branded channels to help users find publisher stories. In 2016, Discover was later relaunched to provide a sense of curated content by adding short titles to each story to gauge user interest in the content.

Building on the rising trend of gamification as a form of engagement, Playbuzz (www.playbuzz.com) created an authoring and distribution platform for interactive storytelling. Playbuzz allows individual users as well as publishers and advertisers to utilize its platform to create various forms of games around content, enabling an entire environment that might better attract millennials and younger generations. As described by Shaul Olmert, Playbuzz co-founder and CEO: “The publishing industry must adapt to the new reality of online consumption habits … content creators can no longer approach penning content in an outdated manner, and must start to rely on tools that will enable them to tell impactful stories that are stimulating both visually and from a narrative perspective” [MMG, 2017].

Playbuzz storytelling techniques emphasize visual over text to “gamify storytelling”, which is manifested mostly in the form of short quizzes. For example, Playbuzz created a Ford campaign quiz that prompted users to choose what color car they would prefer. The game format engages users and provides valuable insights on consumer preferences that would be difficult to obtain through a traditional ad format.

Playbuzz reports an 85–95% item completion rate, a 5–10% share rate, and 2–4 minutes attention per session. The platform has built up a substantial network of more than 500 million monthly active users who interact with its content in 40 different languages, potentially impacting the future of storytelling for publishers and brands. The new shorter, personalized, gamified, and visual forms of storytelling used by brands have also filtered down into the way storytelling is used to tell the news, which is elaborated in the following section.

3. “The New News”

“We have not yet created a news report that takes full advantage of all the storytelling tools at our disposal and, in the process, does the best possible job of speaking to our potential audience.” —The New York Times 2020 Group Report, January 2017.

As far as the press is concerned, the Internet has proven itself to be the most powerful force to influence the news industry in the last 100 years. Much more than radio, TV, and cable TV, the Internet has overturned many of the basic tenets of the news industry since its inception and has driven many news organizations to extinction and others to an uncertain future. The New York Times is an example of a newspaper that has made significant strides into the digital age. It uses an increasing variety of interactive tools to tell stories, and set a goal not shared by many others: focusing on paid digital subscriptions as a source of revenue growth instead of ad revenues. This decision, as well as the precipitous decline of ad revenues, resulted in a situation where revenues driven by readers surpassed ad revenues. Additionally, in the first quarter of 2017, The New York Times added 308,000 digital-only news subscribers (“the Trump Bump”), the biggest quarterly addition in the newspaper’s history, reaching a total of 2.2 million digital subscribers. According to the 2020 Report, in 2016, “the Times brought in almost $500 million in purely digital revenue, which is far more than the digital revenues reported by many other leading publications (including BuzzFeed, The Guardian, and The Washington Post) — combined” [Leonhardt et al., 2017].

But as inspiring as it is, The New York Times’ story is irrelevant to most newspapers — not only in the US, but across the world. The New York Times has an unparalleled reputation, a — still — huge newsroom and an outstanding concentration of editorial and business talent. It is also profitable, with more than USD 800 million in cash. Other newspapers, even those with high credibility and a relatively large readership, are in a much more precarious position, with smaller newsrooms, less financial resources, less prestige, smaller markets, more competition from other newspapers, and especially from Google and Facebook. Many are not too far from going out of business — or being saved by deep-pocketed oligarchs who may have less-than-pure journalistic agendas.

Thus, althoug...