Author: newswriters

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…

By Laura Silver Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu visited the United States on April 7 for the second time since President Donald Trump took office. As Americans look at the Middle East, fewer say the Israel-Hamas war is important to them personally – or important to U.S. national interests – than felt that way early last year, according to a new Pew Research Center survey. In addition, the public’s views of Israel have turned more negative over the past three years. More than half of U.S. adults (53%) now express an unfavorable opinion of Israel, up from 42% in March 2022 – before the Hamas attack…

By Sofia Hernandez Ramones and Maria Smerkovich Later this week, the Group of Seven (G7) will meet in Canada for their annual summit. Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney will host the leaders of the other member countries: France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the United Kingdom and the United States. A bar chart showing that Americans see G7 countries positively, but people in those countries have less favorable views of the U.S. Americans have more favorable views of the other G7 countries than people in these countries do of the U.S., according to Pew Research Center surveys conducted this spring. For example,…

By Damian Radcliffe Artificial Intelligence (AI) is transforming journalism worldwide, but much of the conversation about its impact has been dominated by perspectives from the Global North. A new report from the Thomson Reuters Foundation (TRF), based on findings from a survey of over 200 journalists from more than 70 countries in the Global South and emerging economies, aims to address that. The study, which I authored, sheds light on how AI is being used, the unique challenges these newsrooms face, and the implications of this for journalists, newsroom leaders, funders and policy makers. Here are some of the…

By Damian Radcliffe Artificial intelligence is reshaping multiple industries, including journalism. In the week of World Press Freedom Day, it’s worth considering how the technology can impact media freedom. This picture is complex. On the one hand, AI, and generative AI, can be a powerful tool to support newsrooms, but it can also be weaponized against them. Globally, the state of press freedom was classified as a “difficult situation” in the latest RSF World Press Freedom Index, the first time this label has been used to categorize Against this backdrop, the U.N. notes that “AI brings new risks.”…

Artificial intelligence may bring about the end of the world as we know it – but not in the way most would expect By Dr. Mathew Maavak, who researches systems science, global risks, geopolitics, strategic foresight, governance, and Artificial Intelligence The global economy was already navigating a minefield of volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity (VUCA) when US President Donald J. Trump’s ‘Liberation Day’ tariffs reverberated across international markets. This aggressive escalation of trade barriers, including a mélange of sudden rate hikes, retaliatory measures, and rhetorical brinkmanship, didn’t just amplify the chaos; it ignited the specter of a full-blown economic firestorm.…