Global Investigative Journalism Network (https://archive.gijn.org/tag/bots/)
Many in the journalistic profession fear Artificial Intelligence will leave them without a job. But AI could become the savior of the trade, making it possible to better cover the increasingly complex, globalized and information-rich world we live in. Open Society Foundations’ María Teresa Ronderos writes about the ways some of the world’s newsrooms are using it now.
In September 2017, the lead producer for the BBC Internet Research & Future Services, Tristan Ferne, identified 12 different story formats used in digital news. With new formats constantly emerging, Emma-Leena Ovaskainen, a visual journalist for Finland’s biggest daily newspaper Helsingin Sanomat, has modified the list and made her own additions.
Web scraping is a way to extract information presented on websites. As I explained it in the first installment of this article, web scraping is used by many companies. It’s also a great tool for reporters who know how to code, since more and more public institutions publish their data on their websites.
With web scrapers, which are also called “bots,” it’s possible to gather large amounts of data for stories. But what are the ethical rules that reporters have to follow while web scraping?
Over the past two years, words like “bots,” “botnets” and “trolls” have entered mainstream conversations about social networks and their impact on democracies. Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab laid out some of the working definitions and their methodologies to help identify, expose and explain disinformation online.
This week’s Friday 5, where we round up our favorite reads from around the online world in English, includes Abraji’s report on the investigation into the murder of journalist Léo Veras, a guide to decoding Chinese state propaganda on Twitter, a study into bot-generated coronavirus activity on Twitter, and Hostwriter’s tool to help connect editors to local journalists worldwide.
Bots in newsrooms are becoming increasingly commonplace as a growing number of publishers experiment with various automated services to expand their coverage, help journalists do their jobs better or improve relationships with readers. Here’s a quick history of the bot in newsrooms, and ideas for employing them in yours.
For the inception of a BBC’s R&D project to explore alternatives to conventional news formats, the BBC’s Tristan Ferne conducted a review of the landscape of digital news, looking for innovations in article and video formats online. Here’s the 12 categories he came up with — along with a few others that didn’t quite fit his model.
Hundreds of what appear to be Twitter bots are artificially inflating the retweet and favorite counts of tweets with links to articles from some of Russia’s top news agencies. Lawrence Alexander discovered that these same fake accounts have previously mass-posted links to scores of pro-Kremlin LiveJournal blogs—themselves part of a network of thousands. In this piece, which originally appeared on Global Voices, Alexander walks us through his research process.
What’s the global data journalism community tweeting about this week? Our NodeXL #ddj mapping from March 12 to 18 finds disturbing news from @NASAEarth about low Arctic sea ice and temperature anomalies in the North Pole, @seeingtheory ‘s redesigned educational website on probability and statistics and top ten ways to clean your data by @Microsoft.
What’s the global data journalism community tweeting about this week? Our NodeXL #ddj mapping from June 4 to 10 finds an awesome curated list of resources for visualizing music by @Willian_justen, a deep dive into unsolved murders across America by @washingtonpost and @CarbonBrief mapping of the past, present and future of global coal power plants.