Eleven news organizations are joining a cohort assembled by Trusting News to explore audience perceptions of newsrooms’ use of Artificial Intelligence. The project is part of ONA’s AI in Journalism Initiative, which delivers essential resources for journalists and newsroom leaders to understand the emerging tech trends they should focus on now. With guidance from Trusting News Assistant Director Lynn Walsh, the cohort of newsrooms will gather input from their community about how they individually use or could use AI in the news-gathering process.
Congratulations and thank you to these participating newsrooms:
- 100 Days in Appalachia
- American City Business Journals
- Houston Landing
- Iowa Public Radio
- KXAN
- Science News
- The Associated Press
- TAPinto Plainfield
- The Texas Tribune
- USA TODAY Network
- Voice Media Group: Miami New Times, Denver Westword, Dallas Observer, Phoenix New Times
The goal is for these newsrooms to learn what type of AI use community members are comfortable and uncomfortable with while also gaining more insight into how their news consumers want to be notified if AI is used in the journalistic process. Once newsrooms gather this information Trusting News, will coach them through how to apply this to current AI use policies or help them create policies. The information will be invaluable to help the newsrooms make decisions that best fit their community and news consumers while being used as a tool to build trust with them.
Specifically, these newsrooms will:
- Survey and interview members of their community about their perceptions of and opinions about the use of AI in journalism
- Share results with Trusting News and contribute to the industry’s shared knowledge on the topic of AI use in journalism
- Develop or refine AI policies in their newsroom
- Talk informally to their audience about what they’re learning
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How Trusting News approaches research
Trusting News empowers journalists to take responsibility for demonstrating their credibility, to listen and engage with humility and to explain their integrity through day-to-day transparency. Trusting News designed the research framework for this project and works in a continual cycle of research, learning and sharing to make sure the work evolves. Read about the team, funders and collaborators.
What data will be collected in this cohort?
In this cohort, newsrooms will collect data through one-on-one interviews with news consumers and through a public-facing survey. Trusting News created an interview guide with specific questions to help guide the journalists through the one-on-one interviews. Trusting News also created the public-facing survey. Newsrooms are using the same survey template with an option to make their own modifications. Journalists will be asked to summarize the interview conversations and provide notes from the conversations.
What is the purpose of collecting this data?
This data will help newsrooms better understand what the public thinks about the use of AI in news content. Some newsrooms currently use AI and some do not. This project is grounded in the premise that newsrooms should be disclosing the use of AI, but there are a lot of questions and unknowns about how and when newsrooms should disclose and also about what news consumers want to know about the use of AI. By collecting this data, we hope to help newsrooms answer these questions and provide best practices around AI use and AI use disclosure.
How will this data be used?
Each newsroom will be gathering this data about their specific audiences. Trusting News will then collect the data from each newsroom, combine it and look for trends and similarities. Those trends and similarities will be shared with this group of newsrooms and also with the larger Trusting News audience, which consists mainly of working journalists and journalism educators. Data specific to individual newsrooms will not be shared without their permission.
Trusting News will also lead a session at the 2024 Online News Association Conference in Atlanta (Sept. 18-21) to share lessons from the cohort work and help ONA24 attendees apply best practices to their own AI disclosures. Learn more about the session and ONA24 programming.
Is the collected data anonymous?
We are not asking newsrooms to share any personal information about the news consumers such as their name, email address, etc. Newsrooms may gather this information to contact a news consumer before or after an interview or the survey, but we will not be using this information or sharing it in any results or learnings published from this cohort.