Abstract
Internet technology companies, while boosting online traffic through algorithms and artificial intelligence, have made inroads into journalism. Tech Giants, Artificial Intelligence, and the Future of Journalism focuses on the effect of five tech giants (Apple, Google, Amazon, Facebook, and Microsoft) on news production, dissemination, and consumption in the digital media ecosystem. With 15 years of experience as a tech journalist and prolific author, Jason Whittaker at the University of Lincoln is fully acquainted with literature in digital media and journalism, and thus well situated to critique the evolution of tech giants and its consequences for online journalistic practice. Whittaker argues in the book that tech giants have harnessed automation (interchangeable with artificial intelligence) to alter behavior and perception of the public who shift from legacy media to digital platforms for news consumption.
Whittaker mainly examines the unintended impact of artificial intelligence on journalism, particularly the role of automation in news distribution and production. The law of unintended consequences should always be kept in mind in approaching the issue of a media ecology, “particularly as developments in artificial intelligence (or, more accurately, automation) will certainly ripple outwards far beyond their original purposes,” Whittaker says. The news distribution system, which used to be characterized by a centralized cluster of traditional media agencies reporting news to the public, has been disrupted by a diverse scattering of blogs, alternative news services, and social media feeds reaching an audience of millions. Such a disruptive effect, according to Whittaker, can be attributed to two major factors: advertising models and digital technologies. The advertising models of Google and Facebook utilize automation on a massive scale to reduce the advertisement cost, thus giving them a competitive edge over conventional media outlets. Of equal appeal to advertisers is a constant flow of user data generated by algorithms, enabling them to target potential consumers effectively. With lower expenses and better audiences (local or global), Google and Facebook are the only viable options for advertisers in the digital era. Digital technologies as an another factor influence news stories’ visibility and popularity as Google assesses the trustworthiness of webpages through algorithms to determine its page ranking while Facebook enhances the diffusion of news reports by mapping users’ shares and likes via the algorithms-powered filter bubble. Such automated distribution systems have simplified and facilitated amateur media production and citizen journalism. In other words, they have broken down the barriers between professional journalists and amateur reporters, allowing a variety of ordinary people to report their own communities and circumstances and spread their stories quickly and widely online.
News production is also affected by artificial intelligence. Two main contributing factors are automated gatekeeping and robotic writing. Automated gatekeeping functions like human editors to check, shape, and screen news content, which has resulted in a plethora of propaganda or fake news online. Whittaker maintains that the role of gatekeepers taken by traditional news agencies in the past has now shifted to tech companies, which adjust their algorithms to withhold or highlight certain stories in the news feed. But algorithmic gatekeepers, though excelling at assessing a story’s popularity, are unable to quantify its verifiability or legality and thus cannot distinguish truth from outright lies. Consequently, fake news that appeals to a wider readership will spread faster than unpalatable authentic and legitimate coverage. In addition, robotic writing is beginning to dominate the journalist fields of sport and finance, where both source data and news content are defined in highly structured templates. Accordingly, algorithm-based platforms like Amazon Web Services can produce more news texts more quickly and with fewer errors than human journalists. In other areas like investigative journalism where algorithms cannot generate content, there is a prevailing practice of what Whittaker calls augmented journalism. As human journalists source quotations and stories from interviewees, algorithms and software are employed to help them collate and understand data. Therefore, Whittaker concludes that algorithmic journalism has been fully integrated into news production cycle.
Well-documented and clearly organized, the book begins by tracing the evolution of technology in mass media covering music, books, and news in Chapter 1, and then narrows the focus on the history of news distribution propelled by infrastructural advances such as printing press, freight trains and the internet in Chapter 2. The next two chapters are closely related in addressing the consequences of automation, respectively, for news dissemination and production. The final Chapter 5 summarizes the effects of technology on digital journalism through case studies. On top of a lucid and logical explanation, an abundance of literature citations and references attests to the academic value of Whittaker’s argument. Nonetheless, the volume would be more succinct without such digressions as micropayment and users’ earnings in Chapter 2 as well as business models of iPod and iTunes in Chapter 1.
With cogent reasoning buttressed by historical facts and incidents, Tech Giants, Artificial Intelligence, and the Future of Journalism should make informative and compelling reading and deserve recommendation in digital journalism seminars and graduate courses for those intending to study journalism in the media ecosystem of the internet tech giants.
