As a PhD student at Toronto Metropolitan University (TMU), I am conducting a study on the use of chatbots and other AI technologies in small newsrooms.
As part of this study, I would like to invite small newsroom staff to take part in a brief interview about their use of chatbots and other AI technologies in their work, and also to briefly use and provide feedback on a chatbot prototype I have developed. The interview should take one hour. These interviews will take place over TMU’s Zoom system.
Please note that we will record the interviews to ensure accuracy in the data collection and analysis process. However, the raw recordings will not be publicly available. We are hoping to conduct these interviews throughout October and November 2024.
The data collected in this study will serve as a resource for my PhD dissertation and potential future publications. Participation in the study will be confidential, but broad details about the partciptant’s role may be also included in future publications to provide context, such as “Participant A was a senior editor at a newspaper.” Statements made in the interviews could be included in published research.
We are looking for 10 participants in total for this research study. Participants in this study will be individuals who work in small newsrooms. For this study small newsrooms will be considered to be news organizations that have under 20 full-time employees. Participants must be over the age of 18. At this stage, we are currently only looking for partcipants from Canadian small news organizations.
An incentive of $30 CDN will be provided to participants of this research study, upon completion of the interview and prototype use stage of this project.
This project is funded via a Research Assistantship supported by grant funding from the Social Science and Humanities Research Council. This study has been reviewed and approved by the Toronto Metropolitan Research Ethics Board (REB 2023-186).
If you have any questions about this research or are are willing to participate in this study please by email me at s1duncan@torontomu.ca