I’ve started thinking about new AI-summaries and searches on news media sites. The research question bouncing around my brain is How do AI-mediated summaries and searches reshape the discoverability, summarization, and narrative framing of journalism’s historically controversial archives?
The first output of this project will appear in RUBIX as a commentary soon and I will be presenting it at the ORBICOM conference in Montreal at the end of October.
You can see the ORBICOM presentation here: https://canva.link/hc35wyv6xq89k7f
Examples of AI-mediated searches:
The Washington Post: https://www.washingtonpost.com/search/?query=
The Financial Times: https://ask.ft.com/
“Whether it is selecting out and selecting for, through policy or through design, with whatever justification—all of it “moderates” not only what any one user is likely to see but also what society is likely to attend to, take seriously, struggle with, and value.” – Tarleton Gillespie
READINGS:
- News Machines newsletter: How Der Spiegel brings the Nazi party membership files into ChatGPT and Claude
- Derrida, J. (1996). Archive fever: A Freudian impression (E. Prenowitz, Trans.). University of Chicago Press.
- Dragomir, M. (2026). Who Owns the Answer: Pluralism and Power in the Automated Information Order.
- Foucault, M. (1972). The archaeology of knowledge. Tavistock Publications.
- Gillespie, T. (2022). Do not recommend? Reduction as a form of content moderation. Social Media + Society, 8(4). https://doi.org/10.1177/20563051221117552
- Harris, V. S. (2022). Ghosts of archive : deconstructive intersectionality and praxis (1st ed.). Routledge.
- Hersh, W. R. (2023). Search still matters: Information retrieval in the era of generative AI [Preprint]. arXiv. https://arxiv.org/abs/2311.18550
- Kurtz, H. (1991, October 14). WRITER OF THOMAS COLUMN FOCUS OF ALLEGATIONS AT POST. The Washington Post. https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1991/10/15/writer-of-thomas-column-focus-of-allegations-at-post/b0894fb9-9238-4e39-a5b6-d76ceb9b2627/
- Reuters Institute (2025). Reuters Institute Digital News Report 2025. https://reutersinstitute.politics.ox.ac.uk/sites/default/files/2025-06/Digital_News-Report_2025.pdf
- Zelizer, B. (1992). Covering the body : the Kennedy assassination, the media, and the shaping of collective memory. University of Chicago Press.