IQ Journalism: Exploring the Role of Artificial Intelligence in Assessing Quality of News Content

Proceedings of The 3rd World Conference on Media and Communication

Year: 2023

DOI:

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IQ Journalism: Exploring the Role of Artificial Intelligence in Assessing Quality of News Content

Anastasia Karampela, Catherine Sotirakou, Constantinos Mourlas

ABSTRACT: 

For the past few decades, the mass communication ecosystem has undergone a series of changes due to technological advancements and the integration of social media into journalistic routines. This has altered the flow of news, providing new opportunities in the collection, production, and distribution of information. The lack of clear rules and tools for writing effective online news articles, along with the fact that positive audience response increases news organizations’ advertising revenue and often leads to click-baiting and fake news, has led to the development of “IQ Journalism.” This innovative concept aims to create an intelligent platform for journalistic articles that will guide writers in real-time on the expected success on social media and quality of their text. The proposed intelligent advisor will leverage cutting-edge technologies, from the Artificial Intelligence spectrum to process Greek news articles and suggest edits to journalists and editors.
To assess the indicators of perceived quality, qualitative research was conducted through in-depth interviews with experts, academic researchers, and professionals with experience in the journalistic sector. The majority of respondents attributed the credibility of a news medium to three primary characteristics; the inclusion of key information (what, where, who, when, and why), the presence of sources in the text, and the pluralism of opinions or information. Additionally, the proper use of language that respects spelling, syntactic, and grammatical rules was deemed an important aspect of quality content. Writers were encouraged to use comprehensible and simple language, while avoiding colorism, subjective bias, and emotionally charged discourse. Moreover, the headline was identified as a crucial element that captures the audience’s attention; it should not be misleading, but rather comprehensive and representative of the content. Moreover, most experts advised against the use of capital letters in the title and body of the articles, considering it to be “unacceptable” and “offensive”. Furthermore, they highlighted the usefulness of bullet points as a classification solution, while rejecting the overuse of punctuation.
Audiovisual material, such as impressive images, infographics, multimedia, videos, and hyperlinks, was also seen as a key component of quality content. Finally, the appropriate length of an online news article was debated, with some experts arguing that it should be concise and understandable, while others suggested that the size could vary depending on the genre of the article. The experts’ responses to the writing of a journalistic article will be used as the training features for the machine learning model.

keywords: Media Innovation, Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, Natural Language Processing, News Quality