Beyond Technological Lag: Re-Centering Marginalized Media Markets in Global AI Journalism

Research on artificial intelligence (AI) in journalism has been built largely on evidence from well-resourced newsrooms in Western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic nations. This thematic issue focuses on media markets that are marginalized economically, politically, linguistically, or epistemically. Its 17 articles examine newsrooms, journalists, educators, developers, and public discourse across Sub-Saharan Africa, Southeast Europe, Latin America, BRICS (an international group currently comprising 10 countries: Brazil, China, Egypt, Ethiopia, India, Indonesia, Iran, Russia, South Africa, and the United Arab Emirates), and the Caribbean. Read together, these studies show that AI adoption at the margins is selective, bounded, and human-gated, shaped by subscription costs, scarce local data, missing newsroom policies, state agendas, and dependence on platforms built elsewhere. Journalists respond with layered boundary work and what contributors call “defensive” forms of governance, protecting verification, judgement, and accountability as human domains. The issue also shows that AI is made meaningful through discourse before it is experienced, as hype, risk narratives, and representations position marginalized societies as recipients rather than co-producers of AI futures. We argue that marginality is relational and that it changes what AI does to journalism. We close with an agenda for comparative, locally grounded, and decolonial research on AI and news.