Notes from Newmark: Leading AI Education for Journalists
“Notes from Newmark” showcases our community’s innovations — and the people behind them.
The Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism is excited to announce the launch of our AI Advisory Board. Newmark’s faculty has been digging into artificial intelligence for years. The new advisory board marks the next chapter in our efforts, inviting leading thinkers about AI to help stake out a clear position in the shifting terrain of AI — one that focuses on our role as training journalists on how to use and innovate with the technology, while keeping watch on the issues of bias, diversity, and equity that accompany it.
The board consists of twelve members with about half representing Newmark faculty and instructors from J+ — the school’s professional development division: Sandeep Junnarkar, Lam Thuy Vo, Barbara Gray, Jeremy Caplan, and Nikita Roy. An additional seven AI experts to join the board include Justin Hendrix, editor of Tech Policy Press; Gideon Lichfield, former editor-in-chief of Wired; Aimee Rinehart, senior product manager AI strategy, The Associated Press; Kevin Delaney, co-founder of Charter; Karen Hao, contributing writer at The Atlantic; Dorrine Mendoza, product and partnerships lead, The American Journalism Project; and Andrew Rodriguez Calderon, computational journalist at The Marshall Project.
The board isn’t Newmark J-School’s first foray into AI. Professor Sandeep Junnarkar, director of Newmark’s Data Journalism Program, won a grant from the “AI and the News: An Open Challenge” in 2019 to study AI’s effects on news and information on behalf of Newmark, the only journalism school selected among the grantees. The demand for AI and data journalism teaching has only grown.
Junnarkar and his colleague Associate Professor Lam Thuy Vo help students explore the ways machine learning, data mining, and algorithms are changing news production and consumption.
“At Newmark, we train our students to write their own AI and machine learning programs that can run complex investigative tasks,” said Junnarkar, who is also a data trainer and projects adviser at Bloomberg News.
Newmark offers courses that give graduate students a practical grounding in how AI makes decisions, teaching them to create public records requests that can uncover bias in coding and algorithms powering government-run datasets.
“It’s essential for journalists to understand the plumbing of the technologies powering AI tools like ChatGPT or to question the efficacy of the many algorithms that are transforming our lives,” said Vo, who is also a reporter at The Markup, where she regularly covers and investigates AI.
This year J+, in collaboration with Microsoft, launched its first AI Journalism Lab. The three-month program features seminars and hands-on workshops. Nikita Roy, AI educator, host of the podcast Newsroom Robots and Knight Fellow at the International Center for Journalists, is at the program’s helm.
“The AI Journalism Lab is equipping our participants with the strategic mindset, technical prowess and ethical compass to navigate the complexities of AI and drive its responsible adoption in newsrooms,” said Roy.
As AI shifts the news terrain, the school’s role is clear: to train the journalists of tomorrow to lead some of the most important thinking about AI, to identify where its limitations lie and to discover a new world of possibilities. The new AI Advisory Board only furthers Newmark’s mission.
Curious about learning more about AI programs, teachings, and other Newmark J-School news? Follow @newmarkjschool.