Akangjungla
Every day the newsroom is flooded with press releases and statements on report about various activities and events from different corners. To name a few, this kind of matters which are later presented in the form of news item, are often issued by government departments, civil society organisations, educational institutions, political parties etc. Last week, quite a lot of organisations and institutions joined the commemoration of International Women’s day in the State, and the news room could see multiple press releases coming in. The occasion and the quantity of the press releases was like any other daily assignment for the news desk, however, the content and the language used in the statements stood out, or rather took the attention. There were quite a few press releases from completely different sources containing similar sentences with usage of unusual introduction nearly identical since it was the same occasion, complex sentence formation which had no relation to the event, highly informal languages used for descriptions, and almost like a poetic work. Sadly, a quarter of such press releases came from schools and colleges in Nagaland.
In any newspaper organization, one of the tasks for the news desk or sub-editor is to prepare the press releases for publication and it requires the ability to execute basic editing, proofreading and making sure the content fulfills the criteria of a news item. The recent trend of content writing, with doubt of being generated with the help of artificial intelligence raises concern. Undoubtedly, artificial intelligence has its own benefits and it only continue to advance. Nonetheless, its penetration into the education sector and journalism raises a number of ethical concerns. It becomes crucial find ways to uphold originality, accountability and transparency. The newsroom and journalists are becoming aware of these concerns and taking steps to mitigate the practices/usage of artificial intelligence for generating news reports and press release to maintain journalistic ethics. And while doing so, it is important for the readers (including those who are writing the press releases) to ensure and demonstrate unique insights, human context, effectiveness and morally acceptable.
Comments can be sent to akangjungla@gmail.com
