Between fear and confidence
The dual relationship between journalists and news automation
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.1558/jalpp.21051Keywords:
headlines, journalism, news automation, public discourses, robot metaphor, technological imaginariesAbstract
The phenomenon of news automation is viewed ambivalently by news professionals, who understand that it promises to give journalists more time to focus on their key activities but who also fear job losses and perceive new ethical questions relating to its use. Although automated news production methods refer to software or algorithmic processes that convert structured data into text or visual representations, a ‘robot’ metaphor is often used to describe the activity. Does this metaphor influence the mediatic discourses of journalists when they write about automated news within their professional context? How do they give meaning to the information? Do they observe an enunciative withdrawal? The present corpus-based research focuses on 300 headlines published online in English and French in a variety of countries over eight years. The findings show that journalists do not limit themselves to facts when they write about a subject connected to them, and that although in this instance the two groups studied do share some preoccupations, there are nuances between them. Those nuances lie in the opposition between the expression of feelings of fear (of losing their jobs or professional identity) and the expression of feelings of confidence (in the future or in progress). It was also found that the use of robot metaphors influenced these trends but in opposite directions.
References
Anciaux, Arnaud, Julian Durazo, Julian Herrmann and Liziane Guazina (2017) Comparative research: Journalism, media and politics Introduction. Sur le journalisme, About journalism, Sobre jornalismo 6 (2):12–17.
Caelen, Jean (2012) Eléments de linguistique et de pragmatique pour la compréhension automatique du langage: du signe au sens. Grenoble: Fédération IMAG.
Carlson, Matt (2014) The robotic reporter: Automated journalism and the redefinition of labor, compositional forms, and journalistic authority. Digital Journalism 3 (3): 416–431. https://doi.org/10.1080/21670811.2014.976412
Cecilia, Juan Herrero (2007) Syntaxe, sémantique et pragmatique des titres des nouvelles de la presse française construits en forme de phrase nominale ou averbale: aspects cognitifs et communicatifs. In Dominique Bonnet, María José Chaves García and Nadia Duchêne (eds) Littérature, langages et arts: rencontres et création. Huelva, Spain: Servicio de Publicaciones.
Catenaccio, Paola, Colleen Cotter, Mark de Smedt, Giuliana Garzone, Geert Jacobs, Felicitas Macgilchrist, Lutgard Lams et al. (2011) Towards a linguistics of news production. Journal of Pragmatics 43 (7): 1843–1852. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pragma.2010.09.022
Chalaby, Jean K. (1996) Journalism as an Anglo-American invention: A comparison of the development of French and Anglo-American journalism, 1830s–1920s. European Journal of Communication 11 (3): 303–326. https://doi.org/10.1177/0267323196011003002
Charaudeau, Patrick (2006) Discours journalistique et positionnements énonciatifs. Frontières et dérives. Semen. Revue de sémio–linguistique des textes et discours 22: Online. https://doi.org/10.4000/semen.2793
Charaudeau, Patrick, Dominique Maingueneau and Jean-Michel Adam (2002) Dictionnaire d’analyse du discours. Paris: Editions du Seuil.
Chavand, Florent (2017) Des données à l’information. Paris: ISTE Editions.
Cheng, Winnie (2014) Corpus-based linguistic approaches to critical discourse analysis? In Carol Chapelle (ed.) The Encyclopedia of Applied Linguistics, 1343–1340. Oxford: Blackwell.
Christin, Angèle (2016) Is journalism a transnational field? Asymmetrical relations and symbolic domination in online news. Sociological Review 64 (2): 212–234. https://doi.org/10.1111/2059-7932.12009
Cornu, Daniel (2009) Journalisme et vérité. Geneva: Le champs éthique, Labor et Fides.
de Maeyer, Juliette and Sylvain Malcorps (2015) Des controverses sociotechniques aux discours métajournalistiques. Hermès 73 (3): 171–180. https://doi.org/10.3917/herm.073.0171
de Villers, Marie-Éva de (2001) Analyse linguistique d’un titre de presse: illustration d’une norme. In Diane Raymond and André A. Lafrance (eds) Norme et médias, 97–98. Quebec: Terminogramme.
Degenne, Alain and Pierre Vergès (1973) Introduction à l’analyse de similitude. Revue française de sociologie 14: 471–511. https://doi.org/10.2307/3320247
Deuze, Mark (2002) National news cultures: A comparison of Dutch, German, British, Australian, and US journalists. Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly 79 (1): 134–149. https://doi.org/10.1177/107769900207900110
Deuze, Mark (2005) What is journalism? Professional identity and ideology of journalists reconsidered. Journalism 6 (4): 442–464. https://doi.org/10.1177/1464884905056815
Develotte, Christine and Elizabeth Rechniewski (2001) Discourse analysis of newspaper headlines: A methodological framework for research into national representations. Web Journal of French Media Studies 4 (1). Available online: https://web.archive.org/web/20011217013614/http://wjfms.ncl.ac.uk/enframes.htm
Dierickx, Laurence (2020) La production automatisée d’informations en appui aux pratiques journalistiques: Analyse des représentations, des conditions d’association et de la structuration des usages en Belgique francophone. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, Université Libre de Bruxelles, Brussels.
Domingo, David (2008) Interactivity in the daily routines of online newsrooms: Dealing with an uncomfortable myth. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 13 (3): 680–704. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1083-6101.2008.00415.x
Donsbach, Wolffgang and Bettina Klett (1993) Subjective objectivity: How journalists in four countries define a key term of their profession. Gazette (Leiden, Netherlands) 51 (1): 53–83. https://doi.org/10.1177/001654929305100104
Dor, Daniel (2003) On newspaper headlines as relevance optimizers. Journal of Pragmatics 35 (5): 695–721. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0378-2166(02)00134-0
Dörr, Konstantin Nicholas and Katharina Hollnbuchner (2017) Ethical challenges of algorithmic journalism. Digital Journalism 5 (4): 404–419. https://doi.org/10.1080/21670811.2016.1167612
Englebretson, Robert (2007) Stancetaking in discourse: An introduction. In Robert Englebreston (ed.) Stancetaking in Discourse: Subjectivity, Evaluation, Interaction, 1–25. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. https://doi.org/10.1075/pbns.164.02eng
Espeland, Wendy N. and Mitchell L. Stevens (2008) A sociology of quantification. European Journal of Sociology 49 (3): 401–436. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0003975609000150
Fairclough, Norman (2003) Analysing Discourse: Textual Analysis for Social Research. London: Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203697078
Fish, Stanley E. (1976) How to do things with Austin and Searle: Speech act theory and literary criticism. Modern Language Notes 91 (5): 983–1025. https://doi.org/10.2307/2907112
Flichy, Patrice (2001) La place de l’imaginaire dans l’action technique. Réseaux 109: 52–73. https://doi.org/10.3917/res.109.0052
Garric, Nathalie (2013) Introduction à la linguistique. Paris: Hachette Education.
Goatly, Andrew (1997) Critical Reading and Writing. London: Routledge.
Graefe, Andreas (2016) Guide to Automated Journalism. New York: Tow Center for Digital Journalism, Columbia Journalism School. https://doi.org/10.7916/D80G3XDJ
Hallin, Daniel and Paolo Mancini (2004) Comparing Media Systems: Three Models of Media and Politics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511790867
Harris, Zellig S. and Françoise Dubois-Charlier (1969) Analyse du discours. Langages 13: 8–45. https://doi.org/10.3406/lgge.1969.2507
Ho-Dac, Lydia-Mai, Marie-Paule Jacques and Josette Rebeyrolle (2004) Sur la fonction discursive des titres. In Sylvie Porhiel and Dominique Klingler (eds), L’unité texte: Actes du colloque ‘Regards croisés sur l’unité texte / Conjoint Perspectives on Text, 125–152. Pleyben, France: Association perspectives.
Jarrige, François (2014) Technocritiques: du refus des machines à la contestation des technosciences. Paris: La Découverte.
Kammer, Aske (2013) The mediatization of journalism. MedieKultur: Journal of Media and Communication Research 29 (54):141–158. https://doi.org/10.7146/mediekultur.v29i54.17385
Karlsen, Joakim and Eirik Stavelin (2014) Computational journalism in Norwegian newsrooms. Journalism practice 8 (1): 34–48. https://doi.org/10.1080/17512786.2013.813190
Kim, Daewon and Seongcheol Kim (2017) Newspaper companies’ determinants in adopting robot journalism. Technological Forecasting and Social Change 117: 184–195. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.techfore.2016.12.002
Kronrod, Ann and Orit Engel (2001) Accessibility theory and referring expressions in newspaper headlines. Journal of Pragmatics 33 (5): 683–699. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0378-2166(00)00013-8
Lakoff, George and Mark Johnson (1980) Conceptual metaphor in everyday language. The Journal of Philosophy 77 (8): 453–486. https://doi.org/10.2307/2025464
Latar, Noam Lemelshtrich (2015) The robot journalist in the age of social physics: The end of human journalism? In Gali Einav (eds) The Economics of Information, Communication, and Entertainment: The Impacts of Digital Technology in the 21st Century, 65–80. Wiesbaden, Germany: Springer. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-09009-2_6
Leteinturier, Christine (2016) Continuité/discontinuité des carrières des journalistes français encartés. Etude de deux cohortes de nouveaux titulaires de la carte de presse. Recherches en Communication 43 (43): 27–57. https://doi.org/10.14428/rec.v43i43.48753
Linden, Carl-Gustav (2017) Decades of automation in the newsroom: Why are there still so many jobs in journalism? Digital Journalism 5 (2): 123–140. https://doi.org/10.1080/21670811.2016.1160791
Linden, Carl-Gustav and Laurence Dierickx (2019) Robot journalism: The damage done by a metaphor. Unmediated: Journal of Politics and Communication 2: 152–155.
McEnery, Tony and Andrew Wilson (2001) Corpus Linguistics (2nd edition). Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Moeschler, Jacques (1985) Argumentation et conversation: éléments pour une analyse pragmatique du discours. Paris: Hatier.
Moirand, Sophie (2007) Les discours de la presse quotidienne: observer, analyser, comprendre. Paris: Linguistique Nouvelle Séries, Presses Universitaires de France.
Monti, Matteo (2019) Automated journalism and freedom of information: Ethical and juridical problems related to AI in the press field. Opinio Juris in Comparation 1 (1): 139–155.
Munoz-Torres, Juan Ramón (2012) Truth and objectivity in journalism: Anatomy of an endless misunderstanding. Journalism Studies 13 (4): 566–582. https://doi.org/10.1080/1461670X.2012.662401
Musso, Pierre (2009) Usages et imaginaires des TIC: la friction de fictions. In Christian Licoppe (ed.) L’évolution des cultures numériques: de la mutation du lien social à l’organisation du travail, 201–210. Limoges: FYP.
Neveu, Erik (2010) News without journalists: Real threat or horror story? Brazilian Journalism Research 6 (1): 29–54. https://doi.org/10.25200/BJR.v6n1.2010.225
Powers, Matthew (2012) In forms that are familiar and yet-to-be invented: American journalism and the discourse of technologically specific work. Journal of Communication Inquiry 36 (1): 24–43. https://doi.org/10.1177/0196859911426009
Rebeyrolle, Josette, Marie-Paule Jacques and Marie-Paule Péry-Woodley (2009) Titres et intertitres dans l’organisation du discours. Journal of French Language Studies 19 (2): 269–290. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0959269509003780
Ruellan, Denis (2005) Expansion ou dilution du journalisme? Les Enjeux de l’information et de la communication 2005 (1): 77–86. https://doi.org/10.3917/enic.005.0077
Schudson, Michael (2001) The objectivity norm in American journalism. Journalism 2 (2): 149–170. https://doi.org/10.1177/146488490100200201
Singer, Jane B. (2003) Who are these guys? The online challenge to the notion of journalistic professionalism. Journalism 4 (2): 139–163. https://doi.org/10.1177/1464884903004002021
Soler, Honesto Herrera (2008) A metaphor corpus in business press headlines. Ibérica: Revista de la Asociación Europea de Lenguas para Fines Específicos (AELFE) 15: 51–70.
Thurman, Neil, Konstantin Dörr and Jessica Kunert (2017) When reporters get hands-on with robo-writing: Professionals consider automated journalism’s capabilities and consequences. Digital Journalism 5 (10): 1240–1259. https://doi.org/10.1080/21670811.2017.1289819
Van Dalen, Arjen (2012) The algorithms behind the headlines: How machine-written news redefines the core skills of human journalists. Journalism Practice 6 (5–6): 648–658. https://doi.org/10.1080/17512786.2012.667268
Van Leuven, Sarah, Karin Raeymaeckers, Manon Libert, Florence Le Cam, Joyce Stroobant, Joke D’Heer, Sylvain Malcorps et al. (2019) Portrait des journalistes belges en 2018. Ghent: Academia Press.
Vandendaele, Astrid (2018) ‘Trust me, I’m a sub-editor’: ‘Production values’ at work in newspaper sub-editing. Journalism Practice 12 (3): 268–289. https://doi.org/10.1080/17512786.2017.1291312
Waddell, Franklin T. (2018) A robot wrote this? How perceived machine authorship affects news credibility. Digital Journalism 6 (2): 236–255. https://doi.org/10.1080/21670811.2017.1384319
Watine, Thierry (2004) Entre réalité, vérité et objectivité: la ‘perspective’ journalistique. Les Cahiers du journalisme 13: 24–38.
Wien, Charlotte (2005) Defining objectivity within journalism. Nordicom Review 26 (2): 3–15. https://doi.org/10.1515/nor-2017-0255
Published
Issue
Section
License
Equinox Publishing Ltd.
