Google's new study reveals ‘Artificial Intelligence benefiting journalism’

A recently released study explains how News Robots and journalism can benefit from Artificial Intelligence. According to the study, Artificial Intelligence can give reports more time to focus on some new ways to produce and deliver news to viewers. According to a report by a joint effort by Polis from the London School of Economics and Political Science and the Google News Initiative, it states that Artificial Intelligence could enable the journalists to simply leave the ordinary and repetitive tasks to machines and focus on other important tasks.

News Organizations and AI

According to a recent study that surveyed around 71 news organizations available in 32 different countries reveals that there are so many newsrooms already using the AI to find videos and images and also transcribe it into multiple languages.

According to LSE, some news organizations like Finnish Public broadcaster Yle are already using news robots, these news robot journalists available at YLe are producing hundreds of pieces of textual content and illustrations within a week. There are so many examples of journalism and AI already working together including the use of AI to analyze the election results and corporate earnings.


Major obstacles to AI in the news industry

Although the study by Google reveals the benefits of AI to journalism but it fails to talk about the major obstacle faced in newsrooms that is the lack of financial resources. The larger question here should be about economic survival for news organizations in the age where Google and Facebook are constantly dominating the digital advertising through their various products.

Legacy Newsrooms shutting down due to financial problems

Google News Initiative is an attempt by Google to help journalism survive in the era of digitalization. One of the winners in the News grant competition held by Google was the Pulitzer-prize winning Salk Lake Tribune which was also recently granted non-profit status by the Internal Revenue Service. Now the newspaper website includes a donation button which can be seen at the top of the home page and the readers have displayed a text stating ‘Thank you for your tax-deductible gift to The Salk Lake Tribune, Inc. and for supporting Utah’s independent voice’ whenever a user clicks on the donation button.

Due to the world moving more towards digitalization, the business model for local newspapers is broken and beyond repair anymore.

In August, The Vindicator, Ohio officially closed the organization making its city without any daily newspaper. According to McClatchy and Google, the Youngstown, Ohio would be the first city to have a new digital news site and the New Youngstown site, Mahoning Matters was launched in October.

One of the third-largest newspaper chains in the U.S. is now facing the financial problems and is one verge of closing down. Last week, McClatchy announced that the U.S. government should grant pension insurer to take over the company’s pension plan.

Read next: Now you can read stories in two languages simultaneously in Google News app
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