Humans Have Heart, Computers Do Not
Algorithms, it seems, have their obvious limits, especially when people position algorithms in opposition to human capacities. Humans have heart and instinct, while computers do not. The ability to judge newsworthiness is seen as a distinctly human quality and a central factor of what journalism is about: craft. It is contingent on journalistic instincts and professional know-how. While some of the interviewees, as we have seen, think there has been too much emphasis on “human instincts” in journalism, “gut feeling” is still an important part of the professional self-understanding of journalists and editors (Schultz, 2007). The journalistic “gut feeling” constitutes a tacit form of knowledge about the newsworthiness of a story. To most practitioners, it is so self-evident that explaining what this gut feeling actually amounts to can be dificult. Even textbook authors charged with articulating the nuances of news practice for newcomers, describe the end-product of journalistic socialization as “instinct” (Coter, 2010: 77). Indeed, many of the interviewees rely on well-known journalistic discourses of professionalism when talking about the role of algorithms in journalism.
As the role of information gatekeeping increasingly lies in the hands of engineers and computer programmers, journalists and news professionals are faced with the dificult task of revisiting professional codes of conduct, and defining what the role of journalism should be. Major concerns in these discussions are whether robots will supersede human labor and what increased automation means for job security. When prompted to think about this, many of the informants talked instead about the limitations of algorithms. While algorithms promise to make the editorial workflow more eficient, this is also where the relationship between algorithms and automation hits its boundary. Algorithms, most interviewees contend, are basically just math, formulas, and calculations. Geir Larsen, then head of analysis at Norway’s most read newspaper $V G ,$ notes how the growing amount of data is just a fact, something news organizations have to deal with sooner rather than later. Yet, the influence of data and algorithms should not be exaggerated. “An algorithm is just a form of programmed logic,” Larsen replies when I ask what kind of algorithms VG is using. “Big data or not,” Larsen continues, “we do a lot of interesting things with small data, too. Whether the data set is big or not is not that important.” At the end of the day, “the most important working tool you have is your journalistic instinct” (Interview 20, March 2014). Even at a news organization such as Omni, which fundamentally relies on algorithmic intermediaries, the computer’s inability to infer contextual information or understand irony means that “there is no chance that algorithms will ever be able to replace the human heart and brain in knowing what is best for the readers” (Interview 8, April 2014). This juxtaposition of human judgment and computational mechanisms does not just reveal a way of thinking about algorithms as mechanical and inferior; it also speaks to the desire of maintaining journalists’ professional environment. As Larsen suggests when I ask about the prospects for automating the curation and presentation of the front page at VG, “We have thought about it, but the answer is no.”
138
I F . . . T H E N