INMA (International News Media Association) organized an annual innovation week in Helsinki at the end of September. More than three hundred participants from all over the world had gathered in Little Finland -house for three days. I took a few notes during the seminar, took a few pictures of the important presentation materials and then let the time pass. After two weeks, I took out my anger, wrote down the three main themes that had stuck in my mind from those three days, and started writing this blog.
Engagement, distinctiveness, recommendability and permanence are things that every media measures and strives to improve. If the media has a clear, permanent and strong brand of its own, it will make it easier to achieve all the previously mentioned things to aim for. The brand is a combination of original journalism, polished and well-built products and the technology that supports the two. One thing that you saw very concretely at INMA is that when you sit surrounded by the world's leading newspapers, newspapers that have faced the same challenges as everyone else, their way of telling things to their readers, listeners or viewers has not really changed. The chosen angle has been kept and creates security and permanence in media consumers, thus creating brand loyalty.
In several case studies, it was emphasised that it is not so much about how nicely the technology has been made to play together but how people have been involved and made to adopt new technology. This is of course an age-old challenge, but perhaps in more traditional process digitalizations, it has been treated like a waterfall - when everything changes, there is no other choice but to jump into the flow and go with it. When it comes to bringing AI into the editorial process, the waterfall model doesn't work so well. For someone who uses AI by necessity and is not interested in delving into why, how, and at what point in my work, this would make it easier for me, but the results can be the opposite. The power decreases, and the annoyance increases.
In several examples, tech experts who went to deliveries were gathered. They were part of the editorial team, not the gurus of the internal IT department who would come to say how the Teppo editor should prepare and write his article tomorrow. Together with the delivery, these agents observed, questioned and wondered about all kinds of challenges and nimbly created solutions for them, of course first using the platforms built for these projects.
Politiken's story stuck in my mind the most. They had added a separate picture narrative level to extensive reportage stories. Picture narration creates a passage for the reader to the story itself. Let's highlight the essence of the whole thing with about eight carefully selected, photographed and well-concentrated photos. The end result looks impressive, and without denying, it does its job, creating a growing interest in the reportage itself in its readers. What is surprising about this whole process is not the technology behind it but how the images are chosen and the storytelling plot is created. It takes place far from the digital dimension in the middle of the large open office of Politiken's editorial office, with large photo prints and text candidates lying on the floor, forming a photo-narrative final result as a result of the editor's cut-paste-craft work. So, no matter how much technology creates opportunities, the only force driving change forward is the people themselves. In this case, the strength is precisely born from the fact that the entire group that participated in the journalistic reportage process together illustrates in eight pictures the whole of the story that they themselves have been creating. No artificial intelligence could do that, and no individual supplier of this process.
A strong part of the publication's brand is personality and a certain underlining of one's own style throughout the publication. On the other hand, at INMA, perhaps more than usual, media independence and information integrity, information reliability and political neutrality were emphasised. Laura Hyvärinen from Helsingin Sanomat talked about the intervention made for freedom of speech and free communication, where Helsingin Sanomat designed a map for the very popular shooter game Counterstrike, in which they embedded a lot of factual information about the war between Russia and Ukraine. The game in question is especially very popular among youth and young adults in Russia. The map became a hit, with over 50,000 downloads and 4.58 stars out of five.
Since the facts were not visible on the map but required the players to know how to find them, it is not possible to say exactly how many people finally found these facts about Russia's actions in Ukraine, let alone how well the information spread from then on. Undeniably, the findings of factual information have caused a discussion among players. Perhaps one of the successes can be considered the fact that about a month after the release of the map, it suddenly disappeared from the game completely. Free speech in a free country is not exactly free everywhere.