‘Our task is to demystify fears’: Analysing newsroom management of automation in journalism

Abstract

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.

Transforming media agency? Approaches to automation in Finnish legacy media

“…The broader notion of automated journalism is here preferred. Newsworkers themselves view the phenomenon of automation as encompassing various aspects of journalism such as data and information collection and content distribution (Milosavljević and Vobič, 2019a, 2019b; Wu et al, 2018); these findings are confirmed by the results of this study.…”

“…In recent research, the adoption and consequences of automation in journalism has been approached as technologically driven changes in processes of news production (Lindén, 2017a), as institutionally managed innovation processes (Milosavljević and Vobič, 2019b), and as a part of a broader transformation of journalism such as ‘computational journalism’ or a ‘quantitative turn’ (Anderson, 2012; Coddington, 2014). 1 It has been proposed that the prospects of automation pose an unprecedented challenge to our understanding of journalism as a human task (cf.…”

Automation fears: Drivers and solutions

“…This is supported by Nam (2019) who reports that people aware of the impacts of automations on the labour market tend to be more optimistic and less sceptic. Milosavljević and Vobič (2019) investigate the fear of ATs of journalists in the United Kingdom, Germany, and the United States. The authors find that the journalists consider the new technologies as liberating rather than subordinating them.…”

Journalists as end-users: Quality management principles applied to the design process of news automation

“…As a mediator, his role was also to anticipate potential fears about the principle of automation, given the negative feelings that such a project is likely to entail. This position meets one of the biggest preoccupations that news automation managers have to challenge all along a process that is, first of all, human (Milosavljević and Vobić, 2019). His mixed background, between journalism and technology, enabled him to make dialogues easier between the newsroom and the start-up in charge of the development of "Quotebot".…”