As AI-generated content floods social media, preserving genuine human connections is essential for journalists, creators, and audiences.
Social media was meant to be a space for people to connect, share ideas, build communities, and participate in public life, a digital agora.
But what once brought us closer is now being overrun by automation.
Instead of amplifying real voices, algorithms are increasingly pushing artificial interaction.
Continue reading “Bots ruin social media”Meta and YouTube use AI translations to accelerate content localization but risk losing emotion, cadence, and cultural context.
If you have been on social media lately consuming content originally produced in languages other than your own, you’re familiar with the push for dubbed audio, produced using artificial intelligence (AI). This is not a minor shift.
Meta and YouTube are doubling down on AI translation features that aim to increase reach and attract a broader audience.
And while their goal is similar, they have made design choices to implement this technology that produce very different outcomes.
Continue reading “AI translations for video reshape global understanding”The short TikTok ban in the United States was the latest shakeup in the ever-evolving and exhausting social media landscape.
On Jan. 19 2025, TikTok was banned in the United States for a few hours.*
The latest resolution from the U.S. Supreme Court, issued on Jan. 17, made it “unlawful for companies in the United States to provide services to distribute, maintain or update the social media platform TikTok, unless U.S. operation of the platform is severed from Chinese control.”
The internet did what it does best, and many U.S.-based TikTok users protest the ban by moving to the app 小红书国际版 (“Xiaohongshu”), also known as REDnote. Ironically, this app is entirely Chinese-owned and operated from mainland China, unlike TikTok.
This digital migration sparkled both an unexpected cultural and language exchange and raised concerns about freedom of speech on the new platform.
If you struggled to keep track of everything happening, this TikTok ban is just the latest shakeup in the ever-evolving—and let’s face it, exhausting—social media landscape.
Continue reading “Social media in 2025 was a mess”Here’s what Spotify doesn’t count and why, plus a holiday playlist.
Since December 2016, the Swedish music streaming platform Spotify has been ending every year with an annual campaign-turned cultural moment known as Spotify Wrapped, a development from the Year in Music campaign in 2015.
The product is simple, and extremely effective: a personalized playlist of your most listened music, that comes with creative insights on your most played artists, genres, or what your music listening habits say about you.
And every year users fill social media feeds with the results.
You can even get roasted for your music taste.
Continue reading “Where is the Christmas music in Spotify Wrapped?”AI-powered tools like ChatGPT can significantly boost the writing confidence and skills of those working in a second or third language.
It has been about a year since my views on using AI as a journalist were transformed after a 3-day course at Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at CUNY.
Since then, I’ve integrated AI-powered virtual assistants like ChatGPT into various aspects of my personal and professional life, from revising and editing pieces of writing to assisting with my French learning or generating sets of keywords for tags on YouTube videos based on a given title and description.
One aspect of using ChatGPT that I don’t think is discussed enough is how much it can help as a writing assistant, particularly when working in languages that are not your mother tongue. In my experience, this is especially true for English (et un peu de français, aussi).
Continue reading “How can AI assist writers working in a second or third language?”How to generate a virtual shared experience on Instagram Stories using this feature to enhance user engagement during an event.
Instagram’s “Add Yours” sticker template enables users to pin elements of an Instagram Story before publishing, allowing other users to share their own versions of it, including text, emojis, videos, or photos.
This sticker has become very popular on Stories feeds, with users sharing their favourite movies, personal traits and causes they support.
When working managing social media for a music event earlier this year, I started ruminating the idea of using this sticker, both for us and for active social media users (artists, delegates and regular festival-goers) that were going to use Instagram Stories to share their experience at the event.
The result was a success and the feedback was extremely positive.
Continue reading “‘Add Yours’ sticker template to share events on Instagram”A sustainable future for news organizations depends on diversifying revenue, gaining trust back, and fostering agile methodologies.
Working in digital news feels a lot like ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Constant changes and shifts raise a lot of strategic and operational questions regarding change management, workflows, tech…
The key is to understand change management is never fully done. Everything keeps changing all the time, it can’t be stopped. And humans are actually not naturally inclined to constant transformation and disruption. New challenges, like the popularization of generative artificial intelligence or an increasingly changing social media landscape, generate stress, discomfort and tons of uncertainty.
Those who are excited about riding the wave of change are actually the weirdos, not the norm, most people, and particularly the stakeholders in news organizations making the key decisions, usually belong to the norm, the old guard, who feels threatened and exhausted by change.
How do you get them on board? The modernization of a traditional work culture, in news and any other business, often only happens in a context of urgency, like after an acquisition or drastic layoffs.
Continue reading “Transforming the future of news”A comprehensive overview of what product management is and how it helps news organizations embrace innovation and user-centric design.
My landing in a product management role in 2022 was quite fortuitous. Did you search for “product manager” on YouTube? The videos from the channel Exponent prepare you well for a job interview, but mostly for ‘big tech’ organizations, like Meta, Microsoft or Amazon.
My only previous encounters with product managers were in the context of working in music labels and, with an editorial background, I was initially hesitant to consider news a ‘product’.
The founder of the News Product Alliance, Becca Aaronson, defines a product as “a good or service that creates an exchange of value”
Anita Zielina, the lead instructor in the Transformation Boost course I attended, defined product as “a function at the intersection of editorial, tech and business, that addresses user needs, provides excellent user experience and advances the overarching business strategy.”
When I’m asked about my most recent work experience in the multiple job interviews I have been doing recently, I usually use the definition that product management is “a bridge role that connects the audience, business and technology, with users in the centre.”
Specific to news products and product management applied to journalism, product managers look at all aspects involved in the experience of producing and consuming news content.
Continue reading “News as a product”ChatGPT processes my class notes to uncover how artificial intelligence (AI) can be used for news, considering many ethical concerns.
The main ideas in this article were processed by ChatGPT based on my notes from the course at Craig Newmark J-School in New York. The first draft of the article has been later revised by a human (It’s me, hi!), adding a personal tone and voice, and ideas that the original version left out.
And links. I’ve added so many links for additional context.
More than out of laziness, this exercise is done to show that artificial intelligence (AI) is getting extremely good at delivering decent and presentable work, but there’s still a need for edits from a human that adds some sugar and spice, to differentiate the final product from the vast amount of bland content out there, making it somewhat unique.
When AI took off as a buzzword, like the metaverse or blockchain before, I was on the fence, initially. When the AI-generated ‘magic avatars’ flooded your feed I voiced my concerns very loudly over what that meant for artists’ work and who was profiting from unreferenced work.
Seven months later, out of cynicism or simply survival instinct, I’m trying to embrace this change. AI is here to completely challenge all jobs that involve creative work or data processing, and we better cautiously adapt.
There is a clear need to legislate it, make sure there’s transparency on the datasets used and that original creative work is fairly recognized and compensated, but also an urge to welcome this inevitable shift.
Continue reading “AI for news, as written by ChatGPT”Canada’s Bill C-18 is a cautionary tale for news organizations that rely on social media to generate referral traffic.
As a journalist and digital media professional with expertise in social media management that wants to apply my skills in news organizations, these are difficult times to find a job.
Canada, where I lived and worked for more than four years now, is a cautionary tale for news organizations around the world on what can happen when most of your traffic relies on third-party social media platforms, like Facebook and Twitter, and is suddenly gone.
There was a time when Twitter was a reliable source for journalists to find and share information.
Facebook (and Instagram) were also a good place to find breaking news between pictures of your exes and invitations to that school reunion you didn’t want to attend. Facebook (now Meta) was investing in journalism, particularly local news, with their Journalism Project.
That ‘golden era’ for news content on social media was long gone before Elon Musk bought Twitter and Zuckerberg turned to vertical short video to compete with TikTok, but recent events have accelerated this shift.
Continue reading “Social media for news is dead”
Oriol Salvador 