Can GenAI Move from Individual Use to Collaborative Work? Experiences, Challenges, and Opportunities of Coordinating GenAI into Collaborative Newswork

TL;DR

This paper investigates whether GenAI can move from isolated, individual use to coordinated, collaborative newswork, using journalism as a high-stakes, socio-technical context. It leverages 27 semi-structured interviews with editors, managers, and journalists in Chinese newsrooms and analyzes the data with reflexive thematic analysis to reveal how dispersed GenAI practices interact with team workflows. The key contributions are empirical evidence of a gap between private experimentation and formal collaboration, a detailed account of structural and cultural barriers, and concrete design and policy implications for embedding GenAI into collaborative newsroom practices. The work advances HCI and CSCW by highlighting governance, transparency, and shared-ownership considerations essential for accountable and scalable GenAI-enabled collaboration in journalism and other information-intensive domains.

Abstract

Generative AI (GenAI) is reshaping work, but adoption remains largely individual and experimental rather than coordinated into collaborative work. Whether GenAI can move from individual use to collaborative work is a critical question for future organizations. Journalism offers a compelling site to examine this shift: individual journalists have already been disrupted by GenAI tools; yet newswork is inherently collaborative relying on shared norms and coordinated workflows. We conducted 27 interviews with newsroom managers, editors and front-line journalists in China. We found that journalists frequently used GenAI to support daily tasks, but value alignment was safeguarded mainly through individual discretion. At the organizational level, GenAI use remained disconnected from team workflows, hindered by structural barriers and cultural reluctance to share practices. These findings underscore the gap between individual and collaborative work, pointing to the need to account for organizational structures, cultural norms, and workflow when coordinating GenAI for collaborative work.

Figures (1)

• Figure 1: Overview of the Findings Structure