Newsbots That Mediate Journalist and Audience Relationships

News media organisations are experimenting with a new generation of newsbots that move beyond automated headline delivery to the delivery of news according to a conversational format within the context of private messaging services. To build the newsbot, journalists craft statements and answers to users’ questions that mimic a natural conversation between a journalist and user. In so doing, journalists are experimenting with styles of communication that reflect very particular journalistic personas. We investigate the persona of the news chatbot created by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC), the better to understand how the public broadcaster’s forays into social media service delivery and automation are shaping new relationships between public service broadcasters and their audiences. We find that, for a section of the audience that uses it, the friendly newsbot contrasts favourably with their previous experience with news and the journalists who produce it. The public service journalists who operate the bot are, in turn, using the bot to try to reach new audiences by experimenting with a more informal, intimate relationship with citizen users. The supposedly “intelligent” (but in actual fact very much human-crafted) newsbot is the vehicle through which this new relationship is being forged.