Images of Essence: Journalists’ Discourse on the Professional “Discipline of Verification”

Abstract

The verification of factual accuracy is widely held as essential to journalists' professional identity. Our rhetorical analysis of interviews with award-winning and semi-randomly selected newspaper reporters confirms this professional norm while revealing

AI should embody our values: Investigating journalistic values to inform AI technology design

“…For example, and consistent with previous findings, there was a diversity of practices around verifying the accuracy of information [52,53]; data-led stories utilised different verification practices for seeking truth than investigative stories. This supports previous findings that journalistic values are highly contextual and culture-dependant [35] and is consistent with Shoemaker [60], who found journalistic values were influenced by journalists' personal beliefs and the ethos of media organisations.…”

“…As there is much existing scholarly work on professional values in journalism, including work that highlights important values [35,57,60], we did not try to identify what values are important in the context of story creation for its own stake. Instead, this was a steppingstone for understanding how these values may be supported and/or undermined by AI technologies and associated implications for design.…”

“…However, little research has examined how journalistic values can inform the design of interactive systems for journalists and, to our knowledge, no previous studies have aimed to understand the potential impact of AI technologies on the professional values journalists consider important. Journalism might particularly benefit from a value-oriented approach to AI design as it is a strongly value-based profession, firmly guided by professional values and codes of conduct [60].…”

Making newsworthy news: The integral role of creativity and verification in the human information behavior that drives news story creation

“…Our interview approach was inspired by the critical incident technique (Flanagan, 1954), which has been successfully used to elicit detailed recent memorable examples of information interactions in Makri et al (2019), including in a journalism context (Bird-Meyer et al, 2019;Finn, 2016). It was also inspired by previous journalism research where journalists discussed news stories they created (Shapiro et al, 2013(Shapiro et al, , 2016. We used stories as research probes to articulate the human information behavior (HIB) they undertook during story creation.…”

“…Our work is at the intersection of these two discourses: how journalists use creativity to produce stories that have “some kind of value, impact or recognition” (Witschge et al, 2019, p. 976) and engage in verification to ensure accuracy. Creativity and verification are widely recognized as intrinsic and integral aspects of newswork (Deuze, 2019; Shapiro et al, 2016). However, their role in the information acquisition and use that facilitates newswork has not yet been examined.…”