Thread by @CharlieBeckett

Thread: Journalism is being refashioned in a thousand ways but do we understand the fundamentals of the challenge? @jeffjarvis sets out some basic false assumptions that the news media has still not faced properly. It touches on some obsessions of mine. medium.com/whither-news/a…

Jeff's questioning of "the primacy of the story as journalistic form and...the risk of valuing drama, character, and control over chaotic reality" is just the starting point.
He quotes neuroscientist Alex Rosenberg on journalism:

'journalists have to work harder to dig out the real motives behind the actions they report. Stop trying to explain what people do as actions driven by motives, and start taking on major social trends and figure out how the structure of cultural variation...imposes outcomes.”

While greater public news literacy is good, it's actually the journalists who need to become more social/human literate. As I argue in this, that means drawing on disciplines like anthropology to use emotions for understanding, not just sensation. blogs.lse.ac.uk/polis/2019/04/…

Jeff also cites David Weinberger on how AI/ML might actually help in some ways to correct the what John Birt called the news media's bias against understanding. We need a mission to understand the human. blogs.lse.ac.uk/polis/2017/08/…

We rightly worry a lot about algorithmic biases, but is it possible that creative use of data and personalisation might help us deconstruct the idea of the 'story' as a relationship of understanding? It's a key question for my latest project looking at how newsrooms are using AI

We'll be looking at the economic and ethical issues around AI but for me one of the core questions is how it might reshape the fundamental purpose as well as the production of journalism. Details of the research project in this blogpost. blogs.lse.ac.uk/polis/2019/04/…

As Jeff writes, this goes beyond some tech fix. But perhaps if journalism can reach out beyond its usual thinking then challenges such as polarisation and the lack of generative democracy and healthy political discourse can be addressed (not solved)?

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