Artificial intelligence (AI) and future newsrooms: A study on journalists of Bangladesh

Abstract

Many Western and economically developed countries have already incorporated Artificial Intelligence (AI) into their newsrooms. As the media industry is constantly addressing new technological advancements, media scholars are highly confident about the combination of AI and the newsroom. This research investigates AI as a new prospect in the Bangladeshi journalism arena, focusing on the current state of AI usage and projecting the future by evaluating professional journalists’ ‘Mental Readiness’ across a variety of media companies. In the first phase, from the survey of 107 working journalists from 20 different news organisations, this study finds that journalists possess a mostly positive attitude towards AI and are willing to incorporate current technologies in their newsrooms. The majority of journalists are informed, yet many of them lack sufficient AI literacy. In the second part, in-depth interviews with five newsroom editors reveal that it is difficult for Bangladesh to make a significant transformation within a short period. Most of them believe that providing AI-enabled newsrooms in a developing country like Bangladesh is still a long shot, owing to economic and technological constraints.