Project Details
Journalism: Automating the news and journalistic autonomy
Applicant
Professorin Dr. Wiebke Loosen
Subject Area
Communication Sciences
Term
since 2024
Project identifier
Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 516511468
The project investigates ComAI’s involvement in journalism by analyzing the challenge of journalistic autonomy at the interactional, organizational, and societal levels. We assume that journalism is particularly concerned with relationships between humans and machines within societal communication, a relation that this is also relevant to self-reflection and the appropriation of ComAI in the journalistic field. Our research is guided by four questions: How do journalists and other professional domain actors interact with ComAI and what agency do they construct in relation to it? What patterns exist within ComAI’s organizational embeddings and its related forms of hybrid agency? How does ComAI relate to conceptions of news and objectivity, journalistic roles, audience relationships, and imaginaries of ComAI’s futures? How is ComAI appropriated in journal-ism, possibly challenging journalistic autonomy? To answer these questions, a mixed-methods design is applied, consisting of ethnographies in three different types of media organizations in Germany, Austria and the UK as well as interviews, group discussions, and ethnographies at events and conferences.
DFG Programme
Research Units