Journal of Cyberspace Studies

Journal of Cyberspace Studies

The applications of artificial intelligence in content production and dissemination in electronic journalism in Iraq

Articles in Press

Document Type : Original article

Authors
Ali Abdul Hassan Alabbas
Ehsan Shahghasemi
Abdollah Bicharanlou
Department of Communication, Faculty of Social Sciences, University of Tehran, Tehran, Iran.
10.22059/jcss.2026.418887.1261
Abstract
Background: Artificial intelligence is reshaping news production and dissemination, yet most evidence comes from Global North newsrooms, leaving Global South media systems underexplored. Iraq, whose electronic-journalism sector has grown rapidly, has figured only marginally in this literature.
Aims: This article examines how AI is applied in Iraqi electronic journalism and how practitioners weigh its usefulness against its drawbacks.
Methodology: The study adopts a sequential exploratory mixed-methods design. Semi-structured interviews with seventeen Iraqi journalists, editors, and academics were analysed thematically to build a model, which was then operationalised as a questionnaire administered to 303 practitioners and analysed in SPSS and LISREL using confirmatory factor analysis and one-sample t-tests.
Findings: The qualitative phase distilled 174 codes into twenty-two basic themes, four organising themes, and one global theme, yielding four newsroom functions: optimising the news-production process, intelligent language and text processing, news personalisation, and the management of multimedia tools. Confirmatory factor analysis validated this structure with excellent fit (χ²/df= 2.33; RMSEA= 0.022), and one-sample t-tests confirmed that all four dimensions are used significantly above the scale midpoint (P< 0.001), with multimedia management most pronounced and personalisation least. A consistent ambivalence emerged: practitioners embrace AI as an efficient technical assistant while resisting its extension to analytical and narrative judgement.
Conclusion: The study contributes evidence from a largely absent context and a transferable, validated model. It identifies technical infrastructure, not practitioner willingness, as the principal constraint on adoption, implying that returns depend less on persuading staff of AI's value than on infrastructural investment, tool-literacy training, and safeguards preserving human oversight.
Keywords
artificial intelligence
automated journalism
electronic journalism
mixed-methods research
news production
Subjects

Main Object: Humanities & Social Sciences; Applications of Artificial Intelligence in Content Production and Dissemination in El

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Journal of Cyberspace Studies

Articles in Press, Accepted Manuscript
Available Online from 08 September 2026

  • Receive Date 19 July 2026
  • Revise Date 04 August 2026
  • Accept Date 08 August 2026
  • First Publish Date 08 September 2026
  • Publish Date 08 September 2026