When thinking about AI in publishing, most of my focus is on the potential that AI tools have for all all departments. Even editorial departments, full of journalists that audiences count on to be professionally skeptical, can find value in the technology’s capabilities to complement the hard work they do.
A recent Digital Journalism article took a closer look at the messages that news media unions are sending about genAI, ultimately finding what authors Mike Ananny and Jake Carr break down as “six areas where news media unions are focusing their generative AI attention and concern — and, notably, two areas where they’re not.”
“We see this as a case of journalists articulating their roles and values in an all-too-common moment when they are challenged by sociotechnical forces that they did not create, but that they must nonetheless collectively navigate and reshape in service of the profession’s democratic mission,” says the “How Media Unions Stabilize Technological Hype” analysis.
In looking at two years’ worth of union public statements, testimonies, CBAs, and other trade press articles, the study found much of the focus on:
In addition to isolating those focuses, the authors found that unions were largely ignoring two other aspects in the larger conversation: genAI’s larger social, economical, and infrastructural impacts, as well as journalist wellbeing.
“These absences may simply be areas that fall outside of unions’ expertise or interest, or they may be deliberate and strategic choices to focus generative AI conversations around tractable and actionable concerns,” write the authors in Nieman Lab. “In any event, they suggest opportunities for news media unions to expand their thinking about who qualifies as a ‘media’ worker, to see journalistic GenAI within larger infrastructures and ecosystems, and perhaps to use this moment for advocacy that further foregrounds the humans and humanity that power journalism.”