The future of journalism

In this interview with Victoria Ertelthalner-Nikolaev, professor and PhD student at Ludwig-Maximilians Universität, we tried to look into the field of journalism and its evolution through the lens of research.

What is your academic background and how did it lead you to LMU ?

First of all, I started at LMU for my PhD in 2021. And before that, I studied journalism communication studies in Vienna. Because I received a prize for my master’s thesis, I decided to explore more the field of research, so I then started to work for a research project at an Austrian press agency in Vienna, where we focused primarily on the use of AI in the Austrian media landscape. 

After that, I found out that LMU had a free position for PhD so I wanted to give it a try, and that’s the reason why I started to work at LMU as a PhD researcher. 

The fields of journalism and communication are really evolving since the past few years. Is it challenging to keep in touch with the new tools ?

What I can see from my research is that some people have a quite critical perspective on using the AI tools. So there still are some concerns out there among journalists. And interestingly, it’s not more about the traditional journalists, I was very impressed that some really experienced journalists, who could have 30 years of experience, are absolutely open to AI tools. It really struck my interest. One journalist told me the reason why he believes that he has no problems with new tools : when he started as a journalist, he started before the age of digitalization in work routines and labor, before the internet and digital devices, and he said that the evolution from analog to digital technologies was so crucial and had such a big impact on them that AI is just the natural next step.

He also observed that especially younger journalists who enter the field have more problems with that because they have specific assumptions on how to do journalism. And then they find out that it’s slightly different from university and they have to use new tools, so maybe they’re overwhelmed because they have to learn many new things in the field, and now they have to use AI tools as well.

Do you think that these “old” journalists, when they were themselves students, had as well some troubles with the beginnings of the internet and digitalization ?

I don’t think so. For example, there was one journalist, who, after 30 years of journalism, still had the same energy in developing new tasks and practices for new technologies. And he said he was just interested : There’s something new, let’s have a look at it.

Right now, he’s working on the new building complex of Bayerische Rundfunk, the public broadcaster in Bavaria, and for that they use this transformation process to implement new equipment, new technology, new infrastructure. It’s also extremely interesting that when we talk about changes in journalism, we often focus on technology and tools and software systems. But we forget there are things like architecture, software implementation, new architecture. People need more buildings or they’re working at home. So everything is changing a little bit.

Concerning the use of AI, do you think journalists will have to develop new skills ? Which of them will become crucial to have in the years to come ?

I did my master thesis about that. We can have a look on what will change in work practices and what will change in the skill sets for journalists.

In the earlier years when AI came up, it was a technology for very technics savvy users, users who are able to adopt new technologies very easily, so they have the ability to teach themselves very quickly how to use the systems and understand the logic of the systems.

And so AI was strongly connected with the very technical areas of communication and computer science, linguistics, computer linguistics, programming and digital engineering. The challenge is that most people are more creative people, with more qualitative approaches, and then on the other side, we had these typical technical savvy users focusing more on software development, who said to me that I had to do programming, learning program languages to use AI. Because this is the way we can communicate with these technologies. So more scientists have to adopt these new skills from computer science to be able to use these technologies. 

What I see now is a totally different approach. Software engineers try to develop more usable technology solutions. For example, if you have a look at ChatGPT, what they have done is put away all the stuff you usually have to know to use AI, and replace it by a surface which looks like a normal assistance system. 

I’m going to take the example of photography : When you learned analog photography, you had to do everything in that manner, every parameter : light, setting the objective… Everything. It’s amazing the skills you needed 10 years ago for doing photography. Today, if you’re using a camera, you have all the parameters already set. The same will happen with AI as more and more people are using it.