Abstract
We discuss the potential of a mobile app for news tips to local newspapers to be augmented with artificial intelligence. It can be designed to encourage deliberative, consensus-oriented contributions from citizens. We presume that such an app will generate news stories from multi-modal data in the form of photos, videos, text elements, location information, and the identity of the contributor. Three scenarios are presented to show how image recognition, natural language processing, narrative construction, and other AI technologies can be applied. The scenarios address three interrelated challenges for local journalism. First, text and photos in tips are often of low quality for journalism purposes. Second, peer-to-peer dialogue about local news takes place in social media instead of in the newspaper. Third, readers lack news literacy and are prone to confrontational debates and trolling. We show how advances in deep learning technology makes it possible to propose solutions to these problems.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Change history
07 June 2022
The Author has provided belated corrections to the affiliation of one of the co-authors of this chapter. The corrections to the affiliation have been carried out as follows:
References
Baron-Cohen, S. (2004). The essential difference. Penguin Adult.
Bazalgette, P. (2017). The empathy instinct: How to create a more civil society. Hachette UK.
Borrajo, D., Roubíčková, A., & Serina, I. (2015). Progress in case-based planning. ACM Computing Surveys, 47(2), 35:1–35:39. https://doi.org/10.1145/2674024
Chaney, A. J. B., Stewart, B. M., & Engelhardt, B. E. (2018). How algorithmic confounding in recommendation systems increases homogeneity and decreases utility. In Proceedings of the 12th ACM conference on recommender systems (pp. 224–232). Association for Computing Machinery. https://doi.org/10.1145/3240323.3240370
Cui, B., Li, Y., & Zhang, Z. (2020). BERT-enhanced relational sentence ordering network. In Proceedings of the 2020 conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP) (pp. 6310–6320). Presented at the EMNLP 2020, Online: Association for Computational Linguistics. https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/2020.emnlp-main.511
Devlin, J., Chang, M.-W., Lee, K., & Toutanova, K. (2019). BERT: Pre-training of deep bidirectional transformers for language understanding. arXiv, 1810.04805 [cs]. http://arxiv.org/abs/1810.04805. Accessed 23 June 2021.
Diakopoulos, N. (2019). Automating the news. Harvard University Press.
DiSalvo, C., Lukens, J., Lodato, T., Jenkins, T., & Kim, T. (2014). Making public things: How HCI design can express matters of concern. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on human factors in computing systems (pp. 2397–2406). Association for Computing Machinery. https://doi.org/10.1145/2556288.2557359
Durance, P., & Godet, M. (2010). Scenario building: Uses and abuses. Technological Forecasting and Social Change, 77(9), 1488–1492. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.techfore.2010.06.007
Gervás, P. (2009). Computational approaches to storytelling and creativity. AI Magazine, 30(3), 49–49. https://doi.org/10.1609/aimag.v30i3.2250
Gervás, P., Concepción, E., León, C., Méndez, G., & Delatorre, P. (2019). The long path to narrative generation. IBM Journal of Research and Development, 63(1), 8:1–8:10. https://doi.org/10.1147/JRD.2019.2896157
Girish, D., Singh, V., & Ralescu, A. (2020). Understanding action recognition in still images. In 2020 IEEE/CVF conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition Workshops (CVPRW) (pp. 1523–1529). Presented at the 2020 IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition Workshops (CVPRW). https://doi.org/10.1109/CVPRW50498.2020.00193
Habermas, J. (1996). Between facts and norms: Contributions to a discourse theory of law and democracy. MIT Press.
Haldekar, M., Ganesan, A., & Oates, T. (2017). Identifying spatial relations in images using convolutional neural networks. In 2017 International Joint Conference on Neural Networks (IJCNN) (pp. 3593–3600). Presented at the 2017 International Joint Conference on Neural Networks (IJCNN). https://doi.org/10.1109/IJCNN.2017.7966308
Karimi, M., Jannach, D., & Jugovac, M. (2018). News recommender systems—Survey and roads ahead. Information Processing and Management. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ipm.2018.04.008
Le, Q. V., & Mikolov, T. (2014). Distributed representations of sentences and documents. arXiv, 1405.4053 [cs]. http://arxiv.org/abs/1405.4053. Accessed 23 June 2021.
LeCun, Y., Bengio, Y., & Hinton, G. (2015). Deep learning. Nature, 521(7553), 436–444. https://doi.org/10.1038/nature14539
Lepore, J. (2019). Does journalism have a future? The New Yorker. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/01/28/does-journalism-have-a-future
Leppänen, L., Munezero, M., Granroth-Wilding, M., & Toivonen, H. (2017). Data-driven news generation for automated journalism. In Proceedings of the 10th international conference on natural language generation (pp. 188–197). Association for Computational Linguistics. https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/W17-3528
Lindén, C.-G. (2018). Algorithms are a reporter’s new best friend: News automation and the case for augmented journalism. The Routledge Handbook of Developments in Digital Journalism Studies, 237–250. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315270449
Liu, D., Li, J., Yu, M.-H., Huang, Z., Liu, G., Zhao, D., & Yan, R. (2020). A character-centric neural model for automated story generation. Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence, 34(02), 1725–1732. https://doi.org/10.1609/aaai.v34i02.5536
Maiden, N., Zachos, K., Brown, A., Apostolou, D., Holm, B., Nyre, L., et al. (2020). Digital creativity support for original journalism. Communications of the ACM, 63(8), 46–53. https://doi.org/10.1145/3386526
Mikolov, T., Sutskever, I., Chen, K., Corrado, G., & Dean, J. (2013). Distributed representations of words and phrases and their compositionality. arXiv, 1310.4546 [cs, stat]. http://arxiv.org/abs/1310.4546. Accessed 23 June 2021.
Miroshnichenko, A. (2018). AI to bypass creativity. Will robots replace journalists? (the answer is “yes”). Information, 9(7), 183. https://doi.org/10.3390/info9070183
Motta, E., Daga, E., Opdahl, A. L., & Tessem, B. (2020). Analysis and design of computational news angles. IEEE Access, 8, 120613–120626. https://doi.org/10.1109/ACCESS.2020.3005513
Nyre, L. (2014). Media design method. The Journal of Media Innovations, 1(1), 86–109. https://doi.org/10.5617/jmi.v1i1.702
Opdahl, A. L., & Tessem, B. (2021). Ontologies for finding journalistic angles. Software and Systems Modeling, 20(1), 71–87. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10270-020-00801-w
Spinney, L. (2017). How Facebook, fake news and friends are warping your memory. Nature, 543(7644), 168–170. https://doi.org/10.1038/543168a
Svendsen, R. D., Gulla, J. A., & Frøland, J. (2019). Anbefaling av nyhetsinnhold i praksis. Fra algoritmer til personaliserte nyheter. (Recommending news content. From algorithms to personalised news). Norsk Medietidsskrift, 26(1), 1–22. In Norwegian.
Tully, M., Maksl, A., Ashley, S., Vraga, E. K., & Craft, S. (2021). Defining and conceptualizing news literacy. Journalism, 14648849211005888. https://doi.org/10.1177/14648849211005888
Vaswani, A., Shazeer, N., Parmar, N., Uszkoreit, J., Jones, L., Gomez, A. N., et al. (2017). Attention is all you need. arXiv, 1706.03762 [cs]. http://arxiv.org/abs/1706.03762
Wolf, T., Debut, L., Sanh, V., Chaumond, J., Delangue, C., Moi, A., et al. (2020). Transformers: State-of-the-art natural language processing. In Proceedings of the 2020 conference on empirical methods in natural language processing: System demonstrations (pp. 38–45). Online: Association for Computational Linguistics. https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/2020.emnlp-demos
Yadav, N., Mundotiya, R. K., Singh, A. K., & Pal, S. (2021). Diversity in recommendation system: A cluster based approach. In A. Abraham, S. K. Shandilya, L. Garcia-Hernandez, & M. L. Varela (Eds.), Hybrid intelligent systems (pp. 113–122). Springer. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-49336-3_12
Young, T., Hazarika, D., Poria, S., & Cambria, E. (2018). Recent trends in deep learning based natural language processing. arXiv, 1708.02709 [cs]. http://arxiv.org/abs/1708.02709
Zhang, L., & Liu, B. (2017). Sentiment analysis and opinion mining. In C. Sammut & G. I. Webb (Eds.), Encyclopedia of machine learning and data mining (pp. 1152–1161). Springer US. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4899-7687-1_907
Funding
This work was supported by the Norwegian Media Authority and the regional Norwegian innovation fund UH-nett Vest. It was also supported by industry partners and the Research Council of Norway through MediaFutures: Research Centre for Responsible Media Technology and Innovation, project number 309339.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2022 The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Tessem, B., Nyre, L., d. S. Mesquita, M., Mulholland, P. (2022). Deep Learning to Encourage Citizen Involvement in Local Journalism. In: Manninen, V.J.E., Niemi, M.K., Ridge-Newman, A. (eds) Futures of Journalism. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-95073-6_14
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-95073-6_14
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-95072-9
Online ISBN: 978-3-030-95073-6
eBook Packages: Literature, Cultural and Media StudiesLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)