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Paper short abstract:

This paper argues that a journalism studies ought to be more more sensitive to technology, materiality, and socio-technical culture and discusses the ways to enact this research agenda.

Paper long abstract:

In most scholarship about journalism and most of the classic research about how the news is made, what it consists of, how it circulates in society, and what effects it has on politics and culture, most likely you will find an account of words, the people who wrote or said them, and the organizations they belonged to and interacted with. Virtually ignored, in the mainstream research tradition, are the transformations in the material conditions of news production, distribution, and reception of information that have marked the past few centuries of journalistic production.

This paper argues that a journalism studies research agenda more sensitive to technology, materiality, and socio-technical culture ought to emphasize two overall areas. First, it needs to rethink its relationship with other fields of study that also concern themselves with communication and technology, particularly in terms of the degree to which it imports the finding of other theories rather than providing its own insights to other fields. Second, it needs to rethink where exactly the boundaries of journalism lie, and how technological artifacts and practices reconfigure our understanding of what journalism is and how to study it.