Tech Giants, Artificial Intelligence, and the Future of Journalism

Abstract

This book examines the impact of the "Big Five" technology companies-Apple, Google, Amazon, Facebook, and Microsoft-on journalism and the media industries. It looks at the current role of algorithms and artificial intelligence in curating how we consume media and their increasing influence on the production of the news. Exploring the changes that the technology industry and automation have made in the past decade to the production, distribution, and consumption of news globally, the book considers what happens to journalism once it is produced and enters the media ecosystems of the Internet tech giants-and the impact of social media and AI on such things as fake news in the post-truth age. The audience for this book are students and researchers working in the field of digital media, and journalism studies or media studies more generally. It will also be useful to those who are looking for extended case studies of the role taken by tech giants such as Facebook and Google in the fake news scandal, or the role of Jeff Bezos in transforming The Washington Post.

Artificial Intelligence in News Media: Current Perceptions and Future Outlook

“…Until recently, AI only worked at a limited capacity since technologists had to program a wide array of functions into a system to mimic human intelligence, requiring a massive computing power with low throughput. However, this has changed with better hardware, more data, and better algorithms (Aronson 2018;Castro and New 2016;Hassaballah and Awad 2020;Whittaker 2019). Nonetheless, computer vision is still a subfield of AI that requires a powerful tool to simulate human vision, enabling a machine to learn to recognize abstract patterns in images (Castro and New 2016;Szeliski 2011).…”

Oportunidades de la robotización en el periodismo local: el caso de 'Mittmedia'

“…De acuerdo con un artículo reciente, «[…] 16 medios, 13 agencias y 21 empresas lideran a nivel mundial el escenario de la automatización de noticias» (Túñez-López, Toural-Bran y Cacheiro-Requeijo 2018: 753), entre los que se hallan las principales agencias europeas de información. El gigante tecnológico Google es una de las empresas que más trabaja sobre la robotización informativa, lo cual puede suponer un riesgo para la independencia periodística (Whittaker, 2018).…”

The use of YouTube by the Spanish press: A model to be defined

“…Its profitability and revenue are unclear, and the business could be described as opaque. Not in vain, YouTube, like other multinational giants, has endeavoured to create barriers between content producers and consumers (Whittaker, 2019).…”