■ PUBLICATIONS
Road to freedom : News media breaking free from Silicon Valley’s grip (2021) ➢
The aim of the Road to freedom research project was to find out how the Finnish news media are dependent on the technology giants of Silicon Valley, mainly Meta (Facebook, Messenger, Instagram, Whatsapp), Alphabet (Google, Youtube, Android), Apple and Amazon. In this report we present an examination of whether the nature of dependence is disproportionate in terms of power, and if so, how the news media could break free from the excessive influence of the technology giants.
Automated Journalism as a Source of and a Diagnostic Device for Bias in Reporting (2020) ➢
In this article we consider automated journalism from the perspective of bias in news text. We describe how systems for automated journalism could be biased in terms of both the information content and the lexical choices in the text, and what mechanisms allow human biases to affect automated journalism even if the data the system operates on is considered neutral. Hence, we sketch out three distinct scenarios differentiated by the technical transparency of the systems and the level of cooperation of the system operator, affecting the choice of methods for investigating bias.
Immersive Automation: News Automation – A WAN-IFRA guide to the field (2019) ➢
The Immersive Automation is a research and development project that aims at automating news production, and is looking for new ways of making it more automatic. The project’s aim is to create a roadmap and a demonstration of a future news ecosystem based on automated storytelling, intense audience engagement and user experience.
Speaker at SXSW 2018: The Humanoid Future of Journalism (2018) Audio ➢ / Slides ➢
Speaker at South by Southwest. Hanna presented her academic research on news automation and practical experiences from Sweden and Finland where robots now write more news articles than humans. Together with representatives from United Robot and MittMedia she also talked about how all this will affect the news industry in the future.
Master's Thesis (2017) ➢
The aim of the thesis was to gather an understanding on how news automation influences journalists’ work, professional identity and how journalists’ attitudes towards news automation have changed after they started working with it. The research finds that in future journalists use the same working methods as before but, due to news robots, they shift their focus from repetitive tasks to interviews, on the field work and analyses. Automation gives journalists more time to work on news stories that would otherwise been left undone, and it also increases both the quantity and quality of news articles. The study also finds that working with news automation changes journalists’ attitudes from neutral and negative to positive.
Bachelor's Exam (2016) ➢
This study researched upper secondary students' media literacy skills as well as their ability to evaluate the trustworthiness of news. In the study, the students were given three articles with no information of its source: only title and text. Results show that when evaluating the trustworthiness of an article the students paid attention to numeric and statistic information, language and structure, sources and interviewees, objectivity and to how the information is in a relationship with what they already know. The result show an alarming lack in media literacy skills as half of the students evaluated a false media source equally trustworthy to the national broadcasting company.
The aim of the Road to freedom research project was to find out how the Finnish news media are dependent on the technology giants of Silicon Valley, mainly Meta (Facebook, Messenger, Instagram, Whatsapp), Alphabet (Google, Youtube, Android), Apple and Amazon. In this report we present an examination of whether the nature of dependence is disproportionate in terms of power, and if so, how the news media could break free from the excessive influence of the technology giants.
Automated Journalism as a Source of and a Diagnostic Device for Bias in Reporting (2020) ➢
In this article we consider automated journalism from the perspective of bias in news text. We describe how systems for automated journalism could be biased in terms of both the information content and the lexical choices in the text, and what mechanisms allow human biases to affect automated journalism even if the data the system operates on is considered neutral. Hence, we sketch out three distinct scenarios differentiated by the technical transparency of the systems and the level of cooperation of the system operator, affecting the choice of methods for investigating bias.
Immersive Automation: News Automation – A WAN-IFRA guide to the field (2019) ➢
The Immersive Automation is a research and development project that aims at automating news production, and is looking for new ways of making it more automatic. The project’s aim is to create a roadmap and a demonstration of a future news ecosystem based on automated storytelling, intense audience engagement and user experience.
Speaker at SXSW 2018: The Humanoid Future of Journalism (2018) Audio ➢ / Slides ➢
Speaker at South by Southwest. Hanna presented her academic research on news automation and practical experiences from Sweden and Finland where robots now write more news articles than humans. Together with representatives from United Robot and MittMedia she also talked about how all this will affect the news industry in the future.
Master's Thesis (2017) ➢
The aim of the thesis was to gather an understanding on how news automation influences journalists’ work, professional identity and how journalists’ attitudes towards news automation have changed after they started working with it. The research finds that in future journalists use the same working methods as before but, due to news robots, they shift their focus from repetitive tasks to interviews, on the field work and analyses. Automation gives journalists more time to work on news stories that would otherwise been left undone, and it also increases both the quantity and quality of news articles. The study also finds that working with news automation changes journalists’ attitudes from neutral and negative to positive.
Bachelor's Exam (2016) ➢
This study researched upper secondary students' media literacy skills as well as their ability to evaluate the trustworthiness of news. In the study, the students were given three articles with no information of its source: only title and text. Results show that when evaluating the trustworthiness of an article the students paid attention to numeric and statistic information, language and structure, sources and interviewees, objectivity and to how the information is in a relationship with what they already know. The result show an alarming lack in media literacy skills as half of the students evaluated a false media source equally trustworthy to the national broadcasting company.
Updated April 2022
Contact: hanna.tuulonen(a)helsinki.fi