The fast paced growth of AI and its rapid institutionalization in contemporary organizations makes it a uniquely evergreen subject of study from the perspective of its adoption. This issue is particularly relevant in the field of journalism due to the diversity of social, cultural, technological and political challenges it faces. Newsrooms are actively trying to balance innovative experimentation frameworks with efforts to institutionalise the technology and to improve productivity and financial performance (Newman & Cherubini, 2025). These dynamics happen at the same time as a field-wide discussion on organizational governance, accountability and labour impacts as well as calls for “human-in-the-loop” approaches and the safeguard of editorial judgement (Simon, 2024). Most notably, issues such as the growing reliance on third-party platforms, growing disparities between resource-rich and resource-poor newsrooms (WAN-IFRA, 2023) and the lack of knowledge to manage algorithmic power, transparency and accountability (Diakopoulos, 2019) underscore the need to equip journalists with targeted training and enhanced algorithmic literacy (Cools & Diakopoulos, 2024). If we acknowledge that we are still in the early stages of a big shift in technology, we should put at the same level both the positive effects in the media industry (opportunities) and negative (threats), namely: more efficient ways to access information, personality-led news, traditional media being less relevant, interesting or authentic (Newman, 2025), or the correlation between the emergence of AI Overview summarisation and the decrease in news visualisation. (Pais et al., 2025) In this contribution we focus on the appropriation of AI by journalists, as a means to identify adaptation and improvisation patterns in Portuguese newsrooms. From a questionnaire aimed at professional journalists, it is possible to extract quantitative data relating to a non-probabilistic sample we enquire about journalists and their practices. More than simple answers, the preliminary results reveal more doubts and uncertainty than clear paths to the future of journalism and the contribution of AI to the media industry. There are more journalists afraid of AI dependency than confident in AI contribution (even if the majority agrees AI as a tool is helping media professionals). Regarding disinformation and trust, the role of AI is regarded as more negative than positive, and the ethical challenges are immense. In terms of AI adoption, journalists identify the use of several tools (ChatGPT is, by far, the most common), consider them useful to boost their productivity, but are mostly self-taught and lack specific professional training, provided by their employers or acquired by themselves. The results highlight a sector struggling with several previous challenges while trying to incorporate a technology of which the consequences are not well known yet. That balance is particularly significant in a country where public trust in news media is among the highest (Cardoso et al., 2025).

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AI,journalism,newsrooms,adoption,appropriation.