Changing or Reinforcing the “Rules of the Game”: A Field Theory Perspective on the Impacts of Automated Journalism on Media Practitioners

Danzon-Chambaud, Samuel; Cornia, Alessio

doi:10.1080/17512786.2021.1919179

Cited by 9 publications

(2 citation statements)

References 51 publications

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“…As has been well-established by science and technology studies, innovations generally become embedded only once they become regularised in practice and diffused throughout organisations or societies (Edgerton, 1999). Existing international research in journalism studies suggests that the organisations that succeeded in automating COVID-related news had prior experience in the process, and so their news workers (journalists and developers) already had computational literacies and a predisposition to wrangle data and develop automated and artificial intelligence (AI)-enabled tools (Danzon-Chambaud, 2021). Generally, particular kinds of news organisations, particularly those with global reach and/or very high volume (such as wire services), tend to be the ones that have developed with some degree of success this new model of automated news generation (Beckett, 2019; Diakopoulos, 2019; Dörr, 2016; Graefe, 2016; Linden, 2017).…”

Section: Situating the Pandemic In Digital Journalismmentioning

confidence: 99%

Beyond the ‘critical incident’: COVID-19, data journalism and the slow road to editorial automation in Australian newsrooms

Montaña-Niño,

Burgess

2024

New Media & Society

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This article draws on a qualitative interview-based study and the framework of the ‘critical incident’ to explore whether, how and for whom the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic saw an increased uptake of data-driven automation in Australian newsrooms and with what implications for the field. Our findings show that, while news workers combined and adapted existing technologies to meet increased demands for rolling, data-driven coverage of the pandemic, structural and institutional factors prevented the uptake and embedding of forms of data journalism and editorial automation that may have assisted with providing more timely and effective public health information. The findings highlight the importance of COVID-19 as both an acute event and an ongoing situation that has revealed and prompted reflection on the practical and political challenges of data flows between government agencies and news organisations.

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Section: Situating the Pandemic In Digital Journalismmentioning

confidence: 99%

Beyond the ‘critical incident’: COVID-19, data journalism and the slow road to editorial automation in Australian newsrooms

Montaña-Niño,

Burgess

2024

New Media & Society

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“…In this article extracted from my PhD thesis ( Danzon-Chambaud, 2023b ) 2 , I will provide a more complete picture of the use of automated news, conducting a cross-national exploratory study for this. I will rely on Actor-network theory (ANT) concepts to distinguish when an interference is made to otherwise linear situations where initial intent is kept and where it does what it is supposed to do.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Automated news in practice: a cross-national exploratory study

Danzon-Chambaud

2023

Open Res Europe

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Background This article provides a comprehensive picture of the current state of automated news—understood here as the auto-generation of journalistic text through software and algorithms—as well as to where it is headed. For this, I look at 18 news organisations in Europe, North America and Australia, following a strategic sample inspired by Hallin and Mancini’s (2004) media system typology. Methods To conduct this cross-national exploratory study, I made use of semi-structured interviews with editorial staff, executives and technologists. I also rely on Actor-network theory (ANT) to tell when an interference is made to an otherwise linear situation, thus endowing automated news with a sense of agency. Results Overall, my findings show that the main interferences concern alternate data sources (e.g., news organisations’ internal feeds, crowdsourced material), in-house interfaces that allow for more journalistic participation (e.g., internal self-editing tools, notification streams) and output other than text (e.g., automated audio summaries for voice assistants). Conclusions Although these changes lead to greater journalistic professionalisation, they could also make news organisations become too dependent on Big Tech companies for data acquisition and dissemination of automated news products. That said, mutual negotiations and a re-alignment of interests may occur as platforms increasingly face journalistic challenges.

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Keeping Up with the Technologies: Distressed Journalistic Labor in the Pursuit of “Shiny” Technologies

Min

Fink

2021

Journalism Studies

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Changing or Reinforcing the “Rules of the Game”: A Field Theory Perspective on the Impacts of Automated Journalism on Media Practitioners

Cited by 9 publications

References 51 publications

Beyond the ‘critical incident’: COVID-19, data journalism and the slow road to editorial automation in Australian newsrooms

Beyond the ‘critical incident’: COVID-19, data journalism and the slow road to editorial automation in Australian newsrooms

Automated news in practice: a cross-national exploratory study

Keeping Up with the Technologies: Distressed Journalistic Labor in the Pursuit of “Shiny” Technologies

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