Andrea Perez
Daniel Torrealba is a Venezuelan journalist, currently working as the director in Strategic Communication and External relationships in CAF (bank of development in Latin America and the Caribbean). He has two master degrees, one in Master in Project Management and another one in Digital and Online Marketing. He has had the opportunity to cover important political elections, such other events.
Q: Could you tell me about your daily routine in the newsroom?
A: Well, for example, I work in the digital area of the newsroom, and there are 3 turns, which are switching all day, from 6 am to 11 pm, so this guarantees that the webpage is always updated, always having someone active in case something happens, or even some changes in the printed version of the journal, with news that happen at last time of the day.
Q: How do you decide if a news is worth publishing? Both in print and online.
A: It’s kind of a relevance thing. Because of how newsy it is. I mean, of course after a while, as a journalist, you start developing a “journalistic smell”, to identify what is actually news, and in case it is, being able to build the news up and post it. Now, when it comes to news online, you have way more tools to know if your topic has public interest or not. For example, we use Google Analytics to check how relevant our news are, to see if people are reading them and all those things.
Q: How long before do you start writing a story to publish it?
A: Well, its complicated. It depends if you post your news online or printed. For example, in the digital newspaper, the idea is to be way more concise and be able to post a couple of news a day. I mean, you can have like, 5, 6 or even 7 stories to post, which is what is expected from an online journalist, it happened to me in Venezuela and it’s also happening to me now in Colombia. So, you have to like, post way more news online than what you post on the printed journal, where you can post 2 or maximum 3, because concepts of space, for example. Another difference is, that online you have less time, mostly because you don’t have to fill with sources, but your material is the one you find on the web, on television, and of course, information from official agency press. So, basically, summing up. As the we try to reduce the process as much as possible, in order to have the most amount of news in the web; we have around 15 or 20 minutes to decide if it’s worth it or not. Once you have that, you have like half an hour to build the news up and post it on the web at once.
Q: When you want to post a news online, how do you manage the SEO?
A: Well, the format is the basic one, in the sense that, for most webs, the news is basically text with small paragraphs that have bold letters, hyperlinks, and to have that digital writing, like sources from your social media or a video for readers, to visualize what you are saying, all of these just to make it ideally interesting to the users and looking for them to consume your content. So, they not only read your article, but they also go to your Twitter, the pictures. It’s all about the engagement, to catch them well enough to go to the webpage and read others of your news. Also, SEO it’s about how your readers get or find your news article through the search engines, where what matters a lot are your headline, the pictures you use in your article. You may even have someone in charge of optimization, someone who takes care of optimizing a link, or to know that the picture is optimized, that has a good name. Of course, some of these aspects also depend on the medium and if you have the correct personnel to know everything is ready to post once it’s optimized.
Q: What do you think about the fact that we, as journalists, can be so subjective when posting news?
A: Well, I mean, I feel like subjectivity will always exist. Why? Because, we are human beings and human beings are subjective per se. It is so hard to be objective about something. You try to know where is your subjectivity, in order not to show it so much, but I think part of that in yourself, will always exist. It also depends on the editorial line, for the journal you work for. Because all in all, although you are subjective, the media you work for is subjective too, so you have to follow those ideas. For example, in Spain, it’s not the same to publish for ABC Diario than for El País.
Q: And what advice would you give to someone who is trying to be as less subjective as possible?
A: I think you have to know yourself well enough, because if you do, you know your affiliations and you can control them better if you know yourself than when you don’t. If you don’t know what you like or dislike, that can also be showed when you are writing
Q: What do you think about the fast spread of the Artificial Intelligence? (AI)
A: I think it has its pros and cons. For example, as pros, I can say it’s used when writing news. There are plenty of journalists who are using it to improve their articles. For example, here in Colombia, the official guidelines on how it should be used, maybe are not so clear yet for some media. It wasn’t so clear how, when and for what it should be used. But now, journalists are using it, even to reduce time, to find information, etc. So, yes, it’s being positive for us. It could also come some time when it’s not so positive because it could reduce the number of journalists needed, or even the humans you need in the newsroom. When you know you have the support of an AI, for example, there are media that base their content on what is posted by others, and just make two or three changes and post it on your web. You used a person for that before, but with AI nowadays, you could automatize that process, so journalists wouldn’t be that necessary. However, this could also lead to journalists reinvent themselves and have to learn other things to still be useful. In fact, journalism when I graduated has definitely changed in comparison to nowadays.
Q: Have you, in your newsroom took some measures to control that AI is not used in the wrong ways?
A: No, more than to control that it is not used, (and I think that is what organizations, media and others have to do), is to teach what it should be used for. And most of all, to know what can you share with it. For example, if you are an organization that is sharing information with another company, and you don’t know what kind of use that company can do with the information and the AI together, then is more like, to have laws for organizations, media and corporations like these. For example, I’m using it nowadays, I use Chat GPT, I’m paying for the premium membership, because it helps me to improve, to check my texts and my editorials, to know they are right. So, yeah, basically to reduce time, and to have like a personal assistant to do better, in general. And, in fact, I think we can get good things out of this powerful technology. I mean, it is possible, that in a while it’s going to be more intelligent than us, and knows how to do processes better than us, so you basically have to know how to use it and what do you get good out of it, how do you use it in order to not get left behind, which is what workers must do, to not be put aside because of the AI.
Q: What do you think about the relationship between the AI and fake news?
A: I think the AI could give you fake news if you want it to. You could find some prompts. I mean, there are some things you could ask the AI to give you and it would say “no” to it. I feel like it’s more visible the field of pictures, if you, for example, ask it to make you a picture of President Biden dead, it would say it can’t be done. However, if in the text field, you ask for a story where the President of the United States, called Biden, dies and it will do it and you can post that as fake news; so yes, it’s easier, especially, in this moment, through texts. But if you think about it, it’s not the AI per se the one that is causing harm, but it’s the person who asks for that to be written and then post it. In the end, with the AI happens the same that with social media, which are the medium. The message is the one that still depends on the human being, and it’s the human the one that has to learn what’s right and what’s wrong, or what can be done, even as a society, to be able to judge some fake news because is from someone that could help to do some material, social or individual harm. Moreover, in order to counteract the fact that Ghat GPT doesn’t give you the link of where it’s taking the information is to actually ask what sources is he using, without citing it directly, without sharing you a link.
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