JournalismAI 2023/24 Impact Report
Since we launched the JournalismAI initiative in 2019, with the support of the Google News Initiative (GNI), we have set out to inform media organisations about the potential offered by AI-powered technologies. At the time, artificial intelligence (AI), as we knew it, was “new” and not widely understood. Although the novelty of AI in journalism was still in its early stages, the GNI and Polis, the journalism think-tank at the London School of Economics and Political Science, recognised the long-term potential of JournalismAI.
Almost overnight, AI has become a reality for newsrooms across the world trying to make the most of its potential.
In our first JournalismAI report, published in 2019, our director Charlie Beckett suggested that news organisations needed to quickly grasp the implications of AI:
“If we value journalism as a social good, provided by humans for humans, then we have a window of perhaps 2-5 years when news organisations must get across this technology.”
As the landscape evolved, so did our initiative. In 2022, we renewed our mission to make JournalismAI more inclusive and participatory. We set a 3-year plan to guide our ambitions, with a target to be achieved by early 2025.
In essence, these goals outlined on page 3 of this report, focus on supporting the three levels of AI expertise in the community and broader ecosystem. Our mission is to help journalists around the world move through the AI-literacy funnel. We designed our activities to help learners gain the fundamentals they need to become doers > support and train doers to become leaders > and connect the leaders, and showcase their work to inspire everyone else.
In this internal 3-year plan, we set 11 goals to support the community across the three levels of AI expertise. Some of the goals we have achieved include:
Publishing a new report: Generating Change, on AI in journalism to study the new developments in the field as a direct follow-up to the 2019 report, which has been translated into Arabic, French, and Spanish;
Growing our global community to over 10,000 members;
Launching new forms of collaboration using the lessons learned from two years of the Collab Challenges;
We are continuously developing toolkits and guides to support newsrooms’ implementation of artificial intelligence;
And we are well on our way to meeting the remaining goals by the end of 2024.
All this work wouldn’t have been possible without the support from our close network and community, newsrooms around the world, and most importantly support from the Google News Initiative.
So what’s next? We will continue to build on each year’s learnings, serving as a foundation for shaping the future trajectory of JournalismAI and the global community.