Abstract

In recent years, certain media organizations around the world have begun adopting automated journalism to enhance their newsrooms’ productivity and reporting capacity. These tools, which can be fully- or semi-autonomous expert systems, are being implemented for a multitude of reasons, such as to ease journalists’ workflow, to expand news coverage, to uncover complex investigations and to cut costs. While some have argued automation can help increase newsroom efficiency and output, questions regarding authorship and transparency, and the implications for journalists, have come into question. Despite automated journalism’s growing presence, little is known about its integration in and influence on the Canadian news media landscape.
This thesis reports on the results of qualitative interviews with nine journalists and news media professionals and aims to examine how automated journalism techniques and tools are being integrated, and the effects they have on journalists, their practices, methods, and what is being demanded of them. The purpose of this thesis is to fill a gap in the literature and in our knowledge about automated journalism’s role in Canada. Its findings conclude that, although Canada is behind in the adoption of automated journalism, there is an overwhelming consensus that the ethical guidelines of the Canadian news media industry need to be revised in order to better frame the use of automated technologies.