DataJConf 5.0

Wow, has it been 2 years? Unbelievable.

Last week we held the 5th edition of the European Data & Computational Journalism Conference (#datajconf) in Athens, Greece. It was our first conference since Zurich in 2023, and once again it was, I think, very successful. As always, it was fascinating to see the progress that has been made in the last two years, and how both academic research and industry practice has evolved.

I’d previously thought in Zurich that AI had dominated the agenda but that was nothing compared to the schedule this year, where it was so pervasive that the few authors whose work didn’t involve AI felt the need to mention this at the beginning of their talks and perhaps even excuse it. I think we could count on one hand the number of talks that didn’t mention generative some sort of AI or AI adjacent technology. I’d also commented last time around that many news organisations were quite immature in their adoption of AI - there was a lot of pockets of experimentation, but it was not really baked into newsroom practice or workflows. This conference revealed a vastly changed landscape, with most industry talks showing evidence of how AI had become a standard part of the workflow within their organisation, and how mature AI adoption was in many newsrooms. Tellingly though, all were keen to stress that they were not working without humans in the loop - nobody has yet reached the point where they were willing to trust the pipeline of AI into public facing output without some human level editorial oversight - and it’s not clear that anyone would want to get to that point.

All in all, a fantastic set of academic and industry speakers, some incredibly useful and practical workshops, all rounded off with a truly exciting set of keynote speakers. I genuinely can’t wait for the next one.