"It Might be Technically Impressive, But It's Practically Useless to us": Motivations, Practices, Challenges, and Opportunities for Cross-Functional Collaboration around AI within the News Industry
It addresses practical collaboration issues for news organizations integrating AI, but is incremental as it builds on prior research on AI roles in journalism.
The study investigated cross-functional collaboration between AI professionals and journalists in the news industry, identifying key challenges and opportunities through interviews with 26 participants from Chinese news organizations.
Recently, an increasing number of news organizations have integrated artificial intelligence (AI) into their workflows, leading to a further influx of AI technologists and data workers into the news industry. This has initiated cross-functional collaborations between these professionals and journalists. Although prior research has explored the impact of AI-related roles entering the news industry, there is a lack of studies on how internal cross-functional collaboration around AI unfolds between AI professionals and journalists within the news industry. Through interviews with 17 journalists, six AI technologists, and three AI workers with cross-functional experience from leading Chinese news organizations, we investigate the practices, challenges, and opportunities for internal cross-functional collaboration around AI in news industry. We first study how these journalists and AI professionals perceive existing internal cross-collaboration strategies. We explore the challenges of cross-functional collaboration and provide recommendations for enhancing future cross-functional collaboration around AI in the news industry.