The Trouble With Catching Up: Problematizing the “AI Gap” and its Global Inequities in Journalism

Abstract

The “artificial intelligence (AI) gap” in journalism describes a divide between newsrooms equipped to innovate and benefit from AI and those left behind. Rather than an objective condition, this study examines this gap as a discursive construction, drawing on articulation theory. Using the JournalismAI Academy for Small Newsrooms as a case study, we combine ethnographic observation with interviews conducted in 2022 to 2023 and 2025. Findings demonstrate how technological lag is articulated as a problem and AI investment as its solution, a linkage stabilized through assumptions of inevitable, linear technological progress—legitimizing particular ways of thinking about and acting on AI.