Introduction

News, or “public knowledge claiming to report on current events in the world” (Westlund & Ekström, 2018, p. 3), is more pervasive in citizens’ lives today than ever before. It may be accessed around the clock and in a multitude of ways, including through typical reading, watching, viewing, and listening activities as well as newer “snacking” and monitorial activities such as scrolling through headlines while waiting in the elevator (Costera Meijer & Groot Kormelink, 2015). Those activities may be performed actively via acts such as searching or passively via exposure coordinated by algorithmic recommendation systems. News itself may be accessed through a wider range of media and digital platforms and from a larger multitude of sources. These include legacy news media and digital news start-ups working in and for local, regional, national, or international contexts (Ali et al., 2019; Chua & Duffy, 2019; Heft & Dogruel, 2019), as well as citizen journalists (Kim & Lowrey, 2015) and alternative news media (Figenschou & Ihlebæk, 2019; Holt et al., 2019).

News is neither a “given” nor a necessarily stable object, however. It is the result of news production, defined here as the epistemic processes for developing knowledge about current events or issues that draw upon a range of newsgathering techniques and formatting choices with the objective of yielding a publishable and distributable product designed to inform others. This definition highlights the intrinsic link between news and epistemology, as news can be distilled into different forms of knowledge about the world (Ekström & Westlund, 2019a; Ekström et al., 2021; Nielsen, 2017; Zelizer, 1993). It also underscores that news is necessarily shaped by activities such as sourcing and filtering information (Domingo et al., 2008), which may be produced by human actors or technological actants (Lewis & Westlund, 2015a) and further formatted with particular platforms (Hågvar, 2019; Westlund, 2013) and audiences in mind (Weischenberg & Matuschek, 2008). Finally, it recognizes the close link between news production and distribution―which, indeed, may sometimes occur simultaneously as in the case of broadcasting, live tweeting, and producing newsletters―while acknowledging that the latter is most often examined as a separate, subsequent step (for a detailed examination of news distribution, see Braun, 2019; see also Hermida, 2020; Wallace, 2018).

Adopting an epistemological lens allows scholars to recognize that news is often contested and that much of the contestation occurs implicitly―and sometimes explicitly―along epistemic lines, as with critiques about the veracity of a given news account and allegations of bias (Carlson, 2017; Compton & Benedetti, 2010). This lens also allows scholars to be mindful of the fact that news varies in substance and form between genres, across platforms, and depending on epistemic processes and formats for publishing (Ekström & Westlund, 2019b). In short, news is the result of a dynamic and heterogeneous process.

This article aims to capture that dynamism in order to illustrate the evolution of digital news production, particularly since the turn of the 21st century and mostly in relation to Western journalistic practices. The article therefore does not review the emergence and growth of some important research into news production from the mid-20th century, including the influential work produced by the likes of Herbert Gans, Gaye Tuchman, and Pamela Shoemaker and Stephen Reese. Such work is aptly reviewed by Hanusch and Maares (2021), who describe it as part of a wave of scholarship that illustrate the importance of news routines; the role of intra-, inter-, and extra-organizational relationships; and strategic rituals in shaping news production processes and, consequently, news products (see also Westlund & Ekström, 2019). However, for expediency, this article instead focuses on epistemologies of digital news production, recognizing that present ideas about journalistic knowledge production are shaped by past work.

The article begins with a synthesis of the significant economic, political, professional, social, and technological developments that have played a structuring role in the developments of news production in the field, such as the proliferation of mobile devices and organized disinformation campaigns. Then, it describes some of the key theories that have been used to study news production, centering on an epistemological lens that emphasizes its rhetorical, practical, and evaluative elements. Next, the article systematically examines four emerging forms of journalistic news production―which is characterized by “ambitions toward the publishing of truthful accounts of current events in the world” (Westlund & Ekström, 2018, p. 3)―through an epistemological lens. That examination focuses on participatory journalism, live blogging, data journalism, and automated journalism because they are not only marked by some novelty and represent rapidly evolving forms of journalism but also associated with a significant amount of recent scholarship that merits synthesis. The article concludes with a discussion in which it is argued that scholars can only go so far in understanding news and journalism by focusing on who does journalism or what the news materials produced are, and that the examination of epistemic practices proves a worthwhile addition to that endeavor.

Key Shifts in the 21st Century

The news production process has changed considerably over time and in parallel to broader economic, political, professional, social, and technological changes (Barnhurst, 2011; Braun, 2015; Bruns, 2008; Fenton, 2011; Hanusch & Maares, 2021; Napoli, 2011; Westlund & Quinn, 2018; Zelizer, 2019). Indeed, as scholars have observed, entities typically regarded as being outside the space of journalism can play a major role at particular points of its development. For example, the U.S. Postal Service played a crucial role in creating the distribution infrastructure for newspapers during the early U.S. republic and, in turn, not only helped shape U.S. news processes but also created a sense of national identity and belonging among the citizens of the emerging nation (John, 1995). Although chronicling all the changes that have impacted news production is not possible within a single article, 20 particularly consequential shifts since the turn of the century are highlighted here to illustrate how news production has been transformed alongside changing forces. These forces are grouped for illustrative purposes, recognizing that some transcend simple categories—that is, they may be simultaneously economic and technological, and so on.

Economically, today’s news environment is characterized by greater audience fragmentation, which refers to the process through which (or the phenomenon in which) mass audiences are split into more diffuse and specialized groups in their media consumption (Neuman, 1991). That has promoted specialization in the production of news and the creation of niche outlets to satisfy new and narrower segments (Napoli, 2011). Similarly, there is now greater emphasis on audience measurement, or the process of quantifying, analyzing, and synthesizing information about individuals’ content preferences and how they interact with that content (Napoli, 2011; Tandoc, 2019). The current emphasis on measurement is enabled largely by audience analytics, which provides more (and more detailed) data about audience behaviors and facilitates keying journalistic products to audience demands (Zamith, 2018). The nature of commodification, or the transformation of a good or service into a product that can be sold for profit within a market (Hamilton, 2004), has also changed since the turn of the 21st century due to the unbundling of news products, rise of non-journalistic platforms, and increase in competition from platform companies (Steensen & Westlund, 2021) as well as alternative news media (Holt et al., 2019). This has resulted in pressures for journalists to do more with less and a renewed emphasis on subscription-based and nonprofit economic models (Pickard, 2020). Economic conditions have also resulted in greater occupational precarity, or deteriorating professional conditions that lead to insecure labor conditions (Örnebring, 2018). This situation is characterized by a growing dependence on unpaid labor and outsourced workers, less full-time work, and a more general fear of indiscriminate layoffs, constraining journalists’ ability to adhere to journalistic ideals and remain autonomous (Örnebring, 2018).

Politically, journalists must contend with greater amounts of disinformation, or information that is deliberately false or misleading (Jack, 2017). A range of actors―including state-sponsored groups―have sought to sow disinformation by strategically exploiting trustworthy information channels and outright impersonating trusted news brands, forcing journalists to rethink how they verify information within a speed-oriented craft while also further complicating eroding trust in journalism (Marwick & Lewis, 2017). News media have been subjected to changes in regulations, or rules, laws, and codes prescribed by some authority, typically a government (Flew & Swift, 2013). Scholars have observed that Western countries have generally moved toward overall deregulation, resulting in greater corporate ownership and emphasis on consumer-oriented journalism (Fenton, 2011). However, they have also observed substantially different approaches taken within European countries, where journalists and news organizations sometimes have access to direct, government-sponsored grants and indirect subsidies, and where news audiences often have access to robust public service broadcasters (Murschetz, 2020). Such approaches are markedly different from those in the United States, where the primary government support mechanism is frequently just a general tax break for nonprofit entities and donors (Pickard, 2020). In addition, many countries still operate under strict information control regimes that limit what journalists can publish (Xu, 2015). There is also now greater digital surveillance of journalists, which enables an actor, such as a government, to use digital tools to continuously monitor the activities of another actor (Ataman & Çoban, 2018). Indeed, journalists―and investigative journalists in particular―increasingly report serious concerns about being tracked, leading to some self-censorship and increased difficulty getting confidential sources to share information (Lashmar, 2017). There have been changes in the amounts and types of state subsidies for news media, or the direct aid provided by governments to support the activities of independent organizations (Kreiss & Ananny, 2013). Although public support for such media remains high, their subsidies have been repeatedly reduced or threatened in recent years (Fenton, 2011), and the lack of subsidies in some countries has resulted in the development of “news deserts” as commercial models have faltered (Pickard, 2020).

Professionally, there is now greater aggregation of news, or the practice of manually or algorithmically bringing together information from different products into a single one, typically based on some curation criteria (Bakker, 2012). This has resulted in the proliferation of news aggregator sites such as Google News and apps such as Apple News that do not originate news but serve as competitors and key audience brokers by virtue of their strategic position within the contemporary news landscape (Coddington, 2019). Such aggregators tend to promote freely accessible content, making shifts away from ad-supported news more challenging. Similarly, there are new forms of convergence, or the integration of previously distinct media components and technologies to create new organizational forms and processes (Pavlik, 2004). This has promoted internal collaboration across a news organization’s departments (Nielsen, 2012) as well as external collaboration with non-media partners (e.g., Hacks/Hackers; see Usher, 2014). It has also promoted a digital-first ethos, where newsworkers are expected to quickly produce content for online environments and engage through social media platforms in ways that challenge traditional journalistic ethics (Singer, 2012). This shift exacerbated the continuous deadline pressures introduced by live broadcasts, accelerated by 24-hour news, and taken to a new level with the “death of the deadline” in online news, resulting in time-obsessed and stepped-up news cycles that emphasize temporal competition and improvisatory practice (Barnhurst, 2011). Recent research on breaking news has also shown how journalists take timing into consideration, and are mindful of when to release their stream of online news (Ekström et al., 2021).

Socially, journalists now operate in a media environment filled with user-generated content, or non-journalistic content created by active audience members that is typically published online and accessible at negligible cost (Jönsson & Örnebring, 2010). This has enabled outsiders to enter journalism, provided new content subsidies for news organizations, created new competitors within a competitive attention economy, and challenged news professionals’ gatekeeping powers (Bruns, 2008). Similarly, there are now more opportunities for dark participation, or antisocial forms of online participation that include harassment, trolling, and “doxxing,” which refers to the practice of publicly revealing private, and often sensitive, information about an individual or organization (Quandt, 2018). Such participation induces some journalists to self-censor, withdraw from public spaces, or quit the profession altogether—and disproportionately affects journalists from historically marginalized communities (Lewis et al., 2020; Stahel & Schoen, 2020). These developments have paralleled (and driven) challenges to traditional epistemic authority, or an entity’s socially accepted “power to define, describe, and explain bounded domains of reality” (Gieryn, 1999, p. 1). Journalists in many areas of the world must now cope with low and/or declining levels of trust in media, as well as eroding control over information (Fletcher & Park, 2017). News production is also conditioned by placeification, or the shaping of an artifact by the places in which it is produced, practiced, and consumed (Gutsche & Hess, 2020). In many countries, news production now occurs primarily in large, urban centers as a result of broader societal place-based realignments, with consequences for trust in non-urban centers and for journalists to witness certain events firsthand (Radcliffe & Ali, 2017). Indeed, as Schmitz Weiss (2015, p. 127) contends, “location plays a significant role in how communities function and how they see themselves,” and scholars have argued that structural inequalities and political polarization in places such as the United States have taken on a place-based dimension as a result of broader social, economic, technological, and professional shifts (e.g., Usher, 2019).

Technologically, journalists work within an environment characterized by greater interactivity, which refers to the technological attributes of mediated environments that allow users to connect with and through technology (Bucy, 2004). News consumers now expect to be able to interact with news content, whether through responsive websites or dynamic products such as interactive data visualizations (Zamith, 2019b). In addition, news organizations now routinely use external hyperlinks as reference tools, which in turn can promote transparency (Sjøvaag et al., 2019) and contribute to heterogeneous news flows and inter-media connectivity (Steensen & Eide, 2019). The current environment is also marked by miniaturized mobilities, or information and communication technologies designed to fit a mobile lifestyle, such as smartphones and smartwatches (Elliott & Urry, 2010). These mobilities have enabled journalists to work outside the newsroom in more diverse and effective ways (see also Duffy et al., 2020; Westlund & Quinn, 2018). Social media, or platforms that allow users to traverse a network of contacts via contributions such as posts and tweets (boyd & Ellison, 2007), have enabled journalists to adopt new practices such as ambient journalism to find novel stories and potentially draw upon a larger range of sources (Hermida et al., 2014). They have also substantially altered how information spreads (Swart et al., 2019). More broadly, however, the space of journalism is now characterized by an immense number of transparent intermediaries, or actors and actants that exert a structuring role in media production and distribution yet are unseen by most media consumers (Braun, 2015). These include algorithmic recommendation tools that shape individuals’ exposure to content―both in terms of what journalists see and which of their work gets seen by news consumers―and promotes practices such as search engine optimization of headlines (Gillespie, 2014). Notably, throughout the 2010s, many publishers aimed to build a presence on social media platforms (Steensen & Westlund, 2021). However, amid growing concerns about their loss of power and revenue in the long term (Nielsen & Ganter, 2018), some publishers have shifted toward platform counterbalancing (Chua & Westlund, 2019).

In concert, these economic, political, professional, social, and technological forces have transformed multiple aspects of journalism and in particular have had material impact on news production—from who the actors are to the actants that are available to them, the activities they may engage in, and the audiences they can interact with (see Lewis & Westlund, 2015a). Such impacts have required scholars to revisit different theories that help explain how news is produced and with what consequences.

Theorizing News Production

There is a long tradition of theorizing news production, much of which draws heavily on psychology, sociology, political economy, and cultural studies (see Ahva & Steensen, 2019; Hanusch & Maares, 2021; Steensen & Westlund, 2021). An early and enduring example is gatekeeping theory, which refers to the process through which actors or actants (gatekeepers) can include or exclude information before it reaches an audience—as with a newspaper editor who chooses which newswire stories to include and exclude (White, 1950). Theorizing from this stream has since argued that such decisions are the product of professional socialization and structural constraints, including the inculcation of news values, practices, and norms (Vos & Heinderyckx, 2015).

Similarly, scholars of journalism have drawn on institutional theory throughout the years to contend that institutions—typically defined as meso-level variables such as beliefs, norms, and formal rules—mediate the relationship between macrostructures such as journalism and the micro-actions of individuals or organizations (Cook, 1998). This line of thinking has proved fruitful in explaining the uniformity in certain aspects of news production and the often cautious responses to disruption and uncertainty (Lowrey, 2011). This theoretical perspective broadly shares key tenets with field theory, as proposed by Bourdieu (1993), which has proven particularly influential in recent scholarship (e.g., Wu et al., 2019). That perspective imagines society as being composed of multiple “fields” (with journalism being one of them) that have field-specific norms, traditions, and practices that shape behavior but are themselves shaped through their intersection with other fields as well as broader cultural, economic, and political forces (Bourdieu, 1993). Such theorizing has opened avenues for examining cultural resources that, for example, lend greater social legitimacy to certain news production actors and activities over others (Benson, 2006).

These examples illustrate but one, primarily sociological, stream of theories that have been applied to the study of news production (for a broader collection, see Ahva & Steensen, 2019; Hanusch & Maares, 2021; Steensen & Westlund, 2021). However, they are also illustrative in that they have all been developed and occasionally recast in some manner in response to the aforementioned economic, political, professional, social, and technological developments. Indeed, as Wallace (2018) wrote while aiming to remodel gatekeeping theory, sociotechnical developments have “changed gatekeeping selection processes and news flow patterns. Accordingly, gatekeeping theory must also change” (p. 275).

This article is centered on a lens that has garnered increased attention in recent years: epistemologies of journalism (Ekström & Westlund, 2019a). There is a close link between news production and epistemology because the production of news inherently involves developing news information into one form of knowledge. Indeed, the very existence of journalistic authority is largely dependent on a public’s perception that journalism―or some entities within it―offers valuable and unique public knowledge (Carlson, 2017). Moreover, scholars have long contended that journalists are members of interpretive communities that are united by shared meanings about news production and the practice of collectively interpreting key events (Zelizer, 1993).

An epistemological lens focuses on understanding the production, articulation, justification, and use of knowledge within the social context of journalism (Ekström, 2002). In other words, it helps scholars examine what newsworkers know, how they know it, and how they justify their accounts―“the news”―as a form of knowledge (Ekström & Westlund, 2019a). This has required scholars to revisit who produces journalism, what epistemic values and activities are accepted as being journalistic, and how those constellations produce distinct forms of journalism―each with sufficiently different epistemological processes and claims.

As Lewis and Westlund (2015a) argue, digital journalism involves a larger and more heterogeneous set of social actors, technological actants, and audiences than ever before. The boundaries that help establish who is a journalist have blurred considerably, with individuals previously at journalism’s periphery now considered central to its enactment (Belair-Gagnon & Holton, 2018). Some news production is already automated, raising questions about the nonhuman and nonjournalistic epistemic logics and processes imbued in the associated algorithms (Diakopoulos, 2019). Audiences have also changed in terms of how they are imagined, constituted, distributed, and measured, complicating how journalists come to understand (and aim to service) what they perceive to be needs of diverse audiences (Napoli, 2011; Tandoc, 2019; Zamith, 2018).

Ekström and Westlund (2019a) observe that research on epistemic values and activities within journalism have centered on three interrelated aspects. The first focuses on how journalistic knowledge claims and epistemic authority are articulated in discourse and through texts. The second draws on journalists’ narrated reflections of their practices, norms, and routines to examine how they think about and enact different epistemic notions. The third evaluates how journalistic knowledge claims are justified in news products and the extent to which they are accepted, rejected, or remixed by those who consume them.

Although news is sometimes treated as homogeneous―especially in statistical modeling that reduces it to a single endogenous or exogenous variable―the scholarship clearly observes that it is instead quite heterogeneous as a result of distinct news production practices, objectives, and constellations. Nielsen (2017) helps illustrate one degree of epistemological divergence in outlining three different forms of knowledge that can be conveyed through digital journalism: news-as-impression, or decontextualized snippets of information as with brief news alerts; news-as-item, or typical-length news articles and video news reports about news episodes; and news-about-relations, or in-depth, explanatory, and durable news products that aim to show the bigger picture. Matheson and Wahl-Jorgensen (2020) also point to five key aspects for distinguishing between types of journalism: narrative structure, or the way in which information is organized; temporality, or how time is accounted for; journalistic role, or the responsibilities, values, and objectives of the news product; authorial stance, or the journalist’s perspective on conventions such as objectivity and balance; and status of text, or whether the product is treated as a finished or evolving product.

Drawing on this literature, this article attempts to explicate the epistemologies of news production through a matrix of 10 dimensions referred to as the epistemologies of journalism matrix. This matrix focuses on identifying the key (a) social actors, (b) technological actants, and (c) audiences within a space of journalism; examining their articulation or justification of (d) knowledge claims and their distinct (e) practices, norms, routines, and roles; differentiating between the (f) forms of knowledge they typically convey; and evaluating the similarities and dissimilarities in their typical (g) narrative structure, (h) temporality, (i) authorial stance, and (j) status of text.

Epistemologies of News Production

Discussion and Research Directions

Until recently, scholars have studied and described news production as a set of human-oriented activities that largely share a universal set of characteristics (see review in Westlund & Ekström, 2019). The authors of this article have deliberately sought to do otherwise, and instead called attention to recent arguments underscoring the growing role of technological actants in journalism and the heterogeneous nature of news production―which, in turn, have implications for how people come to understand “news.” This position primarily draws on three streams of research: the epistemologies of journalism (e.g., Ekström & Westlund, 2019a, 2019b), sociotechnical approaches to understanding news work (e.g., Lewis & Westlund, 2015a; Zamith, 2019a), and systematic comparisons of diverging news production processes (e.g., Matheson & Wahl-Jorgensen, 2020). The authors contribute to those streams by proposing the epistemologies of journalism matrix, which provides scholars with an analytic framework for examining the heterogeneity of news production in terms of its implicated entities, its cultures and methods, and its positionality in relation to matters of knowledge and authority.

The utility of the matrix is illustrated through an examination of four forms of journalism: participatory journalism, live blogging, data journalism, and automated journalism. The analysis highlights three points. First, contemporary news production is deeply influenced by myriad technological actants, which are reshaping how knowledge about current events is being created, evaluated, and disseminated. Second, professional journalists are losing epistemic authority over the news as key activities are delegated to algorithms created by non-journalists and to citizens who have become more present in news production. Third, the outputs of news production are becoming more diverse both in form and in content, further challenging long-standing norms about what is and is not “journalism.” However, those are but four forms and hardly capture all of what journalism encompasses. The authors thus invite scholars to expand on the matrix by applying it to other forms of journalism—and, in the process, refine the matrix itself and advance its theoretical implications.

In addition, the authors believe it is important for any scholar studying news production to be mindful of three key developments in their future work. First, it is apparent that what is “news” to different people is quite different today from times past. The history of journalism has been marked by many significant changes as to what is considered news, how it is shaped, and who distributes it. However, digital devices and platforms have made news available 24/7, and the ease of producing and disseminating content these days has contributed to an explosion of news produced by a large and diverse array of actors. Moreover, that news is increasingly sought on just a few platforms (e.g., Google and Facebook) that often flatten traditional media hierarchies by placing news produced by professional journalistic outlets alongside content created by nonprofessionals. The consequence is that there are now more interlopers seeking to pass their content off as “news”—from individual trolls seeking to get a rise out of people (Quandt, 2018) to actors hoping to monetize their content (Braun & Eklund, 2019) and states seeking to gain political advantage (Marwick & Lewis, 2017)—which has further complicated a historically contested term. Moreover, the past decade has been marked by low or declining levels of trust in news media in many areas of the world (Fletcher & Park, 2017), as well as sustained attacks on news media (Carlson et al., 2021; Waisbord, 2020).

Second, the heterogeneity of “news” and “news production” requires scholars to think carefully about how they operationalize those variables in their work (Mast et al., 2017; Waisbord, 2018). For example, there is a substantive and growing body of literature on news consumption and news avoidance that builds on quantitative data and analyses of media effects (Skovsgaard & Andersen, 2020). Such studies often conceptualize and operationalize news and news production processes in ways that make them appear more homogeneous than they are in practice (Mast et al., 2017). As such, differences in research findings may be due, in part, to distinct understandings of those concepts, in light of their heterogeneity. It is imperative, therefore, for scholars to both examine the evolution of these understandings and account for them in research by either offering more granular options or detailing their operationalizations.

Third, the power dependencies in news production have changed markedly in recent years (Ekström & Westlund, 2019b). It is now much more difficult for practitioners to adhere to the values typically associated with their occupational ideology or to resist changes instituted by superiors and consolidating ownership (Coddington, 2019; Vos & Heinderyckx, 2015). News producers, once seen as gatekeepers, are now themselves gatekept by algorithms employed by platform companies (Gillespie, 2014; Wallace, 2018)—algorithms that producers often believe they must adjust to even as they recognize such actions only make them more dependent (Nielsen & Ganter, 2018; Pickard, 2020). Their future is sometimes tied to technologies developed far from newsrooms (Braun & Eklund, 2019; Diakopoulos, 2019; Tandoc, 2019). Thus, contemporary analyses of news production should account for power differences among institutional actors—recognizing that journalistic actors are now less likely to exert dominance.

At the same time, although this article has focused on change and on digital journalism, it is important to recognize that a non-negligible amount of what is commonly referred to as “journalism” has remained reasonably stable—and that much of the change is rooted in pre-digital expectations, practices, and capabilities (Zelizer, 2019). Moreover, this article has focused on the mainstream applications of journalism in Western contexts, and it is important to recognize that the histories and legacies of other places impact the developmental trajectories—and epistemological notions—of digital journalism differently in those contexts (Mellado, 2021).

Nevertheless, history has shown that news production will continue to evolve alongside broader economic, political, professional, social, and technological shifts—and in doing so spring new forms and assemblages. An epistemological lens affords scholars a useful and adaptable approach for understanding the implications of those changes to the production of knowledge about news. Nevertheless, it is apparent that future scholarship will demand further theoretical and methodological development in order to keep up with a rapidly changing ecosystem and information regime.