"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

TL;DR

This paper investigates how Chinese newsrooms internally organize cross-functional collaboration around AI among journalists, AI technologists, and AI workers. It uses a two-phase qualitative design (26 interviews and 3 workshops) to reveal motivations, current practices, and challenges, with emphasis on autonomy, governance, and value alignment. Key findings highlight power imbalances, the invisibility of data labor, and the need for co-design, prototyping, and trading-zone mechanisms to translate journalistic values into machine-tractable design. The work advances HCI and journalism research by offering actionable guidance for inclusive, value-centered AI collaboration in newsrooms, particularly under political and regulatory constraints in China.

Abstract

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.