Journalism and machine learning: a poweful tool for investigations

First of all, let's make one thing clear: this post will not be about mystical or magical processes, nor about artificial intelligence. Instead, it will be about algorithms, data analysis, scraping, cleaning, etc. All of this with the aim of helping journalists to investigate. Machine learning (ML) can be useful to journalists in their investigations, especially when they have to analyze a huge amount of data. To better understand how, here are four concrete (and inspiring) examples. Following them, I draw some lessons and recommendations on how journalists can use ML and I add links to other examples (not detailed here) to discover.