‘In recent years, a series of AI courses for journalists has emerged in response to the rapid adoption of AI technologies in newsrooms, their uneven market distribution, and news professionals’ desire to upskill. Consequently, these courses are becoming important sites where specific understandings of AI and journalistic practices are introduced, negotiated and legitimised. In this paper, we examine the specific case of the JournalismAI Academy for Small Newsrooms, an educational initiative with institutional prominence and global reach, as a site of domestication. Drawing on theorising of technological domestication in Media Studies and Science and Technology Studies (STS), we examine how institutional actors shape domestication practices in news contexts and the implications of these interventions. Based on ethnographic observations and qualitative interviews, we identify four central dimensions of domestication that each enact sets of practices and meanings associated with AI. These include: (1) demystifying, (2) cultivating, (3) managing, and (4) finally, appropriating AI. In analysing these dimensions, we identify how the course instructors enact AI as domesticable in ways that are contingent on both dominant understandings of AI and the perceived local and organisational constraints of the participants. These enactments, in turn, reshape participants’ relationship to AI and their subsequent use of AI technologies. Through this analysis, we shed light on how courses such as the Journalism AI Academy for Small Newsrooms intervene in participants’ AI practices, and how the course, in unintended ways, naturalises and depoliticises dominant understandings of AI and its inevitability in journalism.’
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