The year of machine-to-machine journalism

“Search and social helped tailor information choices to individuals to a degree by leveraging content recommendation technology. But what happens when the content itself can be created, processed, and distributed through algorithms?”

Machines, not humans, will become the biggest consumers of news in 2018. This shift will be driven by the growing impact of smart devices and the internet of things in the information ecosystem.

When two machines speak to each other, they speak in a language of categorization — a taxonomy. Words are organized into categories, which then trigger an output. In machine-to-machine journalism, this output (a story or other piece of news content) from one machine is then interpreted by a second machine before it reaches its final audience.

For example, one machine can create stories out of data, send that story to a second machine, which then personalizes that story and only then disseminates it to a human. But machine-to-machine journalism can also achieve tangible outcomes beyond informing individual news consumers. For example, an automated financial story about stocks can change another machine’s investment patterns, or an AI lawyer can assess how libelous an automated article can be across different jurisdictions.

Journalists will need to examine how these machines speak to each other and how they develop connection with one another — perhaps even emotional ones.

But replicating human judgment in language is not an inevitable technological advance. Machine-to-machine journalism will be confronted with the challenge of replicating a kind of “journalistic intuition” merely through data points. This is particularly difficult, because humans have a very complex and adaptive way of assessing value judgments in one another’s speech. In other words, when two people speak, each has an intrinsic barometer that assesses the relative value of the words the other party is using against a standard that you perceive him or her to have. For example, when someone who tends to exaggerate describes something as “revolutionary,” the word has a different relative value than when somebody uses it who is rarely impressed. And as relationships develop, humans gain an increasingly nuanced understanding into one another’s speech value judgments. It remains a question whether a journalistic intuition can be developed using existing data points as an input.

The proliferation of smart devices in 2018 will quickly generate demand for “smart content” — news tailored to a specific individual or use case, and personalized with a specific editorial style. And the way that two or more smart machines can speak to one another through stories presents new opportunities and challenges — it can generate higher engagement but could also lead to information asymmetries.

Today, most people find information via search or social, and while these two channels are radically different in functionality, they have one thing in common —  any given article surfaced through these platforms is exactly the same for everyone in the world.

For example, an article entitled “Legionnaires’ disease outbreak looms over southern California” reads the same to me, a 31-year-old male living in New York City, and for a mother of two in her early 40’s residing in San Diego.

Content today is one-size-fits-all. And why wouldn’t it be? A journalist writes a story hoping to reach as many people as possible.

Search and social helped tailor information choices to individuals to a degree by leveraging content recommendation technology. But what happens when the content itself can be created, processed, and distributed through algorithms (the smart machines) that analyze readers’ locations, social media posts and other publicly available data? News consumers could then be served content through a smart device, tailored to their personality, mood, and socioeconomic status, among other things — infinite versions of the same story. True personalization drives higher consumption, but without editorial guidelines and well defined journalistic standards, could also create siloed views of the same reality.

When machine-to-machine journalism becomes a prevalent way to produce, process, and distribute content, then those algorithms will start falling under the purview of journalists. Just as it’s important to verify a source’s reliability, it will become crucial to consider the reliability of smart machines.

Francesco Marconi is strategy manager and AI co-lead at The Associated Press.

Michelle Ferrier   The year of the great reckoning

Jacqui Cheng   Retailers move into content

Jake Levine   The return to now

Rodney Benson   Better, less read, and less trusted

Corey Ford   The empire strikes back

Sally Lehrman   Trust comes first

Emily Goligoski   Looking beyond news for inspiration

Molly de Aguiar   Good journalism won’t be enough

Lanre Akinola   Making noise is not a strategy

Joanne McNeil   Gatekeeping the gatekeepers

Rachel Davis Mersey   AI, with real smarts

Miguel Castro   The arrival of the impact producer

Marcela Donini and Thiago Herdy   Collaboration is the way forward for Brazilian journalism

Brian Lam   Sketchy ethics around product reviews

Kristen Muller   The year of the voter

Matt Carlson   Attacks on the press will get worse

Mi-Ai Parrish   Blockchain and trust

Paul Ford   Go global

Amy King   Let’s amplify visual voice

Zizi Papacharissi   Women come back

Charo Henríquez   Training is an investment, not an expense

Tracie Powell   The muting of underserved voices

Joanne Lipman   Journalists inventing revenue streams

Emma Carew Grovum   Newsroom culture becomes a priority

Betsy O'Donovan and Melody Kramer   Skepticism and narcissism

Jim Moroney   Newspapers have to be good enough for readers to pay for

Almar Latour   Conquering calm

Adam Thomas   Sharing is caring: The year of the mentor

Pete Brown   Push alerts, personalized

Amie Ferris-Rotman   More female reporters abroad (please)

Borja Echevarría   TV goes digital, digital goes TV

Jarrod Dicker   Honesty in advertising

Sue Schardt   Jump the niche

Mary Meehan   Real lives are at stake in rural areas

Eric Nuzum   Beyond the narrative arc

An Xiao Mina   Memes and visuals come to the fore

Alexios Mantzarlis   Moving fake news research out of the lab

Ray Soto   VR reaches the next level

Will Sommer   The year local media gets conservative

Debra Adams Simmons   And a woman shall lead them

Jared Newman   Venture funding and digital news don’t mix

Rasmus Kleis Nielsen   The Snapchat scenario and the risk of more closed platforms

Sydette Harry   Listen to your corner and watch for the hook

Dheerja Kaur   Fun with subscription products

Umbreen Bhatti   The trust problem isn’t new

Michelle Garcia   Navigating journalistic transparency

Jesse Holcomb   Information disorder, coming to a congressional district near you

Christopher Meighan   Passive partnership is in the rearview

Monika Bauerlein   The firehose of falsehood

Mariano Blejman   News games rule

Dan Shanoff   You down with OTT? (Yeah, DTC)

David Skok   Finding an information-life balance

Richard Tofel   The platforms’ power demands more reporters’ attention

Alan Soon   The rise of start of psychographic, micro-targeted media

Alice Antheaume   Are you fluent in AI?

Nathalie Malinarich   Peak push

Helen Havlak   Keywords, not publishers, power the world’s biggest feeds

Frédéric Filloux   External forces

Aron Pilhofer   We can’t leave the business to the business side any more

Michael Kuntz   The only pivot that might work

Sarah Marshall   Loyalty as the key performance indicator

Nushin Rashidian   Publishers seek ad dollar alternatives

Niketa Patel   Live journalism comes of age

Mike Caulfield   Refactoring media literacy for the networked age

Burt Herman   Things get real

S. Mitra Kalita   The arc of news and audience

Damon Krukowski   Reviving the alt-weekly soul

Mira Lowe   The year of the local watchdog

Monique Judge   Letting black women tell their own stories

Nancy Watzman   Know thy TV

Kyle Ellis   Let’s build our way out of this

P. Kim Bui   The reckoning is only beginning

Jassim Ahmad   Thriving on change

Rick Berke   Value is the watchword

Feli Sánchez   The year for guerrilla user research

Pia Frey   Address users as individuals

Valérie Bélair-Gagnon   Seeking trust in fragmented spaces

Cindy Royal   Your journalism curriculum is obsolete

Gordon Crovitz   Serving readers over advertisers

Taylor Lorenz   Social and media will split

Cristina Wilson   The year of the Instagram Story

Kim Fox   Audience teams diversify their approach

Steve Grove   The midterms are an opportunity

Federica Cherubini   The rise of bridge roles in news organizations

Neha Gandhi   Filler killers

Tanzina Vega   It’s time for media companies to #PassTheMic

Evie Nagy   Pivot to mobile video frustration

Claire Wardle   Disinformation gets worse

Tanya Cordrey   Finally, the seeds of radical reinvention

Renée Kaplan   The year of quiet adjustments (shhh)

Doris Truong   Computer vision vs. the Internet vigilantes

Eric Ulken   The year local publishers get smart(er) about change

Jamie Mottram   From pageviews to t-shirts

Mary Walter-Brown   Show a little vulnerability

Mariana Moura Santos   Think local, act global

Kinsey Wilson   Facebook and Google: Help out or pay up

Marie Gilot   No assholes allowed

Ruth Palmer   Risks will grow for news subjects — especially minorities

Elizabeth Jensen   Show your work

Nicholas Diakopoulos   Fortifying social media from automated inauthenticity

John Keefe   Scooped by AI

Jennifer Coogan   The future is female

Mandy Velez   texting is lit rn, fam

Luke O'Neil   The end is already here

C.W. Anderson   The social media apocalypse

Manoush Zomorodi   Self-help as a publishing strategy

Francesco Marconi   The year of machine-to-machine journalism

Kathleen McElroy   Building a news video experience native to mobile

Juliette De Maeyer   A responsible press criticism

Sam Ford   The year of investing in processes

Craig Newmark   Working together toward sustainable solutions

Hossein Derakhshan   Television has won

Julia B. Chan   Looking for loyalty in all the right places

Alfred Hermida   Going beyond mobile-first

Felix Salmon   Covering bitcoin while owning bitcoin

Rodney Gibbs   Tech workers turn to journalism

Millie Tran and Stine Bauer Dahlberg   (Hint: It’s about your brand)

José Zamora   Revenue-first journalism

Hannah Cassius   The year of the echo-chamber escapists

Carlos Martínez de la Serna   The new journalism commons

Jennifer Brandel and Mónica Guzmán   The editorial meeting of the future

Andrew Losowsky   The year of resilience

Amy Webb   Listen to weak signals

Jennifer Choi   Standing up for us and for each other

Tim Carmody   Watch out for Spotify

Andrew Ramsammy   The year ownership mattered

Ariana Tobin   Too tired to tap

Sam Sanders   Shine the light on ourselves

Basile Simon   We need better career paths for news nerds

Jim Brady   With the people, not just of the people

Kawandeep Virdee   Zines had it right all along

Raney Aronson-Rath   Transparency is the antidote to fake news

Joyce Barnathan   It will be harder to bury the news

Juleyka Lantigua   Women of color will reclaim and monetize our time

Matt Thompson   Here come the attention managers

Julia Beizer   A longer view on the pivot

Dan Newman   A return to trust

Trushar Barot   The Jio-fication of India

Pablo Boczkowski   The rise of skeptical reading

Caitlin Thompson   Podcasting models mature and diversify

Matt Boggie   The intellectual equivalent of the Dead Sea

Justin Kosslyn   The year journalists become digital security experts

Raju Narisetti   Mirror, mirror on the wall

Andrew Haeg   The year journalists become relationship builders

Bill Keller   A growing turn to philanthropy

Edward Roussel   Eyes, ears, and brains

Ernst-Jan Pfauth   Publishing less to give readers more

Rubina Madan Fillion   Unlocking the potential of AI

Jessica Parker Gilbert   Design connects storytelling and strategy

Sara M. Watson   Feeds will open up to new user-determined filters

Vanessa K. DeLuca   Women’s voices take center stage

Caitria O'Neill   The new court of public opinion

Heather Bryant   Building the ecosystems for collaboration

Matt DeRienzo   A recession, then a collapse

Tamar Charney   We get serious about algorithms

Vivian Schiller   Pivot to tomorrow

Cory Haik   Suffering from realness, pivoting to impact

Nikki Usher   The year of The Washington Post

Ståle Grut   Reclaiming audience interaction from social networks

Imaeyen Ibanga   Longform video leads the way

Susie Banikarim   R.I.P. Pivot to Video (2017–2017)

Nicholas Quah   Stop talking trash about young people

Kelsey Proud   No, no, no

Usha Sahay   Wallets get opened

Mario García   Storytelling finally adapts to mobile

Lucas Graves   From algorithms to institutions

Daniel Trielli   The rich get richer, the poor scramble

Carrie Brown-Smith   Transparency finally takes off

Yvonne Leow   The rise of video messaging

Rachel Schallom   Better design helps differentiate opinion and news

Alastair Coote   The year of self-improvement

Laura E. Davis   Writing answers before you know the question

Dannagal G. Young   Stop covering politics as a game

Lam Thuy Vo   Breaking free from the tyranny of the loudest

Errin Haines   At the ballot, it’s time to count black women

Corey Johnson   The pro-fact resistance