Verity’s Vicarious and Vicious Virtues
A report in The Sydney Morning Herald this week revealed that News Corp is implementing Verity 2.0 for News Corp journalists, an algorithmic tool that ostensibly supports their work. With its Orwellian supervision of journalistic routines, there are concerns about its intervention into journalistic production. Indeed, there is a growing body of research into the impact of such technology on journalism.
The field of journalistic professionalism has seen an erosion of what was already limited autonomy due to insecure employment and the increasing consolidation of media, but this has been exacerbated by the technological innovations behind media transition. Journalists told Hanusch and Tandoc that the way they see their work is impacted by the ready presence of such feedback as analytics and social media, and an investigation by Neheli found that this orientation was impeding journalistic standards and practices.
That said, journalists have a history of rapidly taking up technological innovations to complement their professional practices – indeed, as the SMH article noted, other prominent Australian news organisations use similar tools. Holman and Perreault have suggested that it is part of the role of journalists to be first adopters of technological innovation, and news organisations can drive some of this development themselves.
A more concerning aspect of a tool like Verity is less its existence and more the way in which it might be implemented by news organisations. While algorithms can seem like mediators of an objective truth, they are enshrining and empowering the sensibilities of their designers and supervisors. In this case, a specifically commercial set of management and editor sensibilities driven by a consumer focus (and not a citizen focus) is being entrenched algorithmically within journalistic routines. It is this ‘big brother’ automated oversight that marks a concerning intervention into journalistic professionalism and a pretty clear counter to journalistic autonomy. It is important to separate the potential utility of the tool from the tyranny of its potentially arbitrary focus. Such innovative facilitations could prove a boon – provided there are safeguards for the crucial role of autonomy in the journalistic profession.
Tim Koskie
PhD Candidate
This article was featured in our newsletter of 24 June 2022 that looked at inconsistencies in media standards as reflected in the Rebel Wilson debacle, News Corp's algorithmic tool and its impact on journalistic autonomy, and a shifting tide at the JNI.
Click to read the full edition.
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