Not AI, but AE: The Key To Saving Journalism?

Plus: Building Trustworthy Journalism - Inspiring Ideas From Across Europe

Jul 03, 2023

👋 Hey there fellow curious journalists,

thanks so much for coming on this email-ride - curating interesting bits and pieces from journalism all over Europe (and occasionally beyond).

🤓A small FYI: Because of my work I have a bias towards all things strategy and visual storytelling. But this newsletter (and me) is a work-in-progress, so with each edition I’ll try to a) expand my perspective and b) cover more and more countries.

🧯AI can not be the only answer

Want to save journalism? Invest in AE roles - AE as in Actual Experience.

👀 This proposal for future newsrooms from Jennifer Brandel, CEO of Hearken, made me look:

She suggests we need AE roles, to balance out AI.

👉 Why? Because while AI will transform everything in terms of efficiency, it does not help to build trust: “But what has been proven to increase trust in information is human, face-to-face interactions and relationships.”

It’s also the one upper hand we humans have on AI: We can care. About our audiences, about our communities and society as a whole. Because as Jennifer puts it: „AI couldn‘t care less“. It doesn‘t have the ability.

And these are some AE roles she lists in her article:

Relationship Builder
Community Collaborator
Community Conversation Facilitator
Professional Industry Networker

💸 Sure, budgets are always tight, but Jennifer argues that financial savings through AI could be invested in AE.

💪 And for those of you who don’t want to wait for structural changes: Jennifer has co-created a nifty Bingo Card that shows how you can include little “acts of care” in your journalism.

And we should worry about trust - a lot. That’s what the new Reuters Digital News Report shows.

🫥 To me reading the report feels more and more like Groundhog Day - there are so many recurring problems.

Why yes, I had Substack-Image-AI create a groundhog in its natural habitat - reading on a smartphone.

The most (de)pressing ones remain year after year: Declining trust in the media and growing news avoidance.

"Trust in the news has fallen, across markets, by a further 2 percentage points in the last year, reversing – in many countries – the gains made at the height of the Coronavirus pandemic. On average, four in ten of our total sample (40%) say they trust most news most of the time."
"The proportion of news consumers who say they avoid news, often or sometimes, remains close to all-time highs at 36% across markets.“

💪 So to remind myself that (small) things do change, I went to look for current ideas that might help us tackle these problems:

Something you can begin with straight away

👂Start to really listen

Do you think you are a good listener?

As a journalist, I certainly did. And then I attended a session on “Deep Listening” with British journalist Emily Kasriel. (You can re-watch it here.)

Turns out: Most of us miss a lot → We practise transactional listening - we listen to answer and not to understand.

1️⃣ Our brains often make unconscious assumptions when we listen, leading us to be wrong more frequently than we realize.

2️⃣ Also, when speaking, we may not articulate our thoughts accurately the first time. So there‘s an even higher chance we‘re not really understanding our interviewing partner correctly.

To overcome these challenges - Emily suggests deep listening: genuine curiosity, careful double-checking, respectful communication.

This is how it looks like in practice:

Screenshot: Handout “Deep Listening” from Emily Kasriel

It’s four simple steps:

Listen deeply to what the person is saying
Capture the essence
Check if you got it right
If not, ask for what you missed and repeat steps 1-3.

👉 Don’t interrupt. Leave 10 seconds before you speak. This is suprisingly hard at first. Really count down the seconds in your head.

If you start to deeply listen, you will also find out more about your audience needs.

This is the first step to 👇

🌈 Diversify your reporting

Here are some other ideas to address blindspots in our newsrooms:

🧠 Leverage AI - Norwegian Broadcaster Yle explores using AI to scan their reporting for biases and blind spots. They aim to develop a system that analyzes who is quoted, with what frequency, and in what type of story. Additionally, they plan to employ sentiment analysis to uncover terminology biases.

📨Data-onboard everyone: Mediahuis sends out a personalised newsletter to every author, so they can see how their content performs. This would also be a great way to track diversity metrics and nudge reporters to correct blind spots and biases.

🎨 Viszualize it - Consider whether you are serving communities that are already well-served. In the UK this project is mapping out regional coverage - the goal is to “encourage philanthropists and policymakers to target their resources on the local areas of greatest need”.

👭 Renew your expert-database - There’s now a newsletter to close the gender gap in reporting - Ask A Woman connects journalists with female experts in Europe. Each issue focuses on a theme relevant to current affairs. You can also browse the separate, national databases.

🥋 Challenge unwritten rules - A lot of them just help keeping an outdated status-quo in place. Case-in-point: In German media there is an unwritten rule that makes it near impossible for speakers with audible accents to get airtime. A new study finally challenges this - 58% of German citizens actually support the use of non-native speakers with audible diversity.