Generative Artificial Intelligence (AI) in News: A case study of selected digital-native news outlets in Zimbabwe

The excitement and widespread publicity of OpenAI’s Chat Generative Pre-Trained Transformer (ChatGPT) in 2022 further allowed news outlets and journalists to reimagine their interactions and engagements with audience members. Newsrooms, particularly digital-native, have increasingly woven generative artificial intelligence (AI) tools such as, among others, Google Gemini, ChatGPT, DALL-E 2, Canva, Grammarly, Headline Hero, StoryMap, Chartbeat, GitHub Copilot and Microsoft Copilot into their news production processes. Such AI tools are harnessed for their potential to automate text, image, video and audio creation, streamlining workflows and personalising content. Arguably, these are profound capabilities that are swiftly becoming essential for digital-native news outlets in a competitive environment. This study investigates how four digital-native news outlets, namely Matabeleland Pulse, Community Podium, Centre for Innovation and Technology (CITE), and Eco Climate Network, are adopting generative AI, their motivation in deploying such tools, and how newsroom leaders perceive the influence of these tools on journalistic practice. The study is anchored on the Social Construction of Technology (SCOT) framework, which emphasises that social, economic and cultural forces shape the adoption of technologies as much as technical efficiency does. This study analyses this phenomenon along the three axes of the journalistic field. These are, (i) techno-economic means, that is, financial and technical resources that enable or constrain an adoption, (ii) subject of journalism, that is, journalists’ perspectives on AI in their professional practice and (iii) object of journalism, that is, audience reception, trust and engagement with AI-generated content from the newsroom editor’s perspective. The study employs a qualitative design methodology using online surveys and brief follow-up interviews with newsroom leaders.