AI in Journalism Initiative: Recorded trainings, practice sessions and case studies

ONA members have complimentary access to the training archives for the AI in Journalism Initiative, including recordings, slides and handouts. This page outlines what’s available when you’re logged in to the ONA membership portal. We’ve organized them according to interest and level of expertise so you can mix and match your learning journey for the most relevant information.

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Getting Started 

Start here if you’re looking to understand the basics on how generative AI works and use cases for newsrooms. These sessions give a high-level overview of the technology, dos and don’ts of generative AI and a look at some of the tools newsrooms might find useful.

Intro to AI Tools Part I: Part one of a basic overview of AI tools and why your team should be incorporating AI education into your toolkit. Recorded Feb. 28, 2024.

Intro to AI Tools Part II: Level up your understanding of generative AI and start to look at some use cases in news and tools you may find useful. Recorded April 24, 2024.

Prompt Writing: Learn how to write effective prompts to improve the quality of the results in generative AI tools. Recorded May 22, 2024.

Ethics, Legal, Transparency and more

Dive into considerations for your newsroom around ethical and effective AI use with trainings and discussions on ethics, how to communicate with your audience about AI, the law, and more.

AI + Transparency: We partnered with the team at Trusting News for this training session on how, where and when to talk about your newsroom’s generative AI use with your audience. (Since this session was recorded, Trusting News and ONA have done more research on this topic; see our blog post for follow-up.) Recorded June 14, 2024.

AI, Copyright and Legal Considerations for Journalists, Freelancers and News Organizations: Get a deep-dive update on copyright law as pertaining to AI, where current court cases stand, what freelancers need to know about generative AI and their contracts, and more legal issues around AI and journalism. Recorded Oct. 10, 2024.

AI and Visual Journalism: Ethics, tech, copyright and more considerations for newsrooms and photojournalists: With NPPA and Poynter, we discuss the ethical and legal considerations newsrooms need to know around images, photojournalism and AI. Check out Poynter’s AI ethics toolkit and NPPA’s Code of Ethics. Recorded May 30, 2024.

Dive Deeper

The following set of sessions start to look into use cases for AI tools in newsroom functions, for specific teams and reporting needs.

Image Creation: Learn about how the major AI-powered image creation tools work and the implications for content creation, user-generated content, ethics and more. These tools are changing rapidly and your newsroom needs to be prepared. Be sure to follow up with the Image Creation Mini Lab (noted below) to try out the tools for yourself. Recorded June 18, 2024.

FakeSpotting: Verifying visuals in the age of generative AI: Learn advanced techniques for spotting AI-generated images, beyond the ones you probably already know, and how to train yourself to identify this quickly. Recorded July 23, 2024.

AI + Fact-checking and Elections: Learn how to identify AI-generated content, evaluate AI-powered factchecking tools (how they might help and when they shouldn’t be relied upon), and understand how to build your team’s toolkit around election misinformation in the age of AI. Recorded March 20, 2024.

Generative AI and Audience Engagement: This session touches briefly on some of the tools that can help audience teams streamline their work, and dives into how to make room for authentic audience connections by using AI to take the busy work out of audience development. Once you watch this session, be sure to watch the corresponding Mini Lab for prompt writing. Recorded May 8, 2024.

AI Audio Innovations: A deep-dive sessions into generative AI technologies for audio journalists and audio production, including demos of tools and potentials for using the technology. Be sure to check out the corresponding Mini Lab session below for a chance to try out the tools discussed. Recorded July 24, 2024.

AI for Educators: Implementing AI in Your Classroom or Student Newsroom: Learn about ways to work generative AI into your curriculum and teach students how to use it ethically and effectively. Recorded July 29, 2024.

AI + Data Journalism: Learn to work with Data Analyst, Julius.AI, Claude and others to analyze and visualize data. We’ll work with data scrape formulas and tools such as Tabula and PDFtoExcel.com as well. Recorded Aug. 8, 2024.

AI in Video Journalism: Uses, Best Practices and Ethics: Learn the basics of generative AI for video journalism and tools to try, as well as how to think about ethics and risk when it comes to video production and AI. Recorded Aug. 19, 2024.

Ask Nikita Roy All your Newsroom AI Questions: We hosted this lively Q&A session with AI expert Nikita Roy where attendees could pose any AI question. We touched on analytics, ethics, AI literacy and more. This session also aired as an episode of Nikita’s Newsroom Robots podcast. Recorded June 4, 2024.

Research Update: AI’s Impact on Newsrooms: Join journalist and researcher Felix M. Simon for discussion of AI’s impact on the news, recent research findings and more. Recorded July 31, 2024.

Practice

Journalists need to be aware of the challenges generative AI tools pose as well as the opportunities that might exist to help inform our communities better. We started our Mini Lab series to help you experiment with the technology in a structured setting, all in less than an hour. Think of Mini Labs as short play sessions where you’ll have the chance to try out generative AI applications to help you achieve a specific task.

During these 45-minute interactive sessions, an expert facilitator will lead you in a short exercise using generative AI. You can follow along with the recordings and pause as needed, or try hosting a lunch and learn session with your team to try the exercise together. Make sure to note where you get different results, where the tools are helpful and where they aren’t. With practice, you’ll start to identify opportunities for using AI technology effectively in your work.

AI Tools for Research Mini Lab: Dive into AI-powered research tools and learn how they should and should not be used. Recorded May 7, 2024.

Prompt Writing Mini Lab: Practice writing effective prompts in a variety of generative AI use cases. Recorded June 5, 2024.

Image Creation Mini Lab: Try out some image creation tools in short exercises to see firsthand how they work and what they can do. Recorded July 10, 2024.

AI for Grant Writing Mini Lab: Learn how to use AI to support your grant writing processes in this short exercise. Recorded July 17, 2024.

AI + Audio Mini Lab: Practice making AI-generated audio samples to see how the technology works in this short session. Recorded Aug. 15, 2024

Leveraging AI for Video Research Synthesis and Pitch Creation Mini Lab: In this short session for video journalists, practice using AI tools for research and pitch creation. Recorded Aug. 22, 2024.

Case Studies

Hear from other newsrooms on how they’ve used AI in their workflows and what they’ve learned along the way. You can also check out our written case study series delivered in August-October 2024 for even more ideas.

Case Study: What we can learn about AI and elections from the world’s biggest election. Recorded Sept. 5, 2024.

Case Study: iTromsø. Recorded Sept. 11, 2024.

Case Study: Zamaneh Media. Recorded Oct. 9, 2024.

Case Study: Enhancing Fact-Checking with AI at Der Spiegel. Recorded Nov. 1, 2024

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