Meet the 2023 JournalismAI Fellowship cohort

Written By Lakshmi Sivadas

We are thrilled to announce the 2023 cohort of the JournalismAI Fellowship programme, conducted with the support of the Google News Initiative. We’ve selected 32 journalists and technologists from 15 news organisations across the world to take part in the second edition of the Fellowship programme. Fellows will collaborate in six self-selected teams, working to use AI to enhance reporting and other journalism processes.

We received nearly 170 applications from around the world and shortlisted candidates from 31 news organisations in the initial application phase. Candidates then self-selected partners from other news organisations to collaborate with and submitted their final application to the Fellowship programme. The JournalismAI team, together with our Fellowship partners from the Knight Lab at Northwestern University, conducted the final evaluation and selection based on the strength of the project proposals.

Fellows belong to news organisations from 11 countries across the world: Kenya, the UK, Australia, Jordan, Germany, Brazil, Spain, Malaysia, India, Netherlands, Canada. They represent both legacy and smaller news organisations.

Projects they will be working on range from using AI to tailor content to niche audiences, to creating a plugin to identify cases of bias, to querying structured newsroom datasets to answer questions accurately, swiftly, and transparently, and much more.

Over the next six months, the teams will be guided through phases of definition, ideation, prototyping, and testing. They will present their work at the JournalismAI Festival.

Meet the cohort of the 2023 JournalismAI Fellowship:

BIAS BLOCKER

Our project aims to develop an AI plugin for journalists, editors, and media organisations to detect bias and discrimination in real-time, in English and Arabic content. The plugin utilises natural language processing, machine learning, and computer vision to analyse investigations, in-depth reports, photos, and videos.

ARIJ

ABC AUSTRALIA

Deutsche Welle

SERVING NICHE AUDIENCES

This tool will enable editors to tailor existing content to specific niche audiences. These may be geographic niches such as in local news or demographic niches in lifestyle, sports or business news.

Nation Media Group

MP INTERESTS TRACKER

We will analyse the contents of (UK) parliamentary speeches and MP’s financial interests to reveal overlaps between the two. We will create a structured and annotated version of Hansard and the Register of Members’ Interests, updated daily, highlighting when MPs give speeches on issues in which they also have a financial stake.

BBC News

The Times & The Sunday Times

NOTICIA

NoticIA aims to build a platform that enables newsrooms to create AI-powered chatbots based on their content. Using Large Language Models, the project will provide a new way for organizations to interact with readers while minimizing the risk of inaccurate AI responses.

Aos Fatos

Newtral

Nucleo Journalism

TIMELARK

TIMELARK is a journalistic research tool that makes complex timelines easy to explore and understand. Highlighting conflicting information and suspicious connections, TIMELARK uses Temporal Knowledge Graphs to extract journalistic insights from trusted sources. Using TIMELARK, we investigate the overlapping narratives present in coverage of the war in Ukraine.

OCCRP

BBC News

/ Thomson Reuters

PROJECT DAISY

We are focused on tackling the challenge of enhancing access to our data for audiences. Our goal is to develop an AI framework that facilitates natural language queries on our structured datasets. Our envisioned tool, named “Daisy,” will empower users to ask questions and receive textual or visualized outputs, similar to ChatGPT.

Malaysiakini

CORRECTIV

India Today

Lakshmi Sivadas
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