Using AI in the newsroom : negotiating the institutional pressures of innovation

Abstract

Through the lens of New Institutionalism, this study examines how editorial technologists at news organizations understand and negotiate the role of artificial intelligence (AI) in journalism in order to understand whose interests are served. The study investigates what activities editorial technologists recognise as irreplaceable by AI, and what organizational pressures drive or constrain its adoption. Eighteen in-depth interviews were conducted with AI product managers, digital transformation consultants and C-suite executives at news organizations in the US, UK and France. The study revealed that news organizations have embraced the concept of AI-augmented newsrooms, primarily as a time-saving tool for team collaboration, rather than a cost-saving strategy for content automation. Editorial technologists identified in-person interviewing as the institutional core of journalism that AI cannot replicate and digital news distribution as a target for automation. The study proposes two theoretical contributions to the New Institutionalist literature. Mutually assured disruption describes the escalating dynamic between news organizations and Google Search, in which each party's adaptive moves stress-test the other's structural dependencies. Anticipatory compliance describes the institutional response, in which news organizations collectively reconsider the role of AI as a communicator on their own terms. The study concludes that journalism's irreducible value lies in the way it is produced, not distributed, and news organizations must maintain the legibility of how public discourse is produced.