Author(s)

Hai Tang, Lihong Qi, Xiao Zhang

School of Foreign Languages, Wuxi Taihu University, Wuxi, China.

The Bridge Collapse event in Wuxi in October last year attracted the attention of several domestic media outlets. The news was simultaneously known to readers when the accident took place. Compared with the rapid coverage of the big media, the local media in Wuxi chose to report on the news after two days. The two different attitudes of the media on report of accident news arguably reflected the way of algorithmic news working in context of network society, where local news is accessible from more and more different sources, and where transparency and accountability shall be kept as key tenet of journalism ethics. This paper criticized the local media in Wuxi by elucidated its limitation in aware of accident news as algorithmic as reportable from a series of layers such as immediacy, newsworthy, interactive mode, etc. It also suggests that the challenge of using algorithms is to develop journalistic professionalism, including critique, the use of transparency and concern for public opinions.

Transparency, Accountability, Local Journalism, Bridge Collapse Event in Wuxi, Algorithmic News

Tang, H. , Qi, L. and Zhang, X. (2020) The Impact of Algorithm on Local Journalism: A Comparative Study on Report of Wuxi’s Bridge Collapse in 2019. Advances in Journalism and Communication, 8, 69-79. doi: 10.4236/ajc.2020.83006.