ABSTRACT
The chapter considers the advent of automated journalism, reviews its existing research, and suggests three emerging tensions for journalism, expressed as the dichotomies of scarcity versus abundance, monovocality versus pluralized personalization, and information transfer versus cultural interpretation. It examines a set of emerging critical issues for digital journalism accompanying the rise of automated journalism. The use of automated narrative systems to produce customized news raises fundamental questions about how journalism works. Journalism and technology are deeply intertwined so that extracting the human elements from newsgathering technologies occludes a fuller picture of how news gets made. The market for automated journalism has been pioneered by two companies—Narrative Science and Automated Insights. The advent of automated journalism strikes at core issues regarding journalism as a form of cultural production. Posthumanism, in its cybernetic view, suggests that enhanced connections between humans and machines radically alter our perspective of subjectivity.
