From hidden connections in big data to bots spreading fake news, journalism is increasingly computer-generated. An expert in computer science and media explains the present and future of a world in which news is created by algorithm.

Amid the push for self-driving cars and the roboticization of industrial economies, automation has proven one of the biggest news stories of our time. Yet the wide-scale automation of the news itself has largely escaped attention. In this lively exposé of that rapidly shifting terrain, Nicholas Diakopoulos focuses on the people who tell the stories—increasingly with the help of computer algorithms that are fundamentally changing the creation, dissemination, and reception of the news.

Diakopoulos reveals how machine learning and data mining have transformed investigative journalism. Newsbots converse with social media audiences, distributing stories and receiving feedback. Online media has become a platform for A/B testing of content, helping journalists to better understand what moves audiences. Algorithms can even draft certain kinds of stories. These techniques enable media organizations to take advantage of experiments and economies of scale, enhancing the sustainability of the fourth estate. But they also place pressure on editorial decision-making, because they allow journalists to produce more stories, sometimes better ones, but rarely both.

Automating the News responds to hype and fears surrounding journalistic algorithms by exploring the human influence embedded in automation. Though the effects of automation are deep, Diakopoulos shows that journalists are at little risk of being displaced. With algorithms at their fingertips, they may work differently and tell different stories than they otherwise would, but their values remain the driving force behind the news. The human–algorithm hybrid thus emerges as the latest embodiment of an age-old tension between commercial imperatives and journalistic principles.

Nikki Usher brings together a comprehensive portrait of nothing less than a new journalistic identity. Usher provides a history of the impact of digital technology on reporting, photojournalism, graphics, and other disciplines that define interactive journalism. Her eyewitness study of the field's evolution and accomplishments ranges from the interactive creation of Al Jazeera English to the celebrated data desk at the Guardian to the New York Times' Pulitzer-endowed efforts in the new field. What emerges is an illuminating, richly reported profile of the people coding a revolution that may reverse the decline and fall of traditional journalism.

The death of the daily newspaper in the internet age has been predicted for decades. While print newspapers are struggling from drops in advertising and circulation, their survival has been based on original reporting. Instead of a death knell, metro dailies are experiencing an identity crisis—a clash between traditional print journalism’s formality and detail and digital journalism’s informality and brevity.  

In Metro Dailies in the Age of Multimedia Journalism, Mary Lou Nemanic provides in-depth case studies of five mid-size city newspapers to show how these publications are adapting to the transition from print-only to multiplatform content delivery—and how newsroom practices are evolving to address this change. She considers the successes when owners allow journalists to manage their newspapers—to ensure production of quality journalism under the protection of newspaper guilds—as well as how layoffs and resource cutbacks have jeopardized quality standards.

Arguing for an integrated approach in which print and online reporting are considered complementary and visual journalism is emphasized across platforms, Nemanic suggests that there is a future for the endangered daily metro newspaper.

Before news organizations began putting their content online, people got the news in print or on TV and almost always outside of the workplace. But nowadays, most of us keep an eye on the headlines from our desks at work, and we have become accustomed to instant access to a growing supply of constantly updated stories on the Web. This change in the amount of news available as well as how we consume it has been coupled with an unexpected development in editorial labor: rival news organizations can now keep tabs on the competition and imitate them, resulting in a decrease in the diversity of the news. Peeking inside the newsrooms where journalists create stories and the work settings where the public reads them, Pablo J. Boczkowski reveals why journalists contribute to the growing similarity of news—even though they dislike it—and why consumers acquiesce to a media system they find increasingly dissatisfying.

Comparing and contrasting two newspapers in Buenos Aires with similar developments in the United States, News at Work offers an enlightening perspective on living in a world with more information but less news.

Using a framework of online connection and disconnection, The Paradox of Connection examines how journalists’ practices are formed, negotiated, and maintained in dynamic social media environments. The interactions of journalists with the technological, social, and cultural features of online and social media environments have shaped new values and competencies--and the combination of these factors influence online work practices. Merging case studies with analysis, the authors show how the tactics of online connection and disconnection interact with the complex realities of working in today’s media environments. The result is an insightful portrait of fast-changing journalistic practices and their implications for both audiences and professional identities and norms.