■ ACADEMIC PUBLICATIONS
Immersive Automation: News Automation – A WAN-IFRA guide to the field (to be published 2018) ➢
The Immersive Automation is a research and development project that aims at automating news production, and is looking for new ways of making it more automatic. The project’s aim is to create a roadmap and a demonstration of a future news ecosystem based on automated storytelling, intense audience engagement and user experience.
Speaker at SXSW 2018: The Humanoid Future of Journalism (March 2018) Audio ➢ / Slides ➢
Speaker at South by Southwest. Presented my academic research on automation in the newsroom and practical experiences from Sweden and Finland where robots now write more news articles than humans. Together with representatives from United Robot and MittMedia we also talked about how all this will affect the news industry in the future.
Master's Thesis (June 2017) ➢
The aim of the thesis is to gather an understanding on how news automation influences journalists’ work, professional identity and how journalists’ attitudes towards news automation have changed after they started working with it. The research finds that in future journalists use the same working methods as before but, due to news robots, they shift their focus from repetitive tasks to interviews, on the field work and analyses. Automation gives journalists more time to work on news stories that would otherwise been left undone, and it also increases both the quantity and quality of news articles. The study also finds that working with news automation changes journalists’ attitudes from neutral and negative to positive.
Bachelor's Exam (May 2016) ➢
This study researched upper secondary students' media literacy skills as well as their ability to evaluate the trustworthiness of news. In the study, the students were given three articles with no information of its source: only title and text. Results show that when evaluating the trustworthiness of an article the students paid attention to numeric and statistic information, language and structure, sources and interviewees, objectivity and to how the information is in a relationship with what they already know. The result show an alarming lack in media literacy skills as half of the students evaluated a false media source equally trustworthy to the national broadcasting company.
The Immersive Automation is a research and development project that aims at automating news production, and is looking for new ways of making it more automatic. The project’s aim is to create a roadmap and a demonstration of a future news ecosystem based on automated storytelling, intense audience engagement and user experience.
Speaker at SXSW 2018: The Humanoid Future of Journalism (March 2018) Audio ➢ / Slides ➢
Speaker at South by Southwest. Presented my academic research on automation in the newsroom and practical experiences from Sweden and Finland where robots now write more news articles than humans. Together with representatives from United Robot and MittMedia we also talked about how all this will affect the news industry in the future.
Master's Thesis (June 2017) ➢
The aim of the thesis is to gather an understanding on how news automation influences journalists’ work, professional identity and how journalists’ attitudes towards news automation have changed after they started working with it. The research finds that in future journalists use the same working methods as before but, due to news robots, they shift their focus from repetitive tasks to interviews, on the field work and analyses. Automation gives journalists more time to work on news stories that would otherwise been left undone, and it also increases both the quantity and quality of news articles. The study also finds that working with news automation changes journalists’ attitudes from neutral and negative to positive.
Bachelor's Exam (May 2016) ➢
This study researched upper secondary students' media literacy skills as well as their ability to evaluate the trustworthiness of news. In the study, the students were given three articles with no information of its source: only title and text. Results show that when evaluating the trustworthiness of an article the students paid attention to numeric and statistic information, language and structure, sources and interviewees, objectivity and to how the information is in a relationship with what they already know. The result show an alarming lack in media literacy skills as half of the students evaluated a false media source equally trustworthy to the national broadcasting company.
© Hanna Tuulonen, 2018. All rights reserved.