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

Figures & data

Table 1. Empirical investigation of the impacts of automated journalism on media practitioners: essential dimensions to consider.

	Public service	Objectivity	Immediacy	Autonomy	Ethics
Structures External to the Journalistic Field	Are media practitioners able to employ their traditional journalistic skills to collect public interest data? Are they able to explore other ways to get public information data?	Is a diverse set of data sources used in the conception of automated news? Is an assemblage of templates being used or just a single one? Are alternative data sources taken into consideration?	What is the extent of human verification in the production of automated news? Are computational tasks employed to verify content when automated news are published on a large scale?	Are organisations with a large open data catalogue overrepresented in automated news output? In advanced machine learning models, is it also the case for organisations that generated a lot of training data? Are less affluent groups or movements not covered on these grounds?	Are media practitioners well aware of algorithmic biases? Are they trained in ethics of artificial intelligence and data management?
Accumulating Cultural Capital	Are journalists with the computing background to programme automated news also able to engage with algorithmic accountability reporting?	When authoring templates, do media practitioners refrain from picking a “winning” side and a “losing” side beforehand?	How do media practitioners handle predicting elements of the story in advance when authoring templates? How familiar are they with the concept of abstraction at the core of computational thinking?	Are journalists with a computing background able to programme their own automated news? Are media practitioners with little or none programming background able to use third-party NLG tools or “No-code” development platforms?	Are media practitioners able to adapt their expert knowledge of core ethical values in journalism to new ethical challenges that arise from the utilisation of automated news? Do media practitioners supervise the incorporation of journalistic standards and practices into automated news scripts? Do they also make sure that those are well maintained and up-to-date?
Adversarial Reactions within the Journalistic Field	Does the deployment of automated news threaten the sustainability of less profitable areas of journalism? Does it impact the livelihood of journalists specialised in these areas?	When complementing an automated draft, do media practitioners remain in control of the story while exerting their critical thinking? In advanced machine learning models, do media practitioners prevent algorithmic biases from creeping into the final copy?	Are media practitioners able to engage with formats that demand more time as automated news take on routine tasks? Are they redirected to stories that reflect the priorities of media owners or of the marketing and advertising departments?	How do media practitioners views on automated journalism collide with those of technologists and business people? Is the displacement of human journalists likely to create tensions?	Does the discussion around revamped ethical values happen within professional journalistic forums, or is it too closely tied to external organisations?