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Mattia Peretti

December 17th, 2020

2020 vision and action: a year of JournalismAI

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Estimated reading time: 2 minutes

Mattia Peretti

December 17th, 2020

2020 vision and action: a year of JournalismAI

0 comments | 2 shares

Estimated reading time: 2 minutes

This article is a copy of the last 2020 edition of the JournalismAI newsletter and it offers a complete overview of everything the project has achieved in 2020. Sign up for the newsletter if you want to receive all our updates and opportunities in your inbox.


We made it! This is the last JournalismAI update of 2020. And what a year this was.

In the very first newsletter – which went out on February 4th, although it feels like at least ten years ago – we promised a year full of “New training and educational resources; Events, gatherings, and workshop sessions; Interviews with experts working at the intersection of journalism and AI; A collaborative global experiment.

What did we actually do? 👇

⚙  We designed and published two training courses on Machine Learning for journalists: Introduction to Machine Learning and Hands-on Machine Learning.

📚 We created a library of case studies that collects 90+ examples of AI applications in newsrooms across the world.

🎙 We joined 30+ events and conferences (virtually, of course) to share our work and findings with journalists, students, and other crowds.

🙋 We published 6 interviews with fantastic women in our network, whose career paths showcase how technology is opening up entirely new opportunities in the newsroom for those who dare.

🎉 And we hosted a week-long online Festival to celebrate the very best projects and people in our community. All the videos are on YouTube! 👀

And what about that “collaborative global experiment”?

The JournalismAI Collab

30+ journalists and newsroom types from 20+ news organisations from across the world working together for six months to explore AI-powered journalistic solutions, in the middle of a pandemic! Sounds impossible? Sometimes we can’t believe it either. But check it out, it’s all true.

Our Collab teams produced detailed reports on how newsrooms can tackle challenges with AI technologies, including case studies, experiments, strategy guides, and useful tips on the following key problems for contemporary news organisations:

📋 Connecting users to quality journalism with AI-powered summaries

🕸 How might we leverage AI to understand, identify and mitigate newsroom biases?

💾 How AI will put the power of news media archives in the hands of the journalists

♥️ How your newsroom might use AI to increase loyalty in your audiences

🤓 And you can also read the behind-the-scenes of the Collab and the personal experience of the participants on this very blog.

It’s been inspiring to see the energy, commitment and ingenuity of the people in these groups. They’ve overcome all kinds of obstacles that 2020 put on their way and still managed to deliver such a great amount of practical insights for the industry. And maybe even more important, the Collab laid the foundations for a network of peers who have the power to turbo-charge the adoption of AI by news organisations worldwide.

We’ll let you judge for yourself if we delivered on the promises we made back in February 😉

Oh, and you know about that first newsletter of the year? It went out to 596 people. Today? 2,733. That’s not just a number. That’s you. It’s this incredible international community that gathered around JournalismAI and made it grow in ways we could have hardly imagined just twelve months ago. If you want to help us shape the future of JournalismAI and keep growing this community, make sure to take our ➡️ Community Survey ⬅️. We want to know more about where you are, what you do, and what you want from JournalismAI next year so that we can target our programmes and activities to your needs.

2021 is looking at least as exciting as 2020 has been. And we can’t wait to continue exploring with you how we can improve our journalism with AI. So stay tuned.

See you on the other side.
Charlie & Mattia

P.S.: You can find all the information about the project at journalismai.info and all the updates on this blog.

About the author

Mattia Peretti

Posted In: JournalismAI | Project Update