Digital news as social production of knowledge(s)

Abstract

This thesis investigates how journalists decide what is true and important enough to publish as news. News is approached as a particular form of public knowledge claiming to accurately provide audiences with what is relevant to think about in everyday life. The central theoretical arguments are twofold: 1) Journalists socially decide what they claim to be true and important as the institutionalized rules, routines, and standards for news production shape the specific form of knowledge produced, and 2) Journalism´s authority is not set in stone but is contingent upon the relationship between journalism and its audiences. A relationship built upon audiences´ need for journalism, journalism´s discursive dimensions, as well as the control journalism possesses to provide knowledge for stratified audiences. The digital developments within news production accentuate the malleable character of journalism in shaping radically different genres of news. The four empirical studies investigate the everyday production processes of two developing news genres that display opposing trends within modern digital news cultures: breaking news and an independent form of data journalism. The thesis applies an ethnographic approach, in addition to a mixed-methods case study, to investigate how the journalists acquire, claim and justify such news as forms of knowledges. The results in the four studies demonstrate crucial implications of the knowledge-producing practices for journalistic authority to provide true and important knowledge.