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Introduction: the many relationships of journalism -- Foundations of journalistic authority. Professionalism as privilege and distance: journalistic identity -- Texts and textual authority: forms of journalism -- Telling stories about themselves: journalism's narratives -- Journalistic authority in context. Recognizing journalistic authority: the public's opinion -- Legitimating knowledge through knowers: news sources -- Mediating authority: the technologies of journalism -- Challenging journalistic authority: the role of media criticism -- Conclusion: the politics of journalistic authority

The digital media environment provokes many questions about the state of journalism as a knowledge producing practice. As a means to better assess how changing digital news practices connect to journalists' epistemic authority, this article combines Ekström's emphasis on journalistic epistemology as a social practice of knowledge production with Bødker's conceptualization of circulation both as a form of information transmission and as a site for producing shared meanings about journalism. To develop a model for analyzing the epistemic consequences of digital news circulation, three components of circulation are explored: infrastructure, circulation practices, and epistemic contests. These components consider, respectively, the materiality of digital media, various usage patterns that arise, and public struggles over what news as a form of knowledge ought to look like and who should produce it.

Journalistic judgment is both a central and fraught function of journalism. The privileging of objectivity norms and the externalization of newsworthiness in discourses about journalism leave little room for the legitimation of journalists' subjective judgment. This tension has become more apparent in the digital news era due to the growing use of algorithms in automated news distribution and production. This article argues that algorithmic judgment should be considered distinct from journalists' professional judgment. Algorithmic judgment presents a fundamental challenge to news judgment based on the twin beliefs that human subjectivity is inherently suspect and in need of replacement, while algorithms are inherently objective and in need of implementation. The supplanting of human judgment with algorithmic judgment has significant consequences for both the shape of news and its legitimating discourses.

AbstractThe study of journalism has long included a close examination of who gets to be a news source. With their privileging of the objectivity paradigm and distrust of direct reportorial experience, journalists turn to outside sources to provide evidence for their accounts. But this is not a mere exchange of information; patterns of news sourcing confer authority and legitimacy on certain sources or groups while ignoring others. Over time, sourcing routines reinforce notions of who possesses social power. This essay reviews conceptualizations of how journalist–source dynamics result in the production of certain representations of the way things are. Three perspectives receive attention: viewing the journalist–source relationship as symbiotic and mutually beneficial, as dominated by sources who set the cultural definition of events and problems, and as marked by incessant competition over news access and the ability to shape news frames. While the work on news sources has been extremely productive in conceptualizing the relationship between definitional power and journalism, the shifting media environment requires renewed attention to the relationship between journalists and their sources.

This article examines tensions between new media forms and traditional journalistic practice through the rise of news search engines that index news stories from across the web. Specifically, Google News is taken up as a case study because of its popularity and its insistence on not using human editors. Conflicting normative articulations of journalism arise between traditional news and news search engines: the former promotes an interpretive order through purposefully structuring the news product to create a meaningful map of what is important, while the latter promotes diversity through creating easy access to different viewpoints and multiple versions of a story without legitimating one view over another. As a result, tensions form around questions of what journalism does and what it should do.

This article explores the early stages of the Digital Video Recorder (DVR) market, with particular attention paid to brand leader TiVo. The television industry, which relies on schedules to organize the audience commodity, faces threats from DVR technology. Initially, broadcasters and advertisers reacted with fear, but also came to realize the potential of using the technology for data collection and target marketing. These firms employed a mix of investment and litigation to shape the developing industry. Simultaneously, TiVo characterized its relationship to broadcasters and advertisers as advantageous rather than contentious. As a result, the emerging DVR model offers users greater control through time-shifting and increased functionality with content playback, while presenting existing television firms with a platform for audience surveillance.

The network society is moving into some sort of middle age, or has at least normalized into the daily set of expectations people have for how they live their lives, not to mention consume news and information. In their adolescence, the technological and temporal affordances that have come with these new digital technologies were supposed to make the world better, or least they could have. There was much we did not foresee, such as the way that this brave new world would turn journalism into distributed content, not only taking away news organizations' gatekeeping power but also their business model. This is indeed a midlife crisis. The present moment provides a vantage point for stocktaking and the mix of awe, nostalgia, and ruefulness that comes with maturity.