Automated journalism in UK local newsrooms: attitudes, integration, impact

Thäsler-Kordonouri, Sina and Barling, Kurt ORCID logoORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2233-2044 (2023) Automated journalism in UK local newsrooms: attitudes, integration, impact. Journalism Practice . ISSN 1751-2786 [Article] (Published online first) (doi:10.1080/17512786.2023.2184413)

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Abstract

Automated journalism is increasingly used to produce News content in UK local newsrooms. Although scholars have been discussing the disruptive potential of automation for journalism, little is known about how local media practitioners deploy and perceive automated journalism. This study aims to help fill this research gap using semi-structured interviews with media practitioners from four local news companies. Each use automated content provided by the news automation service RADAR moderated by human journalists at RADAR itself. Typically RADAR identifies important national datasets on release and then uses a human journalist to create an algorithm to analyse the data for local variations. This material is then made available through a subscription service to the end user, the local newsroom. It is for the local newsroom teams to decide what is relevant to their audiences.

Our findings show that local journalists evaluate automated journalism based on several occupational influences, that they integrate RADAR’s automated journalism into their own editorial outputs in various ways, and that the use of this automated journalism is having an impacts on shaping local nes agendas and newsroom performance. Our evidence also shows that whilst most media practitioners perceive a limited relevance of automated journalism for local news reporting and continue to stress the importance of human agency in the journalism workflow, what they report is conversely a shift in their practices which actually suggests that automated journalism has greater impact than they are currently willing to acknowledge.

Item Type: Article
Sustainable Development Goals:
Theme:
Research Areas: A. > School of Media and Performing Arts > Media
Item ID: 37509
Notes on copyright: © 2023 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.
This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives License(http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, and is not altered, transformed, or built upon in any way.
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Depositing User: Kurt Barling
Date Deposited: 20 Feb 2023 16:29
Last Modified: 03 Mar 2023 15:33
URI: https://eprints.mdx.ac.uk/id/eprint/37509

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