Editor’s note: The Fix is running the “What’s your media job” series where we look at different job positions and career trajectories in and around the news industry. For this edition, we spoke with Mattia Peretti, AI consultant and learning experience designer.

Less than a year ago, Mattia Peretti quit his job as project manager and team lead at JournalismAI to take a career break. Within a few months, he started working as a freelance AI consultant and learning experience designer. And in January of this year, he started a new project as a Knight Fellow with the International Center for Journalists.

These four different career steps illustrate Peretti’s approach to his career as a series of experiments that brought him from a local radio station in Italy, to organising events and press trips for a media development organisation in the Netherlands, and eventually to helping newsrooms all over the world to understand and leverage artificial intelligence – mostly working from home in London.

The Fix spoke with Peretti about his career and the lessons he has learned from its trajectory so far. We also collected Peretti’s advice for newsrooms as they are thinking about how to approach generative AI.

Peretti’s non-linear career path

Peretti says he has been working in and around journalism for all his professional life, starting with his involvement in a local radio station in his hometown in Italy when he was a teenager. He had worked at the European Journalism Centre in the Netherlands for several years and then transitioned to JournalismAI, an initiative within the London School of Economics with funding from the Google News Initiative.

Peretti helped build JournalismAI from the ground up by working as a project manager and then assuming leadership over a team of specialists. “What was meant to be a one-year research project became a five year-long initiative that is still ongoing now. It’s probably my biggest [professional] achievement because from a very small project where I was literally the only staff member working with [the project’s leader] Professor [Charlie] Beckett, we were able to grow the project year by year”, Peretti says.

In early 2023, though, Peretti decided to leave JournalismAI – simply because he was extremely tired, he says. The idea wasn’t to just find another full-time job. “I just grew unsatisfied with the way I put work at the centre of my life for these almost 10 years… I really wanted to try at least to redesign, build a better way of [approaching work]”. Peretti took a career break for a few months and then carved out a role for himself as an AI consultant and learning experience designer.

Peretti’s biggest project in the second half of 2023 was working as a generative AI consultant at Internews. The work involved helping the organisation come up with its AI rules and standards, as well as training Intenews staff on AI and keeping them updated on the latest developments in this space.

Peretti has been involved in several other projects apart from Internews, such as helping develop The Guardian’s generative AI rules and working Nordic AI Journalism, an association of publishers in the Nordic countries, to help them design a collaborative process for implementing AI transparency towards their readers.

In early 2024 Peretti became a Knight Fellow with the International Center for Journalists (ICFJ). “During his ICFJ Knight Fellowship, Peretti aims to explore how generative AI can be used by news organizations to better serve their communities, innovating editorial products to meet a wider set of user needs and attract new audiences”, his ICFJ profile notes.

Peretti emphasises that the key to his current career approach is realising his happiness and identity should not solely revolve around work. He likes being open to different opportunities and not having a rigid, linear career path. Instead of the traditional concept of “career ladder”, he refers to a “career river” that allows for exploration and pursuing new opportunities.

Insights for newsrooms on approaching AI

2023 was a breakout year for AI in the news media – with a lot of hype and interest around how generative AI might be useful for newsrooms but quite limited practical applications where new gen AI tools have brought a lot of actual value.

For publishers who are catching up on their AI strategy, Peretti’s advice is to start with identifying a specific need or problem you want to solve, not with the technology you want to use. Don’t automatically assume AI can or should solve this problem.

Publishers with the smartest AI strategies “are definitely not using [generative AI] for anything that’s audience-facing, for producing content, but they’re experimenting with how it can be used to improve and help processes in the newsroom, and keeping in mind that it’s always absolutely necessary to keep a human in the loop,” Peretti says.

A helpful distinction Peretti suggests is discerning “knowledge tasks” from “language tasks”. Current generative AI systems do a poor job producing content just based on prompt, but they are much better with repackaging existing content, meaning “language tasks”. A good example of news organisations getting value from AI is summaries of stories written by the newsroom, like Daily Maverick does.

An exciting opportunity generative AI holds for the future is allowing more personalised, tailored news experiences for audiences, Peretti says. “What really gets me excited is the opportunity of listening to our audiences better and doing something in an automated way to better serve the audiences that we already have and maybe reach audiences that right now, as we’re just producing long articles, don’t care about coming to us. If we give them some more control and we give them the opportunity to listen to a story, just read a summary, whatever else, they may come to us.”

What to read and who to follow to stay on top on AI in news media

Over the past several years Peretti has emerged as a prominent expert on AI in news media. Who does he read to stay on top of what’s happening in the field?

Here are a few recommendations:

People to follow:

Source of the cover photo: courtesy of Mattia Peretti

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AI consultant Mattia Peretti on his “career river” and how newsrooms should approach AI