The advent of digital technologies, AI, and platforms has impacted a vital pillar for a healthy democracy: the news media ecosystem. The distribution channels of news stories have changed, the pace of news has shifted, and production strategies have been altered. In response to these changes, many news organizations increasingly rely on information from news agencies and competitors, and use AI in news production. We investigate the outcomes of these interdependencies and uncover complex dynamics in the news ecosystem.
In the project ‘Complex Dynamics in Digital News Ecosystems: Collaboration and Imitation in the Age of AI’, we demonstrated how shocks to the ecosystem and adaptations among news organizations influence 1) the collaborative structure of the news ecosystem, 2) the diversity in the news coverage, and 3) the role of generative AI in news production. We collected big datasets and used computational social science methods, such as network analysis, natural language processing, LLM-induced simulation modeling.
The project was an interdisciplinary collaboration between the Strategic Organization Design and the Digital Democracy Centre at SDU.
Contact:
Emil Bakkensen Johansen, Ph.D. student (emilbj@sam.sdu.dk)