The levels of automation and autonomy in the AI-augmented newsroom: Toward a multi-level typology of computational journalism

Computational journalistic tools have been implemented in newsrooms since 2010. As these tools have started automating several work packages, they have the potential to change news workers’ roles and could also jeopardize journalistic autonomy. Due to rapid technological advances such as artificial intelligence, a knowledge gap has emerged in the newsroom and academia regarding the interaction between these tools and the news worker. To advance the understanding of this gap, this chapter proposes a typology that maps the levels of automation present in the news ecosystem, focused explicitly on the tool−human interaction. In the proposed typology, the levels of automation range from manual to full automation and are strongly connected to the degree of autonomy the news worker or tool has. In doing so, a typology is proposed, embedded in definitions of automation and autonomy in the maturing field of computational journalism.