Preemptive Boundary Work and AI Integration in Journalism Across Southeastern Europe and the Mediterranean

This paper explores how journalists across Southeastern Europe and the Mediterranean negotiate the integration of artificial intelligence (AI) into newsrooms in terms of the preemptive boundary work (PBW). The study employs a cross-sectional survey of 343 journalists from eight countries: Albania, Croatia, Kosovo, North Macedonia, Romania, Slovenia, Spain, and Turkey, representing diverse political, economic, and media system contexts. The results suggest that journalists are increasingly testing the waters of using AI for various newsroom tasks, but at the same time that its use is not without hesitation and is not uniform in every country. Rather than only fretting about job displacement caused by AI, journalists have the main concern over transparency, accountability, bias, and professional legitimacy. The results indicate that professional negotiations are not only an influence on preemptive boundary work but also the institutional dimension of media systems, which extends the scope of analysis of PBW with regard to the application of AI in journalism.