Robo-Reporters: Evaluating Autonomous AI Agents as Algorithmic Gatekeepers in Computational Journalism
Artificial intelligence agents increasingly perform journalism tasks autonomously, searching for sources, evaluating credibility, and producing news content with minimal human oversight. Yet research has largely treated AI as a monolithic category, leaving the effects of architectural design unexamined. Drawing on gatekeeping theory, this study presents the first systematic comparison of four agent architectures, monolithic (Claude), chain-based (LangChain), multi-agent collaborative (CrewAI), and autonomous iterative (AutoGPT), across 200 controlled experiments spanning 50 journalism tasks of graduated difficulty. All architectures used the same underlying language model and identical tools, isolating architectural effects. Results revealed significant effects on task duration (F(3, 196) = 24.54, p < .001, eta-squared = .27) and computational strategy (F(3, 196) = 305.63, p < .001, eta-squared = .82), with architecture explaining 82% of the variance in processing behavior. Multi-agent collaboration achieved the highest accuracy (84.7%) at roughly twice the time cost of other designs. Multistage analysis of the monolithic architecture documented a 71.7% source rejection rate, a quantitative parallel to classic human gatekeeping, while framework-based systems obscured their filtering inside abstraction layers. Transparency emerged as an architectural choice: framework designs excelled at structured attribution, whereas monolithic and iterative designs produced superior methodological documentation. Findings position architecture as a new structural level of gatekeeping and offer evidence-based guidance for newsrooms: chain-based designs for speed, multi-agent for accuracy, monolithic for versatility, and iterative for auditability.