Automated news in practice: a cross-national exploratory study

Abstract

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.