Author: newswriters

Platform design is a silent pilot steering human behavior. Every design choice that social media platforms make nudges users toward certain actions, values, and emotional states. It is a design choice to offer a news feed that combines verified news sources with conspiracy blogs — interspersed with photos of a family picnic — with no distinction between these very different types of information. It is a design choice to use algorithms that find the most emotional or outrageous content to show users, hoping it keeps them online. And it is a design choice to send bright red notifications, keeping people…

Newswriters.in is conducting an online course on Reporting, Storytelling & Interview Techniques, designed to help participants acquire essential journalism and creative skills through practical, hands-on sessions. The course details containing faculty profile and the outline are attached. The course will be led by senior journalists, academicians, and industry experts with extensive and in-depth experience. This program is designed for media professionals, content creators, communication and marketing executives, journalism faculty and students looking to strengthen their storytelling and interviewing capabilities Registration link to receive the course brochure: https://forms.gle/dXyDNzEzXofWNHjr7 Course outline and faculty profile attached

By Emily Kasriel Journalists are often celebrated for their ability to ask sharp questions and uncover stories. But after more than two decades as a BBC journalist, I realized that the heart of powerful reporting isn’t just about what you ask — it’s also about how you listen. Deep Listening, as I’ve explored through research, fieldwork, my experience as an executive coach and mediator, and in my book, is a transformational approach that can help journalists move beyond transactional interviews to truly understand, connect with, and represent their sources. What is Deep Listening? Deep Listening in journalism means going…

By Anna Patton Geopolitical tension and war are dominating front pages globally. That ongoing coverage is vital — but other angles deserve attention too, said Lola García-Ajofrín, a Spanish multimedia journalist. “When everyone is covering a problem, you can add value by asking questions, and looking at what element is missing,” she said. For example, how have societies previously divided by conflict begun reconciliation? That question prompted her story on a pen pal scheme uniting French schoolchildren and their European neighbors in the aftermath of the Second World War. “If there’s 100 journalists, the job of 99 of them is…

The International Initiative on Information & Democracy powered by Reporters Without Borders (RSF) aims at bringing guarantees for the freedom of opinion and expression in the global space of information and communication. This project is set to implement Article 19 of the Universal Declaration on Human Rights in the digital era. https://rsf.org/en/information-and-democracy

by Amira Blochlinger and Lilia Hofmann | Recent elections show that social media can affect political outcomes. A single post can alter public opinion. How does this affect direct democracies? Full article: https://news-decoder.com/why-social-media-hasnt-ruined-our-democracy-yet/?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Decoder+Digest+(27+Jun+2025)

Many outlets have been personalizing news recommendations for years, but generative AI introduces the possibility to personalize news formats. By Amy Ross Arguedas Many newsrooms already use generative AI for efficiency and back-end tasks. Now they’re increasingly setting their sights on using AI to help deliver news that is more personally relevant and accessible for audiences, at a time when news interest has waned and avoidance has arisen in many countries. This is not a new phenomenon. Many outlets have been personalizing news recommendations for years, and while AI can help enhance tools for tailoring news selection, the more…

American journalism creates space for small-town extremists to gain power, especially given declines in local news. By Nik Usher .  With some luck, unbridled opportunism, and the right mix of underlying political conditions, an extremist politician can draw enough attention to get a few days of nonstop coverage from mainstream news media — and catapult themselves out of obscurity. How does this happen? My new book, Amplifying Extremism: Small Town Politicians, Media Storms, and American Journalism (free for a limited time here), written with Jessica C. Hagman, tries to understand this process. Our takeaway is that mainstream fact-based journalism plays a central, if not the central, role in…

By Andrew Deck Business Insider wants more of its employees to use ChatGPT, and to use it more often in their everyday work. That was the message from an all-hands meeting at the end of April, during which several employees presented on how they have folded ChatGPT into their workflow, and leadership encouraged experimentation among holdouts on staff. The all-hands presentation also included a slide with a leaderboard naming the 10 employees who are using ChatGPT the most across the company, including editorial staffers, according to Business Insider employees in attendance. “We highlighted usage in a recent all-hands as…

By Gretel Kahn  “These newsrooms desperately need the help these technologies provide, but they’re the ones being left out because they work in languages that are considered low-resource, so they are not a big priority for tech companies to support.” Since the launch of ChatGPT in 2022, newsrooms have been grappling with both the promise and the peril posed by generative AI. But not every publisher is equally prepared to pursue these opportunities. While newsrooms in the U.S. and Europe innovate and experiment with large language models (LLMs), many newsrooms in the Global South are being left behind. While AI models…