# Employing a Chatbot for News Dissemination during Crisis: Design, Implementation and Evaluation
## 2 Literature Review  
### Chatbots in the News Media: Uses and Affordances  
In recent years, robotic technologies have established themselves in the news media by offering practical alternatives for journalistic daily routines. Although the transition from bots to chatbots has not been easy, automation techniques have found their way to the news media platforms, eventually resulting in \"automated news\" and \"automated journalism\" through the use and exploitation of algorithms. [PERSON] and [PERSON] (2015) ([PERSON] and [PERSON], 2015) argue for the \"potentially positive and beneficial utility of automated news and information sharing\", including how bots may \"contribute to positive effects in the public media sphere if employed ethically and conscientiously\" (p.3) ([PERSON] and [PERSON], 2015). This new wave of automation incorporates many forms of what is commonly referred to as \"artificial intelligence\" or \"cognitive technologies\", which aid both the inputs and outputs of journalism ([PERSON] and [PERSON], 2015). Automation initially aimed to reduce human effort and facilitate the work journalists undertake to get news to the public in the era of big data ([PERSON] and [PERSON], 2015). The application of chatbots in journalism has shown that they can unburden journalists from daily routine work, reducing pressure to produce quantity and allowing them to concentrate instead on quality, freeing up capacity for in-depth analysis and reporting ([PERSON], 2017). This also enables them to consider best practice in journalistic work, like checking multiple sources, reflection and diligence ([PERSON] and [PERSON], 2015). In addition, chatbots embedded in news platforms assist in the categorization and taxonomy of news, especially in the era of big data, facilitating users' effort to locate specific news topics they are interested in ([PERSON] and [PERSON], 2015). Moreover, the application of chatbots in the news media reshapes the narrative of journalism: Not only do they allow the personalization of information delivery and immediate interaction among sources and recipients ([PERSON], 2017), but they also do so through trusting speech, by which they seek to generate emotion and foster loyalty ([PERSON], 2017) and, consequently, trust. In the news media environment, trust remains one of the most important features that journalists around the world strive to achieve. Several studies have pointed toward trustworthiness that users ascribe to third-party computerized actors and algorithmic processes used for selecting and curating the news. [PERSON] et al. (2018) ([PERSON] et al., 2018), for example, demonstrate a link between respondents' trust in news organizations and their assessment of the utility of algorithmic news selection. They argue that, as trust in news organizations falls, people are less likely to recognize editorial selection by journalists as a good way to receive news. By contrast, agreement that automated personalization is a good way to receive news is less affected by distrust in the media. They conclude that users do not recognize the link between automated news personalization and the operation of news organizations, \"believing the technology has a degree of immunity from contamination by a politically compromised or untrustworthy news media\" (p.17). [PERSON] and [PERSON] (2019) ([PERSON] and [PERSON], 2019) frame their study in terms of the newsbot as a medium that mediates existing social relationships (in this case, between audiences and media organizations). Following [PERSON] (2013) [18], who suggest that robots can be either a connective or divisive element in the inter-group relationships that they mediate, [PERSON] and [PERSON] find that the friendly newsbot contrasts favorably with users' previous experience with traditional dissemination of news and the journalists who produce it. [PERSON] (2020) [19] introduces a two-dimensional framework of Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence (HCAI) that separates levels of automation/autonomy from levels of human control.