ABSTRACT
This chapter shifts attention to audience participatory practices and automated forms of engagement associated with what authors have broadly termed 'automated participatory journalism'. Although heavily skewed towards news organisations in countries whose economies are relatively stronger, such as South Africa and Namibia, and fairly patchy in other countries, these practices manifest through the strategic deployment of AI, chatbots, algorithms and audience analytics systems in newsrooms. The chapter examines the extent to which developments in AI, chatbots, algorithms and analytics systems are an issue in African newsrooms. It demonstrates that automated participatory journalism has opened up more opportunities for human and non-human actors to collaborate and complement each other. Interviews with some of the journalists working at the coalface of digital newsroom operations in South Africa, Namibia and Zimbabwe indicated that newsrooms invest time and resources in trying to understand the logic of algorithms and their implications for audience participation.
