Journalism as Cultures of Circulation

Journalistic epistemology and digital news circulation: Infrastructure, circulation practices, and epistemic contests

“…Journalistic circulation denotes the conveyance of news messages across various media channels while also connoting news as a shared discourse that makes events meaningful. This definition follows Bødker’s (2015) argument that circulation involves both material (e.g. technologies enabling distribution and interaction) and accompanying discursive (e.g.…”

“…The term “epistemic contest” derives from Gieryn’s (1999: 1) use of “credibility contest” to indicate struggles involving epistemic authority. This emphasis on epistemic contests connects back to Bødker’s (2015) conception of journalistic circulation as extending beyond information transmission to include how modes of circulation also communicate meaning about the knowledge they communicate. There are no neutral or natural forms of knowledge; instead, they arise through competition and negotiation.…”

“…Starting from Ekström’s (2002: 260) definition of journalistic epistemology as the “rules, routines and institutionalized procedures that operate within a social setting and decide the form of the knowledge produced and the knowledge claims expressed (or implied),” this article expands on “social setting” through the lens of circulation. Bødker (2015) usefully extends circulation away from a simplistic definition of textual transmission to a broader understanding encompassing “processes underlying the (ongoing) production of meaning and cultures” (p. 104). Applying digital news circulation to journalistic epistemology turns attention to how news as a form of knowledge is shared, transformed, contested, and controverted, by a variety of actors deploying a range of practices across digital media platforms.…”

Repairing a fractured field: Dynamics of collaboration, normalization and appropriation at intersections of newswork

“…This sees information authority become the product of processes of re-negotiation, as online publics amplify, dispute and verify news making use of the affordances of digital platforms (Mortensen 2015, Shirky 2003. Social media spaces have also introduced change, with practices of (re)production, (re)mediation and (re)circulation altering patterns of cultural production and introducing new practices of information legitimation and sensemaking (Bødker 2015).…”

Transmission creep

“…For instance, contributors to a recent issue of Digital Journalism, devoted to "theories of journalism in a digital age," theorized numerous aspects of contemporary communication that in the past were insufficiently conceptualized or even overlooked. They considered "effects" from novel perspectives that incorporated geographic space (Weiss 2015), the means by which information circulates around and through a network (Bodker 2015), and the interplay of humans and technology (Lewis and Westlund 2015). Here and elsewhere, actor network theory (Domingo, Masip, and Meijer 2015;Latour 2007;Primo and Zago 2015), which treats objects -explicitly including technological ones -as actors within social networks, has been posited as useful in making sense of journalism in the 21 st century.…”