Synopsis: 

Throughout this semester, I have learned a handful of things that I plan to carry into my future work as a professional journalist. I would say the biggest take away from writing this story is how to approach long-form storytelling with more intentionality. Researching the evolution of the newsroom technologies and speaking with real news professionals taught me how to balance a narrative with an analysis, using both data and personal insights to better help my audience understand what AI in journalism truly looks like. Overall, I was able to develop my skills in reporting, structuring complex topics and creating stories that are engaging, accurate and continually relevant over time. 

Developing the Story Project: 

As I developed my story project, there were a lot of ethical guidelines I had to follow in order to create an authentic, truthful story. To start, I made sure to verify all of the facts/statistics I included to ensure accuracy and transparency. I also made sure to represent my interviews honestly, quoting my sources accurately and avoiding any wording that could mislead or take their statements out of context. I also tried my best to contact a variety of sources to share their opinion on AI so I could write an unbiased and multifaceted story. I approached the topic with sensitivity by acknowledging both the advantages and concerns surrounding artificial intelligence to make sure that the story remained balanced and ethnically grounded. 

The largest challenge I faced when writing this story was figuring out how I wanted to frame this story. With a topic so large and daunting like artificial intelligence, it was really hard to figure out what exactly I wanted my story to be about. After talking to all four of my sources I had so much quality information, but knew that I simply couldn’t include all of it. After careful consideration, I was able to identify what I thought were the three most important aspects of my interviews. This is how I landed on separating my story into three different subheads and creating the content around these three benchmarks. 

The largest opportunity I faced in working on this project was getting to really dive deep into how AI tools have evolved and how they are currently being used in newsrooms. I feel like artificial intelligence is such a widely known and used tool, but so many people only know surface-level facts about the technology. In this story, I was able to research the topic heavily and hear from experts who deal with this topic on a daily basis. I think it really helped strengthen my research skills and understand the rapidly changing field of journalism. Interviewing industry professionals offered firsthand insight into both the promise and challenges of integrating AI into journalism. This gave me the opportunity to bring authentic voices into my story.

Digital Media Experience: 

This entire experience truly provided me with a new perspective and skillset when it comes to digital journalism. In years past, my journalism classes relied heavily on writing and story development, which are both important aspects of creation, but this class opened my eyes to the fact that journalism is more than just words on a paper. Seeing how so many different digital elements like photos and infographics can be used to further supply context to a story made me realize that success in this field is more complicated than I had anticipated. In order to be a successful journalist, you kind of have to be able to do it all. Writing is extremely important, but being able to connect with your audience by creating visual elements to accompany a story makes your work so much stronger and more powerful. 

My experience in using data for digital journalism was overall pretty enjoyable. I definitely hit a few bumps in the road where I felt like I wasn’t fully understanding the scope of my data, or I was struggling to find a way to present the data to an audience. Other than that, I found the experience very useful and felt that it strengthened my skills in digital journalism production in a way that I plan to carry into my future work. 

When creating the digital elements of my story, I mainly used Canva and Manus. Canva was relatively easy to work with because I had used it before, but I did run into some small issues. Canva can be a bit touchy when designing infographics, and I definitely got a little overly frustrated with it sometimes. Other than that, I had a great experience using the tool. For my image, I used Manus AI to help me create an image related to AI in journalism. I thought it would be an interesting tool to use for my story considering it was all about AI in journalism. I was very impressed by the software itself, but found that you needed to be extremely specific about the image you wanted to create. It took me about 5 revisions from my original statement to come up with an image I wanted to include in my story. 

The most enjoyable moment in working on my website was the fact that I was given so much freedom in the topic selection and the writing process overall. I’ve always been interested in artificial intelligence and what it means for the future of an industry that’s built on creativity in writing. This story gave me the opportunity to speak with people who had so many interesting things to say about the topic. This is probably the most fun I have had and the most I have learned from a final project for class.