Three ideas on the future of journalism from Perugia

The Italian city of Perugia hosted the International Journalism Festival this week, and from the group of interventions highlighted by the Reuters Institute in its report, I am left with these three experiences, which mark paths.

The first, an AI project aborted in the New York TimesThe goal was to teach the algorithm to write short summaries of a newscast to post on social media and other platforms. But the work of reviewing errors ended up being more burdensome than writing these brief entries directly. Furthermore, although the decision-making demonstrated sound judgment, it was still too unpredictable to take the risk. The key? The AI struggles to understand the notion of context.

The second is from the Swedish NewspaperA year and a half ago, this Swedish newspaper launched a separate project to combat the pressure of people disconnecting from the news. The service offers a moderate level of articles and has a filter that, when activated, displays only constructive pieces. It already has 50,000 users, most of whom didn't follow the newspaper before. as it should. It seems like a good way to make the border between information addicts and those who suffer from saturation porous.

And the third, from Paraguay, was launched by the director ofThe LeaverAs he explained, they focused their editorial team on working with impact as a fundamental measure of their output. This approach motivates journalists, he says, because it makes them feel like part of the ecosystem. And, in the end, to achieve impact, you have to reach audiences, so the result is still compatible with leveraging the good parts of algorithms to maximize traffic and discarding those that are disruptive, such as banality or cliché-like behavior.