The cultural capital you need to work with automated news: Not only “your beautiful piece of work”, but also “patterns that emerge”

Abstract

This article sheds light on the emerging forms of cultural capital that media practitioners need to acquire to work with automated news, as in Bourdieu’s understanding of unique abilities that include, among others, journalistic expertise and technical know-how. To uncover these new skills, we carried out 30 interviews with editorial staff, executives and technologists working at 23 media organisations based in Europe, North America and Australia. We show that these new forms of cultural capital are essentially two-fold: on the one hand, they involve taking a “structured journalism” approach so as to think of what an ideal story may look like, and then by breaking it down into smaller predictable elements that can be reusable across many versions of that same story; on the other hand, they also call for knowing how to embed a media organisation’s standards and practices into code for automated news. Overall this study argues that a new type of cultural capital emerges, as it is associated with the production of automated news. We call it the distinct-abstract capital, whereby journalism is thought of both as a one-off endeavour and as a process that can be deconstructed in an abstract way close to computer programming.