To innovate, news needs allies
"Allies, archives and infrastructure in the AI age" - a list of people with the potential to push news forward.
Link: We are not alone, by Adiel Kaplan at the Tow-Knight Center
I was delighted to be included in this roundup by Adiel Kaplan, the Program Director at the Tow-Knight Center for Journalism Futures at the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at CUNY.
“Having a say in what the future of news looks like will likely require not just that collaboration across newsrooms, but also outside them, with other institutions that want to shape a future with informed communities at its center — which is, after all, the mission. Right?
[…] It will also require a different way of thinking about our role in this ecosystem, beyond creating content and distributing it. It might mean getting more involved in building technology, or joining forces in new ways with government-funded institutions.”
This is exciting to me: I’ve been saying for a while now that news needs to get more involved in building technology. My flippant line is that news treats technology as something that happens to it, like an asteroid — but it’s actually a creative work, like an article. Although many newsrooms are too small to build a strong capacity in themselves, it’s perfectly possible for news as an industry to build capacity and create the technology that is unique to its use cases on its terms. So I think it’s a very good thing that news institutions are talking about this need.
The people listed in the article are exceptional. I’m just happy to be on the list in such fine company. Don’t sleep on any of them; I feel most connected to Ivan Sigal’s ambitious and vital work at the Modal Foundation and what Trei Brundrett is building (in collaboration with Blaine Cook and others) at New_ Public. But these are all worthy endeavors: the Library Newsroom Project is a genius on-the-ground effort to create local newsrooms based in every public library in the US, and Sannuta Raghu’s news atoms embed meaning and provenance in natural language articles. All are promising.
We need to move forward. There are certainly more people who could have been added to such a list; my hope is that if one were written a year from now, it would be exponentially longer. Let’s innovate.
