ery simply, the term journalism of things (JoT) joins the concepts of journalism and the internet of things, as formulated by Brazilian researcher Marcelo Barcelos in his PhD thesis, and also by Jakob Vicari in his book Journalismus der dinge, both from 2019. With the development of technologies based on artificial intelligence, automated systems are already capable of producing journalistic content. News agencies and media outlets already use AI and algorithm-based tools to produce content. These tools search the internet for data, cross-reference the information, and produce articles. For trivial hard news coverage like road accidents, traffic information, and weather events, the use of these AI-based tools for news production can be effective in answering the five W’s (who, what, where, when, and why), which are the basic elements for writing a journalistic text. Technology can become an ally of the newsrooms since it frees the journalist to do jobs that require more time and dedication to the investigation of more complex facts and that require a more critical perspective. But it also raises new debates, given the impact of this technology on the profession and users.
There interesting projects going on at WDR; in an interview to AXSemantics, Vicari speaks about a project called Super Cows, where three dairy cows “reported from their lives”. Sensor data gave the animals a voice. And with #bienenlive, the WDR spectators were taken live into the life of bees. Explained in a very simple way, in this project a simple text robot translated the data into a diary of the queen bee. This new world and its challenges bring to the front the discussion of the ethics surrounding the internet of things, the hybridization/robotization of human affectivity, the isolation and harassment of intelligent machines, amongst other things.
