Computational journalism can be defined as the application of computation to the activities of journalism such as information gathering, organization, sensemaking, communication and dissemination of news information, while upholding values of journalism such as accuracy and verifiability. The field draws on technical aspects of computer science including artificial intelligence, content analysis ( NLP, NLG, vision, audition), visualization, personalization and recommender systems as well as aspects of social computing and

information science Information science (also known as information studies) is an academic field which is primarily concerned with analysis, collection, Categorization, classification, manipulation, storage, information retrieval, retrieval, movement, dissemin ...

History of the field

The field emerged at

Georgia Institute of Technology The Georgia Institute of Technology, commonly referred to as Georgia Tech or, in the state of Georgia, as Tech or The Institute, is a public research university and institute of technology in Atlanta, Georgia. Established in 1885, it is part of ...

in 2006 where a course in the subject was taught by professor

Irfan Essa Irfan Aziz Essa is a professor in the School of Interactive Computing of the College of Computing, and adjunct professor in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology (Georgia Tech). He is an associa ...

. In February 2008 Georgia Tech hosted a Symposium on Computation and Journalism which convened several hundred computing researchers and journalists in Atlanta, GA. In July 2009, The Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences (CASBS) at Stanford University hosted a workshop to push the field forward. Since 2012, Columbia Journalism School has offered a course called Frontiers of Computational Journalism for the students enrolled in their dual degree in CS and journalism. The course covers many computer science topics from the perspective of journalism, including document vector space representation, algorithmic and social story selection ( recommendation algorithms), language topic models, information visualization, knowledge representation and reasoning, social network analysis, quantitative and qualitative

inference Inferences are steps in reasoning, moving from premises to logical consequences; etymologically, the word '' infer'' means to "carry forward". Inference is theoretically traditionally divided into deduction and induction, a distinction that in ...

, and

information security Information security, sometimes shortened to InfoSec, is the practice of protecting information by mitigating information risks. It is part of information risk management. It typically involves preventing or reducing the probability of unauthorize ...

Syracuse University Syracuse University (informally 'Cuse or SU) is a Private university, private research university in Syracuse, New York. Established in 1870 with roots in the Methodist Episcopal Church, the university has been nonsectarian since 1920. Locate ...

launched a masters in computational journalism in 2015.

Stanford University Stanford University, officially Leland Stanford Junior University, is a private research university in Stanford, California. The campus occupies , among the largest in the United States, and enrolls over 17,000 students. Stanford is consider ...

launched a Computational Journalism Lab in 2015, as well as a course titled, Computational Journalism. In 2017,

the Associated Press The Associated Press (AP) is an American non-profit news agency headquartered in New York City. Founded in 1846, it operates as a cooperative, unincorporated association. It produces news reports that are distributed to its members, U.S. newspa ...

published a guide for newsrooms to deploy artificial intelligence and computational methods.

Applications

Over the years, computational journalism applications have involved different areas of the newsmaking process: from data gathering to the analysis of big data and their representation. In the beginning, therefore, it was more an aspect area linked to the discipline of

data science Data science is an interdisciplinary field that uses scientific methods, processes, algorithms and systems to extract or extrapolate knowledge and insights from noisy, structured and unstructured data, and apply knowledge from data across a br ...

, where the research and exploration of a fact may be automated. But it is just with the rise of artificial intelligence that it has become possible to explore new types of applications, even up to the automation of news writing (text generation). In this last field, there are interesting examples of application. *

The Washington Post ''The Washington Post'' (also known as the ''Post'' and, informally, ''WaPo'') is an American daily newspaper published in Washington, D.C. It is the most widely circulated newspaper within the Washington metropolitan area and has a large nati ...

that as early as 2017 declared to have published in a year 850 news written entirely by an artificial intelligence. *

The Guardian ''The Guardian'' is a British daily newspaper. It was founded in 1821 as ''The Manchester Guardian'', and changed its name in 1959. Along with its sister papers ''The Observer'' and ''The Guardian Weekly'', ''The Guardian'' is part of the Gu ...

, with the proprietary artificial intelligence software called "ReporterMate", an experimental automated news reporting system.

Related fields

Database journalism Database journalism or structured journalism is a principle in information management whereby news content is organized around structured pieces of data, as opposed to news stories. See also Data journalism Communication scholar Wiebke Loosen def ...

Computer-assisted reporting Computer-assisted reporting describes the use of computers to gather and analyze the data necessary to write news stories. The spread of computers, software and the Internet changed how reporters work. Reporters routinely collect information in dat ...

* Data-driven journalism (extending the focus of data investigation to a workflow from data analysis to data visualization to storytelling based on the findings)

Resources

Chapter on Computational Journalism in ''Handbook of Journalism Studies 2nd Ed''.

Columbia University Computational Journalism course

Computational+Journalism courses at Georgia Tech

A computational journalism reading list by Jonathan Stray of the Associated Press

''Communications of the ACM'', October 2011, "Computational Journalism"

How Artificial Intelligence Will Impact Journalism by Francesco Marconi of the Associated Press

References

{{Reflist Types of journalism Computational science Computational fields of study