I knew it wouldn’t be an ordinary visit but I wasn’t ready to be impressed as much as I was. What else would you expect when being in the centre of one of the world’s strongest platforms for media and broadcasting. It was an amazing opportunity to be invited to the BBC News LAB to see just how things are produced and how it is run.

As part of my university studies we attended the BBC News LAB, where research take’s place to develop and explore new scalable opportunities at the intersection of journalism, technology and data. Experts from a variety of backgrounds work closely with the BBC and R&D. We had the chance to attend a morning meeting and witness the discussion of different projects. The opportunity of being part of such a professional level was a great learning experience and there is one project in particular that caught my attention.

The main purpose of the project is to deal with the excessive amount of daily content in the media and how best to utilise the data. The project aims to track the news about different topics on the internet and that’s by creating a platform to collect all the soundtracks around the world in different languages, analyse it and transfer it to text.

By proceeding with this project the BBC will save the time for hundreds of mentoring journalists as statistics shown in research done by BBC monitoring. Although 300 people monitor all media sources each individual mentoring journalist can only monitor 4 channels and some additional sources at a given time. Whereas SUMMA, Scalable Understanding of Multilingual Media, can bring all the recordings about a specific topic from all over the world translated into English in one click. Yet the experience from analysts is still required to understand a change in behaviour of particular media sources.

As much as technology is changing and advancing to offer a wide range of services to make everyone’s life easier, more could be done to reach a time where technology would be an advantage to people. However with change comes a sacrifice, the more technology takes over the less need there is for individuals to do this job. Will this lead to less jobs leaving more and more people unemployed as the years go by?