The study investigates how automation novelties in the newsroom both challenge and maintain core values of journalistic professional ideology. On the basis of semi-structured interviews with editors of legacy news institutions in the United Kingdom and Germany the study reveals the rationale of the changing journalism-technology relation as well as the dynamics of the re-articulation of journalism's core ideals. Despite increasing relevance of automation for news production human journalists are still regarded as dominant agents in the routinisation of journalism and the re-articulation of its purpose. The interviewed editors' narratives suggest that they observe technological innovations through wider social, institutional and professional perspectives and appear to be aware that either euphoric or dystopic stances might lead to misconceiving the implications of early automation novelties. On one hand, the editors perceive automation as an opportunity to augment journalism through the combined agency of human actors and automated systems as a way to address the crises of social relevance and business viability. On the other, according to interviewees, automation challenges the ideologisation of professional journalism with respect to the retention of its boundaries and the authority of journalists in contemporary social communication.

Using the case of two Slovenian print media as an example, this article examines how online multimedia news has been adopted, what role different newsroom organization models play in online multimedia news production, and what multimedia news formats have emerged on news websites of Slovenian print media organizations. In the last decade, different multimedia news content has been emerging rapidly within news websites of print media organizations with online production organized differently and multimedia news formatted distinctly. A review of scholarly debates and research in media and journalism studies reveals that the particular institutionally structured features of online news production, and the technical and organizational attributes which influence what gets represented in the medium and the manner in which it is done have not yet emerged. Furthermore, on the basis of news format analysis, participant observation, and problem-centered interviews, the article concludes that there is a lack of vision in furthering the evolution of online production organization and news formats in Slovenian print media arena, which signals the present marginal significance of online multimedia news.

The study explores uses of algorithmic techniques in journalists’ working environments and investigates newsroom managers’ negotiations of automation as innovation process aimed at ensuring partial or full replacement of human labour with technology. Drawing from 15 qualitative interviews with representatives of newsroom management from legacy news institutions in the United Kingdom, Germany and the United States, the study analyses their (cl)aims to maintain the newsroom as a stable, but dynamic working environment and reveals three dualist propositions when negotiating automation novelties – human journalistic agency stands in contrast to technology, skills are separated from newsworkers, and the creation of news contrasts with its presentation. The results show the interviewees re-articulate the dominance of human agency over technology, re-establish technological innovations as liberating newsworkers rather than subordinating them, and standardise news by re-evaluating the concept as both a civic bond and a commodity. Such considerations are detached from recent concerns about automation of human labour and closer to what we call algorithmic sublime, maintaining the newsroom management’s loyalty to both the professional values of journalism and the corporate goals of management.

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This study offers insights into articulations between the normative and the empirical in online journalists’ self-negotiations concerning their roles in people’s assimilation of information, the daily provision of news and their institutional status in online departments. In-depth interviews with online journalists from two leading newspapers, Delo in Slovenia and Novosti in Serbia, are used to investigate their negotiations with respect to their societal role. The analysis reveals troubled negotiation processes among interviewed online journalists when they consider what is regarded as “true” journalism, news production requirements and their institutional status. This indicates that rearrangements of political–economic relations in both post-socialist societies have increased journalism’s responsibility to the media owners and power holders and surpassed its normatively defined responsibility to the public. Both case subjects are compared through the prism of the processes of negotiation of normative principles of journalism in the social, national and institutional contexts of the two newspapers.