Participatory Journalism in Africa by Hayes Mawindi Mabweazara Admire Mare

Author:Hayes Mawindi Mabweazara, Admire Mare [Hayes Mawindi Mabweazara, Admire Mare]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, Media Studies
ISBN: 9780429516054
Google: e9YtEAAAQBAJ
Barnesnoble:
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2021-05-18T00:00:00+00:00

How technological ‘actants’ are shaping and influencing practices in newsrooms

AI and audience participation

Although the appropriation of AI in journalism has gained more traction in Europe and North America (Broussard et al. 2019), some media houses in South Africa have started to deploy these tools in reporting, content creation, distribution and audience interaction. In the context of audience participation, AI is considered effective in helping moderators to filter UGC on comments spaces at a faster rate. It is used in efforts to identify toxic comments that can undermine a civil exchange of ideas (we discuss AI-driven content moderation later). Interviews with online editors in South Africa highlighted some of these developments, particularly how newsrooms are experimenting with AI software to enrich their audience participation cultures and practices, as the Online Media Editor of Times Media Group explained: ‘We are […] now employing AI software that analyzes our website and social media platform analytics, then automates our social media posts and publication schedule to optimise it for maximum engagement and traffic referral’.

Some editors saw AI as helping to ‘decongest and free time’ for their production teams to concentrate more on the quality of their product, as the Digital Media Editor at Tiso Blackstar (now Arena Media Group) put it: ‘Because of the new software we have acquired our web production teams have more time to focus on the professional presentation of our digital content instead of spending hours creating, scheduling and responding to social media posts manually’. A Digital Editor at the Independent Newspapers similarly highlighted that AI is helping reporters to tailor and ‘personalise content based on where audiences live and other demographics, such as age, gender and so on’ than would otherwise be possible in the intense deadline-driven daily routines. In other words, AI is making up for the limitations of humans, including ‘human error’, as explained by the Digital Media Editor at Media24: ‘We’re using AI to study the behavioral patterns of our audience, to […] schedule social media content and articles to reduce the workload and time journalists and content producers spend doing these tasks manually’.

From the above, it is evident that leading media houses in South Africa are adopting AI-driven technologies as a potential way to lessen the burden of managing their audience engagement platforms, particularly social media and comment sections. It is important, however, to highlight that because of lack of capacity in the development of applications, newsrooms in South Africa are relying on proprietary third-party AI software from the Global North. With the exception of Media24, which has a fully assembled team of engineers responsible for developing customised and personalised apps, our study revealed that some newsrooms lacked in-house capacity, hence the overreliance on local and international vendors. Several digital media editors confirmed this trend where South African media organisations work with international vendors, especially from Russia, Ukraine and the United States of America to buy state of the art AI software for their newsrooms.

Unlike their neighbours in South Africa, respondents from Zimbabwe’s Alpha Media

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