When algorithms meet journalism: The user perception to automated news in a cross-cultural context

Automated journalism – the use of algorithms in writing news reports – underscores the new direction of media transformation in the 21st century as it may reshape how the news is produced and consumed. Such writing algorithms have been increasingly adopted in U.S. and Chinese newsroom, but how well they are accepted by news users deserves more research. A comparative study was thus conducted to examine how U.S. and Chinese news users perceive the quality of algorithm-generated news reports, how much they like and trust such reports. Results show that U.S. and Chinese users demonstrated more shared, rather than different, perceptions to automated news. The users did not perceive automated content in a linear way, but viewed them by considering the interaction of the authors (i.e., journalists or algorithms), the media outlets (i.e., traditional or online media) and cultural background (i.e., U.S. or Chinese users).