New GNI-funded AI fellowships invite journalists to work with tech colleagues

A new fellowship aims to support media organisations which are working on ways to innovate in journalism using AI, and participants will receive mentoring, expert coaching, and financial support.

The JournalismAI Fellowship Program is organised by the JournalismAI team at Polis – the journalism think-tank at the London School of Economics and Political Science – and supported by the Google News Initiative.

It comes after a collaboration last year which saw 24 newsrooms experiment with using AI to develop potential solutions to editorial problems (read Journalism.co.uk’s profile of one of the experiments here).

Applications are open now, with a deadline of 28 April, and the fellowship invites pairs of colleague (one journalist, one technologist) to apply together – they will then work with a pair from another organisation on the six-month programme from June to December 2022. In total, 20 journalists and tech workers from Europe, Asia-Pacific and the Americas will be selected, and participants are expected to have some experience in AI.

"Projects should be aimed at prototyping a tool or a methodology that can have a systemic impact on the news production – for example by making the reporting of a specific beat more accessible or impactful," Polis said in a press statement announcing the fellowship.

If you are just getting started, or thinking about getting started, with AI and wondering what it could do for your newsroom, check out the articles below.

Newsrooms have five years to embrace artificial intelligence or they risk becoming irrelevant

A thought-provoking study (note: it comes from the think tank which is running the new fellowships) that might help you make the case to your manager for why your organisation could benefit from developing AI capabilities. Three years have passed since this warning was issued.

How Sky News uses AI to unburden journalists

We have all heard the scare stories of robots replacing humans, but what if instead we focused on the ways they can enable humans to do their work more effectively? This case study looks at how AI can also be used to take some of the burden off journalists – automating tasks such as facial recognition or transcription, to free up staff to work on finding stories and the work that requires the human factor.

I am an editor: what can AI do for me?

Of course AI can be used for more than automating the 'drudge' work. One common concern about bringing AI into the newsroom is that it would mean losing the personal touch, but Canadian publisher The Globe and Mail has developed a tool that actually helps them with article placement on the homepage based on what their users want. This is just one example of building tech that helps with audience engagement and personalisation.

Intrigued? We will be taking a hands-on look at AI in the newsroom at Newsrewired, the conference for digital innovators organised by Journalism.co.uk. It is taking place in London on 24 May, and you can find more details and buy tickets here.

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