10-Point Memo: Why Editorial Algorithms Are the Future of Modern Journalism
2 min readFeb 24, 2021
- From a machine learning perspective, journalism is *simply* event detection applied to continuously updating data.
- Let’s look at an hypothetical example where there’s a lot of reliable data: Sports. If we were to monitor all the professional soccer/football matches around the world, occurring over a given weekend, how do we determine what the most newsworthy games were?
- That decision is traditionally made by a journalist based on their domain knowledge and context of the subject — they may emphasize matches that had the biggest offset, focus on top ranked teams, or even pay more attention to teams where highly paid athletes play, among many other considerations.
- In this sense, newsworthiness is triggered when predefined editorial criteria is met. Now, assume that the logic of those principles can be written down and translated into algorithms. Who determines what is newsworthy and what’s not?
- It is certainly not the machine. It is instead human editors who decide what weights and parameters to apply to the machine learning models. These are called “editorial algorithms”.
- Beyond Sports, only a few other coverage areas such as Finance or Weather are fields where data is abundant and for the most part, objective. The same cannot be said for beats such as politics, health, science, world events, among others — yet.
- As everything around us is moved to the digital realm, new data trails and records are being created that can provide ways to constantly monitor fields that today are not quantifiable. Natural language processing is crucial here, but I will leave that for another thread.
- Within the next decade, we will be able to source and gather news through machines at a speed that today is unimaginable (think Associated Press meets Palantir). This does not mean that AI takes over human journalists, quite the opposite.
- The development of editorial algorithms will require humans at the helm (and to clarify, a journalist does not need to be technical in order to define reliable algorithmic parameters — but at the very least they have to understand how machine learning works).
- In this new reality, algorithmic transparency will become one of the most crucial functions of modern newsrooms.
