News media businesses and working journalists are increasingly engaging with automated decision-making systems across a variety of different contexts. Recommender systems systematically distribute news to online audiences and novel machine learning systems can produce comprehensible auto-generated articles. News consumption is also changing, with companies sending news updates through chatbots and voice assistants as a means of engaging with audiences. There are concerns that these developments may see robots replacing journalists and unreliable recommender systems preferred over careful human editorial judgment. A more nuanced approach suggests that practical uses of these technologies will ‘augment’ rather than replace human capabilities. In any case, advances in automation pose new challenges for the sector, which is adopting these technologies with varying degrees of commitment.  
This panel brings together national and international subject-matter experts and leading practitioners in an attempt to separate hype from reality. The panel will discuss the adoption and deployment of automated decision-making, identify probable futures and flag positive and negative issues likely to emerge. The discussion will help to ground ongoing conversations around the interactions between news media and automated decision-making, setting an agenda for public debate and future research projects. 

Speakers:  
Nick Evershed, The Guardian 
Professor Wiebke Loosen, Hans Bredow Institute 
Dr James Meese, RMIT University (Host) 
Dr Silvia Montaña-Niño, Queensland University of Technology 
Inga Ting, ABC - Professor Haiqing Yu, RMIT University

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