NEW YORK--"Everybody's a journal-ish now," says Joan Donovan. "Everybody's reporting, authoring, publishing. We need to educate high school and college students on how to do journalism. Everybody needs to know a little about it, to tell good from bad."
The assistant professor of journalism and emerging media studies in the College of Communications at Boston University and founder of the Critical Internet Studies Institute is speaking on the topic of Artificial Intelligence in Journalism to 90-plus participants at the Council on Foreign Relations' Local Journalists Workshop, held recently at CFR's headquarters on East 68th Street in Manhattan.
I'm not quite sure why I'm here at an event mostly focused on the work of reporters; although I write this weekly column, I spend most of my professional time editing copy of other columnists and editorial writers. When an invitation to attend showed up via email, I suspected it was spam but nevertheless responded, and was stunned to get a return email the next day saying I was welcome to attend.
So I took Janis Joplin's advice: Get it while you can.
Two other Arkansas journalists are present, along with others from almost every other state. Many of their news outlets are nonprofits. Some are NPR affiliates, TV stations like Telemundo, and newspapers such as the Arkansas........