Working Practices of Journalists: Humans or Robots

Abstract

The article presents the results of a research aimed at studying the significant changes in journalistic practices, namely, their partial replacement by automated systems, algorithms, and robots. The necessity of understanding and adapting to these changes comprises the topicality of the research. The research included a random sampling survey of 103 Russian journalists from various mass media. The survey showed that all the respondents use smart services and automated systems at all stages of their work - from making the choice of the topic, and its development, to analyzing marketing efficiency indicators of its promotion. Each stage of working practices requires a different extent of smart technologies involvement, as well as a different set of digital tools. All this proves the authors hypothesis that smart technologies are gradually replacing most routine processes involved in journalists work. In the contemporary commentariat there is no common view on benefits of text generating algorithms and auxiliary automated systems. However, many respondents, who are actually advanced users, believe that these facilitate their work, help to fast-track the relevant processes and avoid errors in routine processes which could be made by a human. The authors recommend taking into account these data when developing university academic programs on Journalism and training programs for professionals in this sphere.