Technology is enabling great opportunities in media: Barkha Dutt

At the e4m NewsNext Summit 2024, Barkha Dutt, Founder-Editor of Mojo Story, spoke on the topic- ‘Technology, AI & Impact on Journalism’.

Dutt began her session highlighting the trend of journalists departing from mainstream media to establish their own platforms. She, however, mentioned that despite this transition, journalists aren't immune to the challenges posed by hyperpolarization in media discourse.

According to her, there are three problems that journalists today are facing irrespective of the medium they are in.

One is hyperpolarization because the audience has begun to love a bias, she shared.

The second challenge, according to her, is the changing nature of technology. “The good news is that great opportunities have been enabled by technology. I do a live streaming show on my platform every evening at five o'clock. When I did the same show at NDTV, it took a crew of 15 people, the production control room, an output editor etc. Now that I have mastered the technology, I can do it myself. We try to keep it to the highest standards of production.”

“The downside is that the technology is changing so quickly that we are all going to have to do two things. We're all going to have to upskill and we're all going to have to unlearn. If we do not upskill and we do not unlearn, we will soon become redundant. Otherwise, technology will not be your friend, it will be a disruptor in a bad way. Make technology your friend,” she added.

The last challenge she spoke about was revenue. According to Dutt, newspapers depend on the government, while television channels depend on big businesses or government, and the market and the internet now depend on clicks. 

“We have moved from a state when media was government-owned, to the tyranny of the market, when advertisers and your ratings drove how many sponsors you got, to now the tyranny of the algorithm. These are challenges and they are leading to a kind of hyperpolarization. The desperate dependence on the click is a very worrying trend in the media today.”

However, in the end, no matter how many platforms or jobs artificial intelligence takes away, what matters is the relationship between you and your audience, she concluded.