AI, algorithms, and automation are increasingly becoming part of newsrooms, influencing nearly every aspect of journalism. Both the pervasiveness of these innovative tools and their disruptive potential in restructuring news work and professional roles become central elements worth studying. Even more so as the pervasiveness of automation entails new relational dynamics in the newsroom, but also with the audience, and other intermediaries and tech companies. This process leads to creating a new hybrid scenario, where the boundaries of journalism are increasingly contested, and new skills and competencies are required. In this context, journalists are forced to renegotiate their communicative space as news work is confronted with shifting human-machine relationships. Similarly, AI, algorithms, and automation also lead to new actor categories and professional roles such as programmers, designers, legal and cybersecurity experts, internal and external to media organizations. And, on top of that, news media have to deal with intermediaries, who exert an increasing social and economic influence on journalism and the news industry, particularly as developers of AI solutions for journalism. These changes entail both opportunities and challenges regarding journalistic relevance and authority.
This pre-conference aims therefore at exploring new AI actor constellations in the journalism field to identify central players and map new interrelations, power imbalances, new dependencies, and potential instances of boundary crossing in the wider journalistic field, moving thus beyond newsroom-centered perspectives on the influence of AI in journalism.
The pre-conference is endorsed by the Journalism Studies Section of ECREA, and is jointly organized by scholars from the Università della Svizzera italiana, the University of Amsterdam, the University of St. Gallen, and Leiden University.
Mapping AI Actor Constellations in News Media and Journalism 