Embracing Technology in Journalism Education Practice

The AJE Summer Conference kicked off session 1 with the theme of embracing new technologies in Journalism teaching. Derby’s Gurvinder Aujla-Sidhu discussed Podcast Journalism and the Role of Women before Sophie McCooey and Greg Nixon from Liverpool John Moores University talked about AI – the thorn in the side of many an academic.

Their paper, co-authored by Thomas McCooey, discussed students’ reactions to writing news with AI and learning about its limitations in real time.

Any academic who has set a task to get students to use AI for news – when we spend so much time warning them about using it for assignments due to academic misconduct – might seem counterintuitive, But findings show how it makes them far more wary of its use and helps them understand its limitations and the need for human checking.

Layla Painter from the University of Leeds discussed the use of digital skills and social media for storytelling with audio, video and captions for context and discussed the way that young people now access news. She showed two very different social stories – one from a nurse discussing the challenges of her work and another piece to camera about football, explaining the Club World Cup.

Maria Urbina Montana from University of Derby has co-authored a project with Chilean academic Camilla Buzzo on looking at Narratives Across Borders – examining the geopolitical framing of AI in global journalism. She discussed how social media algorithms have become gatekeepers of journalistic content , sampling posts on X over several months based in the global north and in Latin America.

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