New Books in Technology

What if AI’s biggest impact on journalism isn’t replacing journalists, but forcing us to rethink what journalism is for?

In this episode, Joanne Kuai speaks with Seth C. Lewis, Rodrigo Zamith, and Tomás Dodds, authors of Journalism in the Age of AI: From Acceleration to Reimagination (Polity, 2027).

For decades, journalism has been caught on a “hamster wheel” of
acceleration: producing more stories, for more platforms, with fewer
resources. AI promises even greater efficiency, but is doing more with
less really what journalism needs?

Lewis, Zamith, and Dodds argue
that the current AI moment offers something more consequential: an
opportunity to reimagine journalism itself. The conversation explores
what remains distinctly human about journalism when machines can
increasingly perform creative and cognitive tasks; how dependence on AI
companies and digital infrastructure is reshaping media power; what AI
means for journalism education and human judgement; and whether
journalism can harness these technologies in ways that strengthen,
rather than erode, its democratic purpose.

The conversation also raises a more fundamental question: is preserving journalism as an institution the goal, or should we rethink how society meets its information needs altogether?

Journalism in the Age of AI is available open access. Learn more and access the book here.

About the authors

Seth C. Lewis is the
inaugural Elcan Jefferson Scholars Foundation Distinguished Professor of
Artificial Intelligence and Media Studies at the University of
Virginia. Previously, he was the founding holder of the Shirley Papé
Chair in Emerging Media and Director of Journalism at the University of
Oregon. In his research, Lewis examines the social implications of
emerging technologies and their consequences for news and public life.

Rodrigo Zamith is an
Associate Professor and former Chair of the Journalism Department at the
University of Massachusetts Amherst. His research and teaching
interests lie at the intersection of journalism and technology, with a
focus on understanding the social implications of emerging technologies
for how news is produced, distributed, and consumed. He is a recipient
of UMass’ Distinguished Teaching Award.

Tomás Dodds is an Assistant Professor in Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the Director of its Public Tech Media Lab.
His research examines the evolving relationship between journalism and
technology, with a focus on how journalists and media organizations can
develop open-source tools and artificial intelligence systems that serve
the public interest.
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Hot Type: The Magnificent Machine that Gave Birth to Mass Media and Drove Mark Twain Mad (Bloomsbury, 2026) is the epic story of the magnificent 19th-century machine that rendered Gutenberg's movable type obsolete and opened the portal to the long century of mass media. The Linotype mechanized the 400-year-old process of setting type one laborious letter at a time, and thus ignited an explosion of newspaper, book, and magazine empires.This is a tale populated with wondrous characters: tragic inventors, malign media moguls, hand-typesetters called the Swifts who turned their craft into a spectator sport, and authors and journalists who chronicled the turmoil of their time, their every word molded into metal type by what some viewed as a thinking machine. This revolution in media technology helped to propel Mark Twain into literary celebrity, but it also cost him his fortune – as well as his sense of humor and optimism.The era of the Linotype was a bridge between Twain's Gilded Age with its tycoons of steam, steel, and wire and today's Gilded Age with its barons of bits and AI. Its history provides an opportunity to reflect on how technology changes culture just as new technologies – the internet and artificial intelligence –manufacture their endless streams of words today.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts.
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Peoples & Things host, Lee Vinsel, talks with writer and researcher, Jehnie I. Burns about her book, Mixtape Nostalgia: Culture, Memory, and Representation (Lexington, 2023). This conversation builds on earlier ones on music and technology, especially our earlier episode with Anthony Kwame Harrison about the ethnography of hiphop. Vinsel and Burns chat about the rise of mixtape culture, how it played out in different subcultures, and how it was wrapped up in and transformed by technological change. We also announce some big news at the beginning of the episode.
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We the Platform: How the Internet Changed Twenty-First-Century Literature (Columbia University Press 2026) by Aarthi Vadde is a groundbreaking account of mass writing in the twenty-first century, identifying rarely recognized forms of literary possibility amid the profound upheavals in traditional publishing. Aarthi Vadde examines the explosion of textuality across digital platforms: countless writers, diverse publishing formats, and vast communities of readers responding to stories publicly and instantly. Countering ubiquitous decline narratives, she offers powerful examples of literary innovation, adaptation, and survival. Among them are Jonathan Lethem and Lauren Oyler’s challenges to individualist ideas of authorship, the Twitter fiction of Jennifer Egan and Teju Cole, Margaret Atwood and Naomi Alderman’s collaborative writing on Wattpad, conceptual projects like Book from the Ground, and the experimental use of chatbots by authors including Sheila Heti. Through nuanced and illuminating readings, We the Platform shows how platform-based writing has altered cornerstone concepts of authorship, aesthetic form, and craft, delivering a bold new understanding of literature now.
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Are we driving our technology, or is it starting to drive us? In this thought-provoking conversation, Eli Karetny sits down with researcher and author Eduardo Albrecht to explore the invisible, rapidly encroaching frontier of AI governance and data surveillance.Moving far beyond traditional debates about data privacy, Albrecht warns of a near future where the state and corporate partners bypass human speech entirely, relying instead on "sentiment detection" to ascribe thoughts and make decisions that impact our physical lives. Together, they trace the historical trajectory of control—from early fingerprinting and eugenics to modern biometrics and neural implants—and challenge the modern illusion of state efficiency at the expense of human agency.Tune in for a deep dive into the two fundamental rights required to safeguard the future of democracy: absolute transparency over our data, and an evolving, radical defense of our collective freedom of thought.
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