Posted by Digital Journalism on the WI Learning Hub Wednesday, 27th August 2025 at 7.30pm
I got ChatGPT to generate me a picture representing digital journalism and it produced the picture above which whilst a little bit old-fashioned (very 1980s) is not unsurprising.
Journalism began in 1400s. Italian and German businessmen wrote down the latest news and circulated it to their connections in the city. The practice grew, especially during times of war so that the people back home would know what was going on. Journalists were providing a service – informing and updating peoples’ lives.
Consequently, journalists have long been the gatekeepers of culture. You ask historians and a big part of their research is often looking at old newspapers, that reflect their times, which is probably why many women have not gone down in history and we are just researching and recovering their stories now.
I myself did a post-graduate diploma in journalism in 2006, at that time, I’d already been online for over a decade and even back then journalism long seemed a bit old fashioned and struggling to keep up as it entered a new phase of the digital: backpack journalism, data journalism, mojo journalism, spin doctors in New Labour’s government and so on, and it seems it has been trying to find its way ever since.
The course was lots of fun as getting to be a carefree student again was great. We did reporting by sitting in court, chasing ambulances, and pitching articles based on the anniversaries of things, or on similar articles already in the newspapers, which we had to buy everyday and read to get ideas. I often thought that the media would consume itself with its self-referential writing and noticed that even back then the Guardian had a penchant for writing articles assuming that the reader had read all the red tops so that they could analyse the analysis already given in those places.
The Huffington Post had been founded the year before (2005), and it was expecting journalists to write for free, even though us journalists were advised to not put anything online for free, unless it was a reputable paper and a way of getting a foot in the door. These days of course, we have content creators, who were known back them as citizen journalists. Some journalists are still quite sniffy about them, but they do the same job often in more depth, and they can earn a lot more money. Then, we have many celebrities and fired journalists who build their own platforms to promote their alternative, sometimes, conspiratorial theories.
In this talk we will be looking at all these areas, asking is this ‘progress‘? What about media law with social media journalism, privacy and trust, and our data? Especially when it is used to train the LLMs which are the backbone of generative AI. The same generative AI which produced the old-fashioned picture above, using old-fashioned data.
Society pays lip service to change and to equity but the practical day-to-day of our lives is very different, mediated by the media, who are motivated primarily by the need to get eyes on their copy, so much so that sometimes, the medium is the message and yet journalism remains a really important part of society not least of all because its influence on democracy itself.
I will be exploring these topics and more on Wednesday.
I hope to see you there:
