Mission
AI News Social is a weekly publication on artificial intelligence in higher education. The purpose is patience in the face of a fast-moving field, without pretending the field is slower than it is.
Each edition opens with a long column — The Longer View — that traces a phenomenon of the week through the months of discourse and coverage that produced it. A seventy-minute conversational podcast, TertulIA, picks up the same topic with a rotating cast of voices. Four reports per category, four briefings per audience, and a complete analytical surface accompany each issue.
What each edition contains
The Longer View — an editorial column of about three thousand words written against the phenomenon of the week, anchored in the months of public discourse and primary sources that produced it.
TertulIA — a weekly seventy-minute conversational podcast. Seven recurring voices, three or four of which appear in any given week. The show belongs to the Latin American tradition of the tertulia: serious conversation, slowed down, neither a news roundup nor a debate.
Four reports per category — Social Aspects of AI, AI Literacy, AI Tools, Higher Education. Each reads the same week through its own frame and its own voice.
Four briefings per audience — Faculty, Institutional Leadership, Research Community, Students. The same body of research distilled four ways, because the framing changes with the position from which it is read.
The analytical surface — interactive visualizations of the week's corpus: stance landscape, narrative frames, thematic network, contradiction map, among others. The methodology and the raw data are open.
How it is made
Each edition begins with a wide search of public writing on AI in higher education — several thousand candidate sources each week, retrieved in English and Spanish, deduplicated, and full-text extracted. A nine-criterion inclusion rubric scores every candidate; articles that clear the threshold are analyzed through the eight elements of reasoning of the Paul–Elder critical-thinking framework, and synthesized into the editorial pieces of the week.
The architecture employs language models under editorial discipline. Prose and synthesis are produced by Claude; the quantitative analysis, by DeepSeek; the illustrations, by Gemini. Every empirical claim in every piece carries a direct citation to the underlying article. Nothing is invented.
The full methodology is public. Subscribing costs nothing. Reader data is kept deliberately minimal.
Who orchestrates it
Dr. Diego Bonilla, Professor of Communication Studies at Sacramento State and Faculty Associate at the Center on Race, Immigration and Social Justice, orchestrates AI News Social as part of his work with the Center. His doctoral research, at Syracuse University in the early days of behavioral tracking, ended with a dissertation arguing that cognition is legible through digital traces. The surveillance implications of that finding became the teaching he has built across the last two decades — including the minor in Digital Communication and Information at Sacramento State, approved by the faculty in 2011, and four editions of the Advancing AI Literacy faculty learning community he led from the Center for two and a half years.
AI News Social is the form teaching takes when it tries to keep pace with the field at the rate the field moves.
Why this way
A publication is also a demonstration. What a single professor, working with tools today widely available, can produce on a weekly cadence sets a lower bound on what an institution could produce if it decided to. The work is offered in that spirit — specific, citable, editorially slow where the evidence rewards slowness, and replicable by other faculty who want to try.
AI News Social is published under Creative Commons BY-NC 4.0 and developed at California State University, Sacramento. · Methodology · Archive