I am delighted to announce the publication of our new article in Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly, one of the leading international journals in journalism and communication research:

“From Structural Inequalities to Labor Precarity: Adoption of Digital and AI Tools in Latin American Journalism”

Drawing on data from 4,250 journalists across 11 Latin American countries, collected during the third wave of the Worlds of Journalism Study, we examine what truly shapes the adoption of advanced digital and artificial intelligence tools in journalistic work.

Our findings challenge a widely held assumption:

(i) technological adoption is primarily explained by national-level economic inequality, as measured by the Gini coefficient. Instead, it is shaped by factors much closer to journalists’ everyday working realities. Contractual instability, income, workload, and access to training operate as decisive filters affecting journalists’ ability to access, learn, and meaningfully integrate these technologies.

(ii) Excessive workloads may increase the use of digital, analytical, and automated tools, but often as a coping strategy for professional pressure rather than as a result of a sustained organizational commitment to innovation.

(iii) Our main contribution is to shift the debate away from technological determinism and toward the labor and organizational conditions that enable—or constrain—meaningful digital transformation. Technology may be available, but its effective adoption depends on the working structures within which it is introduced.

It has been a genuine privilege to conduct this research alongside Miguel Garcés-Prettel, Jesús Arroyave-Cabrera, Summer Harlow, Lilian Kanashiro, Mariana De Maio, Janara Nicoletti, Adriana Amado, Dasniel Olivera Pérez, Celeste González de Bustamante, Maximiliano Frías Vázquez, and Víctor Quintanilla-Sangüeza.

My sincere thanks to the entire team for this outstanding collaborative effort and for contributing to a situated, comparative, and non-deterministic understanding of technological transformation in Latin American and Global South journalism.

The article is available open access: https://doi.org/10.1177/10776990261471551

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