The crisis has emboldened news organizations to make overdue changes
Just a few weeks ago the dark forces of the internet seemed to demand the world’s attention. Democracy itself appeared to be shaken to its foundations.
Social media and cable news can do that to you. They make it appear that everyone is a take-no-prisoners extremist determined to shame you for not joining their mob, on one side or the other.
I was probably reading and writing too much about robot-driven propaganda machines peddling disinformation to gain power or profit. That’s part of my job these days, to investigate disinformation. And like a private detective in film noir, my work was converting me from a skeptic into a desperate cynic. Oh, humanity!
But hold on. This is a time when the optimists have to step forward. When we become pessimists, we shrug our shoulders like Vladimir and Estragon in Waiting for Godot, sit immobile and declare, “Nothing to be done.”
It is true that various nefarious actors have harnessed the power of algorithms to flood the media ecosystem with poisonous information, spreading lies and hatred. But that’s not the whole story.
Optimists get into action
The tools of artificial intelligence, used to great effect by nefarious actors, can also be deployed by quality news media to deliver tailored, custom products designed to replace lost revenue and create greater accountability. You don’t have to look hard to find inspiring examples. They arrive every day. This one came last week:
The Fundacion Gabo in Colombia recently published a report on three Spanish language organizations making use of AI or data processing to produce quality journalism.
- Verificado in Mexico produces a report that draws on a database of the text of all the daily news conferences of President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador. Using software called Pinpoint, the journalists can identify people, events, and cases he refers to and then fact-check his statements. They found, for example, he has repeatedly made false or misleading statements about the corona virus.
- Ojo Publico in Peru has developed a software that scans vast quantities of data about public contracts to identify connections between politicians, government officials, and those who win contracts. The data comes from previous investigations by the journalists. The software flags contracts that bear signs of potentially illicit dealings.
- A Madrid-based company called Narrativa has developed a natural language generator–a software called Gabriele–that uses machine learning to generate news stories in seconds from data bases and other sources. When media use this type of software to report on routine news–sports scores, stock market results, weather forecasts–reporters can spend more time creating high-value analysis or investigation. Among Narrativa’s clients are the Wall Street Journal, InfoBae, 20 Minutos, and RTVE, Spain’s public broadcaster.
Another reason for optimism is that traditional publishers, who have been devastated by lost ad revenue due to the corona virus, are doing untraditional things. They’re experimenting with various kinds of digital subscription and membership models. They’re turning their archives into revenue generators.
Some publishers are developing business models based on independence and credibility. Others are hiring their own sales teams rather than relying on programmatic advertising delivered to them by technology platforms. I’ll write more about innovations in future posts.
The nature of luck and optimism
I’ve been reading Thinking, Fast and Slow, the perennial best-seller by Daniel Kahneman, who won a Nobel Prize in economics for his insights into how people blissfully make irrational and illogical decisions against their own best interests.
Kahneman attributes many of the errors we make to excessive optimism about our power to predict the future, such as stock prices or election results. If by chance we predict correctly, it’s very likely we were just lucky rather than skillful. At the same time, he refers to studies that show optimists are not just delusional:
“Optimists are normally cheerful and happy, and therefore popular; they are resilient in adapting to failures and hardships, their chances of clinical depression are reduced, their immune system is stronger, they take better care of their health, they feel healthier than others and are in fact likely to live longer.”
The phrase relevant to journalists is that optimists are “resilient in adapting to failures and hardships.” The journalists who are making a difference today are optimists. They are Edison-like inventors who take on challenges, test things, measure the results, make modifications, and try again. The formula has been studied and evangelized by Eric Ries in The Lean Startup. When something doesn’t work, it is not a failure but “validated learning.”
The best salespeople are optimists. Every time they are told “no”, they feel they are one step closer to hearing “yes”. For me, the attitude of the optimist, from the salesperson to the scientist, is captured in these quotes:
- “The harder I work, the luckier I get.”–traditional
- “Luck is the residue of design.” — Branch Rickey
- “In the fields of observation, chance favors only the prepared mind.” — Louis Pasteur
Rickey was the general manager of the Brooklyn Dodgers who recognized the potential of Black baseball players to transform the sport. He brought Jackie Robinson to the major leagues.
Pasteur was the great French scientist of the 19th century who innovated with vaccination, recognized that bacteria caused disease, and developed the process of treating milk with high heat to remove germs. His quote emphasizes the importance of careful study to recognize opportunity when it knocks.
Another of Pasteur’s quotes is also relevant to journalists: “Let me tell you the secret that has led me to my goal. My strength lies solely in my tenacity.”
Collaboration and other innovations
It is easy to find reasons for despair, because the evidence is all around us. This leads us to mental mistakes driven by what Kahneman calls “the availability heuristic”, the intellectual shortcut that causes us to make decisions based only on the information that is closest at hand. And often that information comes from the most sensational news of the day.
If you want to find reasons for optimism, you have to look harder and deeper. The evidence is obscured by all the noise in the media ecosystem that surrounds us. Some more reasons for hope are the thousands of journalists and news organizations that have mobilized in international collaborations such as The Trust Project, the Global Investigative Journalism Network, and the International Fact-Checking Network, to name just three that immediately come to mind.
Their job isn’t easy. It takes more time to explain correctly why and how corona virus vaccines work, for example, and the headline will not go viral.
However, journalists who are tenacious, resilient, hard-working, and–dare we say–happy are making a difference, attracting allies, and finding new revenue sources. I plan to bring you more examples in future blog posts. The optimists believe they can change the world. And often they do.
Optimism, luck, and the future of journalism