About That Degree in Real Journalism?
June 26, 2020
Now that humans and algorithms share the job of curating online news, how do the two compare? Curious, Northwestern University’s Jack Bandy and Nicholas Diakopoulos examined one news service and did the math. Mac O’Clock shares Bandy’s summary, “What We Learned About Editors vs. Algorithms from 4,000 Stories in Apple News.”
In the case of Apple News, which boasts 125 million monthly users, human editors pick the “top stories” while AI chooses the “trending stories.” Bandy created a program to track the articles curated by each for two months. The researchers came to three conclusions. First, human editors chose pieces more evenly across news sources. Second, humans chose a wider range of sources. Interestingly, the narrower group of sources favored by the algorithms tended toward topics like celebrities and entertainment. This observation pointed the pair to their final conclusion—that human editors chose fewer “soft news” stories and more articles on serious topics. See the illustrated write-up for more on each of these points.
Bandy follows up:
“Our results highlight the trade-offs between human curation and algorithmic curation. While our study only looked at one platform, it shows that human editors were ‘much more subtly following the news cycle and what’s important,’ as Lauren Kern (editor in chief at Apple News) put it. For many readers and publishers, this is good news. The data shows that editors choose stories about important topics from a diverse set of sources, and choose those sources quite evenly. This is less true of the algorithmic Trending Stories, where readers will see more ‘soft news,’ and just a few major publishers tend to make the cut.”
It is a good idea to frequent a site at which humans still choose the top stories, as one example illustrates. Bandy uses the Wayback Machine to see the Google News headlines from the end of February, and was grateful he had not relied on that AI-centric page for his news at the time. He writes:
“All of the stories mention two things: coronavirus and Donald Trump. If you read them, you may glimpse some information about the impending pandemic — a ‘severity warning’ from the CDC, for example. The headlines probably grab your attention, but they do not provide meaningful information. Apple’s editors had a different approach that day, featuring an article with the headline ‘Coronavirus’s spread in U.S. is “inevitable,” CDC warns.’ It was a formal, descriptive piece from the Washington Post that quoted several officials at the Center for Disease Control. … I remember one quote from the article that changed my expectations for the coming months: ‘Disruptions to everyday life may be severe, but people might want to start thinking about that now’.”
Perhaps one day algorithms will be able to learn that sort of discernment, but now is not that time. Who, or what, is curating your news? Cynthia Murrell, June 26, 2020
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