Mission
AI News Social is a weekly publication about artificial intelligence in higher education. The aim is patience with a fast field, without pretending the field is slower than it is.
Each edition begins with a single longform column — The Longer View — that traces a phenomenon of the week through the months and coverage that produced it. A seventy-minute conversation podcast, TertulIA, takes up the same topic across a recurring cast of voices. Four category reports, four audience briefings, and a full analytical surface accompany each issue.
What each edition contains
The Longer View — a roughly three-thousand-word editorial column written against the week's phenomenon, anchored in the months of public discourse and primary sources that produced it.
TertulIA — a weekly seventy-minute conversation podcast. Seven recurring voices, three or four of whom join any given week. The show belongs to the Latin American tertulia tradition: serious conversation slowed down, not a news recap and not a debate.
Four category reports — Social Aspects, AI Literacy, AI Tools, Higher Education. Each reads the same week through its own frame and voice.
Four audience briefings — Faculty, Institutional Leadership, Research Community, Students. The same body of research distilled four ways, because the framing shifts with the seat.
The analytical surface — interactive visualizations of the week's corpus: stance landscape, narrative frames, thematic network, contradiction map, and others. The methodology and the raw data are open.
How it is made
Each edition begins with a wide search for public writing about AI in higher education — several thousand candidate sources each week, retrieved in English and Spanish, de-duplicated, and full-text extracted. A nine-criterion inclusion rubric evaluates each candidate; the articles that meet the threshold are analyzed across the eight reasoning elements of the Paul–Elder critical-thinking framework, and synthesized into the week's editorial pieces.
The architecture uses language models under editorial discipline. Prose and synthesis are produced by Claude; quantitative analysis by DeepSeek; illustrations by Gemini. Every empirical claim in every piece carries a direct citation to its underlying article. Nothing is invented.
The full methodology is public. Subscribing costs nothing. Reader data is kept minimal on purpose.
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 spent the last two decades building — including the Digital Communication and Information minor at Sacramento State, approved by faculty in 2011, and four editions of the Advancing AI Literacy faculty learning community he directed out of the Center over two and a half years.
AI News Social is the form that teaching takes when it tries to keep up with the field at the pace the field moves.
Why this way
A publication is also a demonstration. What one faculty member, working with tools now widely available, can produce on a weekly cadence sets a lower bound for what an institution could produce if it chose 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 it.
AI News Social is published under Creative Commons BY-NC 4.0 and developed at California State University, Sacramento. · Methodology · Archive