AI in Journalism Education: Curriculum Development and Implementation of Journalism in BRICS Universities

Abstract

This study employs content analysis and semi-structured in-depth interviews to examine how journalism education across BRICS countries has responded to the rise of AI and adjusted its core paradigms. In this study, BRICS refers to the expanded BRICS grouping, comprising Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa, Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates. It combines latent Dirichlet allocation topic modeling of university journalism curricula with 15 interviews of China-based journalism educators. We selected 10 representative BRICS universities with journalism and communication programs as samples, after which we compiled training frameworks, syllabi, and teaching documents for all their AI-related courses, and used the LDA model to extract core topics and to conduct manual qualitative content analysis across five dimensions: course localization, technical tools, skill guidance, teaching content, and values. The interview results provided valuable supplementary insights.