The decision to start using an algorithm in the first place is not always as clear-cut as one might think. Christian Gillinger, who works as head of social media at Sveriges Radio, says of the process of developing the concept for a socially generated top list to be shown on the front-page of the public service broadcaster’s website that “all of a sudden we discovered that what we were doing was creating an algorithm” (Interview 17, May 2016). The social media team had been given the task of finding new ways of promoting socially engaging content. They started down the obvious route, looking at how well certain programs did in terms of likes, shares, and comments. However, they quickly realized that the list would merely reflect and be skewed toward the most popular programs. As Gillinger says, there is nothing particularly social about merely looking at the number of likes and shares for a particular program. If you are a small program, say a Kurdish program with 2000 listeners in total, and you still manage to mobilize 1900 people to share or like you posts, then you are really doing a good job in terms of being social, he adds. Initially, “we didn’t know that what we were developing was an algorithm, but we knew we could not leave it up to the diferent news sections” to define the social; “it had to be done with the help of mathematics.” Because “an algorithm is just a mathematical formula,” the critical task is to decide what the algorithm is supposed to reflect (Interview 17, May 2016, emphasis added). For Gillinger, making decisions about what the algorithm is supposed to reflect is critically dependent on the people involved in actually developing the algorithmic logic. While algorithms are often accused of foreclosing diversity in terms of access to content, the diversity of people designing the algorithms is much less discussed. The more people who think about algorithms and help develop them inside news organizations, the beter, Gillinger argues, suggesting that algorithms require diversity in the teams that create and are responsible for them.
While the algorithm reveals itself as problematic in the initial phases of development and implementation, it may not always solve problems, and it may also create news ones. Sometimes, algorithms simply personalize too much, or they turn out not to automate things as much as anticipated. The news-ranking algorithm at the center of Omni’s editorial infrastructure does not merely support the editors’ workflow; the editors also have to support the algorithm in various ways. As the field of infrastructure studies has taught us, infrastructures require ongoing human commitment and maintenance work (Bowker et al., 2010; Star & Ruhleder, 1996). Infrastructures can be understood as enabling resources; yet, in order to function properly, they are dependent on “human elements, such as work practices, individual habits, and organizational culture” (Plantin et al., 2016: 4). Initially, the idea of assigning the function of curating the front page at Omni to an algorithm was to reduce the need for manual labor. As “Frank,” one of the editors working at Omni, explained to me while I sat next to him observing him at work, the idea is that editors only have to set the news and lifetime value once based on their journalistic know-how; and, then, the algorithm would take care of the rest (Interview 12, March 2015).13 Despite the relative simplicity of the algorithm at work, it turned out that not only did the algorithm not eliminate the need for humans in the workplace, it also, somewhat paradoxically, seemed to put new tasks on the table. As was described earlier, part of the work that editors do at Omni is to assign news and lifetime values to each news story, so that the news-ranking algorithm is able to process it accordingly. Based on these values and a few other signals (i.e., user’s explicit news setings and diferent weights assigned to diferent news sections), the algorithm works to compute the right order on the front page and the right length of time a news story is allowed to remain in that position.
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