Zhang, Xiaoke, Myunghwan Lee, Mi Zhou, Gene Moo Lee. “Large Language Models in the Institutional Press: Investigating the Effects on Information Sourcing and News Production,” 3rd round R&R, MIS Quarterly.
- Presentations: UBC (2024), DS (2024), CIST (2024), BIGS (2024), JUSWIS (2025), UIUC (2025)
- Industry partner: Muhayu
Large language models (LLMs) are transforming journalism by directly entering journalistic workflows, introducing new opportunities and challenges for the institutional press. This study investigates how LLM assistance affects journalists’ information sourcing in news production using a mixed-method approach. We begin with a qualitative study of 43 journalists to identify and theorize how LLM assistance affects three core journalistic values: publication promptness, information source quantity, and information source originality. We then compile a large-scale dataset of 1,073,742 news articles from 111 South Korean news outlets and collaborate with industry experts to detect undisclosed LLM-assisted articles. Our event-level analysis shows that LLM assistance accelerates publication but reduces the number of information sources used in news articles, with a larger decline in primary sources than in secondary sources. Heterogeneity analyses and a randomized experiment suggest that this reduction is driven by two mechanisms: an LLM generation mechanism that narrows the set of retrieved and represented sources, and a metacognitive regulation mechanism that reduces journalists’ active search and evaluation. We further show that these effects extend beyond individual articles. A journalist-level difference-in-differences analysis indicates that LLM adoption leads to persistent reductions in source usage over time. Our findings offer practical implications for LLM system design, newsroom practices, and institutional disclosure policy.