Artificial Intelligence in the Journalism Ecosystem: EU’s normative approach and Journalists’ struggles to re-affirm control over newsmaking.

The journalism ecosystem (Anderson & Valeriani, 2023) is increasingly platformized and subject to Big Tech’s gatekeeping (Nielsen & Ganter, 2022; Simon, 2025). Generative AI (GenAI) is transforming this ecosystem at organizational, cultural, and normative levels, altering newsmaking practices and structural conditions (Diakopoulos et al., 2024; Cools & de Vreese, 2025) with far-reaching implications for journalistic power and authority. These shifts threaten journalism’s democratic function as a guarantor of informed citizenship and accountability, while economic precarity deepens dependence on platform visibility, algorithmic prioritization, and AI infrastructures (Simon, 2025). The European Union has responded through major legislative initiatives - Digital Services, Digital Markets, Media Freedom, and AI Acts (Falkner, 2024; Flonk et al., 2024; Hulko et al., 2025) - aimed at safeguarding information integrity and asserting EU digital sovereignty across physical, code, and information layers (Floridi, 2020). Yet, these frameworks reveal limited ambition to harness AI for human emancipation (Mügge, 2024). Beyond state-centric approaches, struggles for autonomy come on behalf of workers and unions seeking to govern technological change (Minotakis & Faras, 2024). This article addresses this tension through a dual lens: first, by mapping the EU regulatory framework governing news production and critically examining its role in asserting sovereignty; second, by analyzing how journalists perceive and negotiate autonomy amid AI-driven transformations. Drawing on a discourse analysis of regulations and semi-structured interviews with Italian journalists (n = 17), including union representatives, members of the deontological order, and newsroom professionals experimenting with AI (Murru & Carlo, 2024; Splendore, 2024), we assess how the impact of AI in journalism is constructed top-down within the discourse of digital sovereignty through EU regulation, and bottom-up through professional resistance. Our findings expose the interplay between institutional governance and journalistic agency, advancing understanding of how democratic values can be safeguarded in an era of technological governance.