Abstract
Amid the flourishing digital pluralism of news, researchers are grappling with the epistemological implications for journalism and its audiences. In contributing to the sociological literature on news as knowledge, this article suggests a framework for empirical analysis of how the evolution of digital news alters and adds to ways of knowing about reality. Following a science and technology scholarship approach to knowledge production as social practice, the article investigates the interaction between journalistic claims about how publications are valuable for audiences and the applied technology when producing and presenting news. The study applies the framework to investigate breaking news as a form of knowledge, a digital news genre pivotal to modern news culture that is likewise questioned for its societal value. The study takes an ethnographic approach with a newsroom study of a local metropolitan newspaper in Sweden in 2018 with a revisit in 2024. The findings show three mechanisms that produce breaking news as a particular form of knowledge wherein journalistic claims and applied technology interact to stretch and maximize what is reported and likewise continuously reproduce this dominant form of mass attention.
Introduction
Journalism is routinely and vaguely described as necessary for a flourishing democratic society by fulfilling the task of providing people with the information they need. News transforms information into a form of knowledge perceived of as worthy of public attention (Schudson, 1995). We expect journalists to know of the happenings in the world that are important enough to know: “This is a lot to ask – but ask we do” (Carlson, 2017: 7). Within the field of news epistemology, researchers have investigated journalism’s everyday practices around how knowledge comes to be claimed and justified in a continuously evolving mediascape (Ekström et al., 2022; Kligler-Vilenchik and Tenenboim, 2020; Matheson and Wahl-Jorgensen, 2020; Nawararthne and Storni, 2023; Ramsälv et al., 2024). This line of research has mostly focused on the everyday acquiring, claiming, and justifying of knowledge: how do journalists do, and what epistemic challenges occur? As the other main interest within news epistemology, Ekström and Westlund (2019) identified the question of what form of knowing about the world is expressed through news. This question is surely closely interconnected with ones around how knowledge is produced.
To date, the connection between the production and the form of knowledge offered has not been conceptualized extensively in the literature, although seminal studies have addressed similar topics (e.g., Schlesinger, 1978; Tuchman, 1978). This article intends to fill this gap, because in a mediascape developing distinct forms of digital news, it is urgent to investigate how, concretely, these practices impact how reality is presented to people consuming the news. This newsroom study accordingly suggests a theoretical framework for investigating how digital news are produced as forms of knowledge. It is applied to a genre fundamental to modern news culture: breaking news, essentially defined as a news genre with high claims to newness, immediacy and being present where news happens (Ekström et al., 2021; Lewis and Cushion, 2009).
Following Nielsen’s (2017) sequel to Park’s (1940) initial sociological analysis of news as a particular form of knowledge, this article focuses on digital news as various different forms of knowledge. Throughout the article, form of knowledge is conceptualized as how news offers people ways of perceiving and comprehending reality (Ekström, 2002: 261). Whereas previous research (Nielsen, 2017; Park, 1940) has analyzed news as knowledge from the perspective of a spectrum—ranging from acquaintance with to knowing about—this article strives to complement this literature by investigating the connection between knowledge production itself and the form of knowledge offered. This connection is theorized by emphasizing the mutual influence of meaning on technology—and technological affordances on meaning. Science and technology scholarship (STS) has already offered multiple insights into technology and news production beyond a deterministic view on technology (e.g., Boczkowski, 2004; Lewis and Usher, 2013; Nawararthne and Storni, 2023). Yet, in summarizing the inclusion of STS perspectives within journalism research, Anderson (2019) underlines a lack of the original STS focus, suggesting “another avenue for the application of STS theory to the study of news would be to study the manner in which journalistic practices themselves generate knowledge” (Anderson, 2019: 235) This article continues down this same avenue in focusing on journalistic practices.
In following Latour (2005), both human and non-human actors produce digital news, as news workers and technology collaborate to form meaning (e.g., Lewis and Westlund, 2015; Plesner, 2009; Turner, 2005). Accordingly, this article focuses on two crucial components for the production of breaking news: how the publications are claimed by journalists to be valuable knowledge for audiences and the technology applied. In approaching technology as an affordance (Hutchby, 2001), the mutual constraining, allowing, and shaping of these claims and technologies may be investigated, directing the empirical focus on the interactions between them. Empirically separating journalistic claims and technological affordances mitigates the risk raised by Zelizer (2019: 349) to not lose sight of journalism itself, “regardless of its technological bent”
Previous research has to some extent characterized breaking news as a form of knowledge; the news genre is produced under specific modes of expertise coordination (Westlund and Ekström, 2021) with high risks of being wrong due to immediacy being the guiding principle (Rom and Reich, 2020), which forces journalists to develop strategies for these challenges (Ekström et al., 2021). Researchers have also questioned its quality in terms of societal value, with Lewis and Cushion (2009: 316) harshly stating that breaking news “is a perfect example of a victory of style over substance.” Others have investigated why journalists produce breaking news, concluding that it is motivated as a form of knowledge that provides audiences with a moment of being there (Ekström et al., 2021; Montgomery, 2007). However, journalists occasionally acknowledge that breaking news is not always of value for audiences (Usher, 2018). This article situates itself within this broader context of how breaking news still forms a fundament for digital news production in the current mediascape when research has actualized questions of its value for audiences and society. Not all breaking news is negative reporting about accidents etc., yet it arguably forms a dominant feature to the genre as such, making it a suitable focus also for this article that aims to characterize breaking news as form of knowledge. Research has shown how negative reporting makes audiences experience emotions “spanning from fear and despair to anger and disgust” that may ultimately drive audiences to avoid news as such (Villi et al., 2022: 156). This study intends to address this puzzle and deepen the knowledge about breaking news as a form of knowledge through an in-depth investigation into how it is produced in practice.
Following this, the article poses the following overarching research question: In what ways do journalistic claims about the value of providing breaking news interact with the applied technology and offer a certain form of knowledge about reality?
To investigate these interactions in empirical studies successfully, the study applies an ethnographic approach with an extended newsroom study of a local metropolitan newspaper in Sweden in 2018, with a re-visit to the same newsroom for 2 days in 2024.
News as knowledge
Almost a hundred years ago, Robert E. Park (1940) presented the seminal sociological analysis of news as a form of knowledge. He argued for a continuum between to know about and to have an acquaintance with, with the former standing for knowledge with a degree of exactness, precision, and rationality and the latter encompassing intuitive and unsystematic knowledge. According to Park, these two forms of knowledge are relative, and he locates news as a form of knowledge in “a location of its own” (675) in between the poles. This location constitutes a form of knowledge that will make people form conversations about it.
Researchers have started to re-grapple with the concept of news as a form of knowledge, striving to contextualize it in relation to the modern news diversity. Nielsen (2017: 3–4) suggests three ideal typical categories to capture this diversity: news-as-impressions (de-contextualized snippets of information via headlines, alerts, live tickers, etc.), news-as-items (classic “self-contained” articles presented in a newspaper, on television, etc.), and news-about-relations (combined elements of long-form contextual journalism with data journalism and visualizations). According to Nielsen, today’s mediascape pushes news to the two outer categories, to the two extremes that are equivalent to Park’s original endpoints. Relatedly, Ekström and Westlund (2019) point to the difficulties in distinguishing news as forms of knowledge: What significance should be attributed to the form of the news, the knowledge processes they are the result of, and how the news are understood and used in different social contexts? Current research does not provide clear answers. Particular aspects have been studied, though without being integrated in a coherent theoretical framework on news as a form of knowledge.
This article intends to contribute to this literature on news as forms of knowledge by employing a theoretical framework that sheds light specifically on the knowledge production practices and their role in shaping the form of knowledge presented to audiences (Anderson 2019: 235). Previous research on modern news has focused on the acquiring, claiming and justifying of knowledge where studies have hinted at, yet not fully investigated, this concrete relationship. For instance, Matheson and Wahl-Jorgensen (2020) suggest the feature of fragmentation in live blogging risk decreasing claims to knowledge, and Kligler-Vilenchik and Tenenboim (2020) show that audiences may co-produce journalistic knowledge through sustained reciprocal relationships. This article argues for a focus on two central aspects of (digital news as) knowledge production: journalistic claims of values for audiences with the reporting (what value do they claim to provide audiences with?) and the applied technology (what does technology do to this claim?).
In specifying journalistic claims, the framework applies a narrow form of the concept of epistemic value, which concerns: “how journalists understand and justify news as valuable knowledge for the public” (Ekström et al., 2022: 756). Yet, focus is not on the role of journalism in society but more locally on what value the specific news genre is claimed to have for audiences. For instance, how data journalists claim the value with data journalism to be how audiences may explore content themselves without predefined filtering of journalists (Ramsälv et al., 2024). Hence, the empirical focus considering journalistic claims is on how journalists, through how news is produced, argue that the specific news they produce is valuable for audiences. The framework then examines how these claims interact with the technology used when producing and presenting the news.
Technologies as affordances in news production
To date, STS has been utilized in research about journalism, particularly focusing on the role of technology in shaping news production, with Boczkowski (2004) first studying journalism and digitization by investigating the appropriation of consumer-oriented publishing in American dailies. Anderson (2019) summarizes how STS perspectives have contributed fruitfully to journalism studies and underlines how the actor-network theory (Latour, 2005) has been influential in its materialistic approach to technology and agency. According to Anderson and De Maeyer (2015), the prevalent focus in actor-network theory studies is innovation per se and not “insights into the social, material, and cultural context that suffuses our technologically obsessed world” (3). In a similar vein, in striving to move beyond the use and building of new technologies per se, this article focuses on technology in the context of the forms of knowledge that are offered to people reading the news. Studies on modern news have investigated epistemological dimensions of new technological advancements. This for instance where Møller and Thylstrup (2025) identify tensions when data scientists working with AI are translating journalistic epistemologies in practice concerning for instance what news is. Likewise (Ekström et al., 2022), show that a heavy incorporation of metrics into the newsroom risks reducing the efforts towards truth seeking as the more surface-like truth telling aspects in the output phase (packaging, optimizing, etc.) are prioritized. Moreover, Carlson (2020) raises epistemological implications of current media infrastructures where news stories spread independently from original intended meanings. The suggested STS-oriented approach in this study builds upon these results and seek to up-close-investigate how claims to value for audiences and technology interact (intentionally or unintentionally) in practice in a news production process.
The theoretical approach uses the concept of technologies as affordances (Hutchby, 2001), a concept balancing the social constructivist and realist approaches to technology by suggesting that “affordances are functional and relational which frame, while not determining, the possibilities for agentic action in relation to an object” (Hutchby, 2001: 444). This concept is useful for investigating how journalistic claims and technology interact in the production and presentation of digital news without predefining what precedes what. This divides the analytical focus on what journalists claim by how they work, what technology in each respective genre affords, and how these together produce different forms of knowledge. Technology is thus theoretically allowed to be quasi-determinant in the sense that it surely constrains certain things while enabling others, all in the context of a mutual shaping wherein claims and genre-specific technological conventions interact. Hence, the social role of technology is underlined in this conceptual contribution to the sociological study of news as forms of knowledge (Nielsen, 2017; Park, 1940).
Breaking news reporting
To be quick in disseminating information is a stable, inherent value within modern professional journalism (Schlesinger, 1978). Even though interruptive announcements in broadcasting and radio have been part of journalistic practices for a long time, many new forms of rapid digital news genres have developed and gradually become part of everyday (and night) news repertoires over the last decades. Push notifications, live blogging, and breaking news constitute such advancements (Rom and Reich, 2020). Usher (2018) argues that this norm grows stronger as all publishers now share the same constant deadline. Broadly speaking, breaking news is about providing to audiences as quick as possible news about what is currently happening or what is considered to be the most important to know now. In highlighting the “newness of news” (Lewis and Cushion, 2009: 306), breaking news journalists aim at instant publishing to produce a live moment (Montgomery, 2007) when the journalists promise both to be there on site as well as taking the audiences themselves to the site (Ekström et al., 2021).
In departing from the concern that the high-speed operation of news yields an enhanced risk of errors, Rom and Reich (2020) studied online news flashes, comparing routine and crises items and routine and crisis flashes, finding that news flashes, especially during crises, contain more errors than routine flashes and news items (68). In studying the impact of breaking news on the quality of news output, Lewis and Cushion (2009: 305) stated 15 years ago that breaking news had become a defining aspect of our constant news culture, concluding that “being first, most of the time, means an ability to process information with as little thought and discernment as possible.” (p. 312), They argued that all professional judgments, such as what the story means or if it is significant enough to publish, judgments which take time, are absorbed by the competition of being first. More recently, in investigating the rationale for the production of breaking news, Usher (2018: 332) has suggested an ambiguity, wherein “journalists pursue news that they think is not necessarily valuable, but at the same time immediate news is almost a compulsion” (332). This continuous, rapid flow of news reporting represents a fear of not being relevant to the audience. The suggested study intends to complement this characterization of breaking news as a form of knowledge, arguing that the production practices themselves are key to such an in-depth investigation of how and why breaking news production reproduce a certain perceiving and comprehending of reality (Ekström, 2002).
Hence, following the sections on knowledge, technology and breaking news above, three specific sub-questions have guided the analysis: RQ1: How do journalists claim breaking news to be valuable for audiences? RQ2: In what crucial ways is technology involved in producing and presenting breaking news? RQ3: How do these journalistic claims and applied technology interact to form specific characters of knowledge about reality?
Data and methods
The field (2018, 2024)
This newsroom study was conducted at a metropolitan online-first newspaper in Sweden at one of the 28 local/regional titles run by Mittmedia in 2018. Now, in 2024, the newspaper is run by Bonnier Local as one out of 45 titles. In 2018, the researcher spent around 3 weeks in the newsroom as well as in a central live TV hub serving local newspapers with broadcasting studio. The fieldwork was conducted within a larger project investigating the epistemologies of digital news. The organization explicitly prioritizes breaking news and has set up routines for how to go about delivering it. As a study object in this study, breaking news reporting starts with an initial short article with a potential for live broadcasts and follow-up articles, in line with high claims to newness, immediacy and presence (e.g. Lewis and Cushion, 2009). The procedure at the newspaper was: the live editor received the initial information about, for instance, a fire in a building, wrote the first publication on the topic, and then found out more information, while the news editor (the front chief in 2024) accordingly decided whether to opt for a live broadcast: A phone conference was initiated where the headed-out reporter, desk editor, news editor, and staff from the live TV hub discussed existing information as well as plan for the upcoming productions. There was also a specific thread in the communication tool for continuous communication. The desk editor was responsible for the publishing and promoting of the live broadcast, and the reporter used a live-stream app for broadcasting live. The central live TV hub on duty provided the studio with an anchor and a technician in the control room.
In 2024, the researcher traveled back to the same newsroom for 2 days of observations and situated interviews with the staff working with breaking news: front chiefs (former desk editors) and live editors; as well as traditional interviews with one reporter and the desk chief to simply update about the production procedures. This group included both the same journalists and new ones. The revisit zoomed in specifically on the role of technologies in breaking news. As the main procedure for breaking news was intact from 2018, both materials were possible to use in the analysis together; the overall knowledge about the organization together with a further zooming in on technologies.
Ethnographic approach
The methodological approach was ethnographic, as the researcher aimed at investigating everyday practices from the journalists’ perspectives. One key method for so doing was to conduct situated interviewing, where the researcher continuously asked how, why, and what questions following 12 initiated breaking news productions from 2018. Through close observation, the researcher followed: (1) The work of the live editor (writing articles, making phone interviews). (2) The work of the desk editor (re-writing headlines, promoting articles, leading live broadcast when news editor was absent) (3) The work of the news editor (leading live broadcast, guiding reporters to and on site) (4) The work of the reporter (heading out to the field, conducting interviews and the live broadcast) (5) The work of the anchor in the live TV hub (planning with and instructing the reporter, planning with control room staff, preparing and making the broadcast) (6) The work of the technician in the live TV hub control room (planning with and instructing the reporter on site, planning and making the broadcast) (7) The phone conference initiated for each live broadcast production. (8) The internal communication channel initiated for each live broadcast production.
In 2024, the researcher additionally closely followed the production of three breaking news productions through situated interviewing. In focusing on breaking news, the material for this article is focused on these publications (2018 and 2024), analyzed in tandem with the overall ethnographic material from 2018, including for instance, organizational documents and policies, observations of staff meetings, editorial board meetings, introduction meetings for summer workers, a researcher´s account in internal communication channels, situated interviewing when various journalists (reporters, editors, anchor, technician) produced news from start to finish, and spontaneous talks in the newsroom due to having a workspace next to the journalists as they worked.
The overall analytical procedure was to go through all materials to: (1) identify the journalistic claims to value; what are explicit or implicit arguments (in talk and practice) for why the audiences should receive this form of news? (2) identify the key technologies in the production; when observing the work: what distinct technology is necessary in the shaping of this specific character of news? (3) analyze how the key technologies themselves also shape the outcomes of specific claims.
This to conceptualize three such interrelation mechanisms, which are presented with help from empirical examples to illustrate the arguments.
Analysis
The analysis is organized as follows. This section begins by describing the central technologies in the production of the form of breaking news reporting under study. Then, the study identifies three central mechanisms through which key technologies interact with journalistic claims of how breaking news is valuable to audiences: (1) stretching what is, (2) maximizing what is, and (3) reproducing what is. The mechanisms are illustrated with help from empirical examples, and together the mechanisms contribute to characterizing and maintain breaking news as a form of knowledge, which is further addressed in the concluding discussion.
Key technology in breaking news production
This section explicates central technologies in the production of breaking news that will be focused in the analysis below: a) b) c) d) e) f) g)
Mechanism 1 – stretching what is
The empirical example below illustrates a mechanism that stretch what is through an interaction between claimed values of the journalists, and the applied technology. The journalists claim the value of broadcasting live even though the event turns out to be over, as they still may provide audiences with important information. This claim interacts with the live-stream app´s affordance of sending a live stream to the technician, who can cut out cover pictures from it for the broadcast later, which makes it nevertheless seem live.
Example
It is June 2018, and the researcher joined the car with two reporters heading out to cover a suspect drowning. Reporter 1 joined the phone conference with the news editor, desk editor, and the staff at the live TV hub. The news editor reported that the live editor had talked to the emergency service but knew nothing more than the information provided by SOS Alarm, as they had not reached the location yet. Hence, on the way to the location, the reporters knew the information from the alarm, which was that it concerned an alarm about a drowning and the location of the drowning.
When arriving at the location, the technician from the live TV hub asked the reporters to record if they see some “good pictures” to send over the live stream app later. Also, the news editor asked if they had turned on the live-stream app, wanting them to do so for the news editor, live TV hub, and the desk editor to be able to see the same thing as the reporters. The news editor and the technician talked about how valuable it was for them to see what the reporters themselves saw. With the live-stream app on, the technician encouraged the reporters to just hold the phone up straight so that the technician could cut out cover shots, such as of the divers searching in the water.
The news editor, who is the leader of the breaking events, said they could not film the divers live in the broadcast, as they could have found a person just then. Reporter 2 talked to the emergency service leader to find out more detailes and request a broadcasted interview. The emergency service leader told reporter 2 off camera that someone had seen a wheelchair in the water and that they made sure now that someone was not in the water, that they had no other indications of a missing person, and that they had searched for a while and had not found anything. It was clear from listening to the emergency leader that they did not think someone was in the water. The reporter accordingly suggested that the interview was motivated by a desire to inform people about this kind of work, emphasizing the value of letting audiences know how urgent it is to sound an alarm when seeing something like this. The news editor, who is responsible for such decisions, agreed to that suggestion.
The news editor decided the team should make a short broadcast with the emergency service leader, and the live-TV hub staff asked if they wanted the broadcast to be open or behind a paywall. The news editor decided it should be open and published quickly, as they still might find someone, and if they did, they would make that into a new broadcast. The live TV hub and the reporters started planning the broadcast, and reporter 2 reported that it was clear now that there was no person in the water. The broadcast was still going to happen, and it was not discussed whether to broadcast or not. The anchor wanted to know if the divers were still in the water, and the reporter asked the emergency service leader, who confirmed that they were. The desk editor asked for 1 min to change the headline, publish on Facebook, and send out a push notification. While waiting for the desk editor, staff at the location reported to each other that the emergency service divers had now finished the diving search. Even though it was now clear that the rescue mission was over, the broadcast was going to start. The anchor began the presentation in present with the information that the emergency service had been called out for a suspected drowning and that there were divers searching in the water. During the broadcast, the live TV hub included cover shots from the live stream that the reporters had on earlier. The reporter conducted the interview with the emergency service leader, who reported that they had not found anybody in the water and that they had stopped searching. Back in the newsroom, the researcher spoke to the desk editor on duty, who said that the broadcasted interview was one of their most read articles.
Hence, even though the team knew the whole story from start to end before beginning the broadcast, they managed to stretch the time of its liveness for audiences through using a live-stream app that recorded key moments when the divers were searching, when making claims regarding the value of reporting live about the work of the emergency service. This routine of pushing the live-stream app button as soon as possible when headed to the site was a customary method in the newsroom. This was exemplified in a meeting where experienced reporters instructed summer workers about live TV, saying, “That is what is important to make sure to get hold of, because, to be in the broadcast yourself, that you can be 15 minutes later on another location if needed. But it is the pictures there and then that is important.”
Mechanism 2 – maximizing what is
The empirical example below illustrates a mechanism that maximize what is through an interaction in between claimed values of the journalists, and the applied technology. The journalists claim the value of reporting even though there is nothing new to add as it demonstrates how the journalists are present. This claim interacts with affordances of the formats used for publishing breaking news. The variation of formats tones down the repetition per se, yet nevertheless, it discursively makes the event large in volume and hence causes it to demand more attention.
Example
In July 2018, the researcher observed one technician and one anchor working in the live TV hub that serves the local newspapers in the corporate group with TV studio. This morning, one of the newspapers had notified the hub over Slack about a suspect murder in one of the areas that they cover. This notification is like an order for a broadcast from the hub. Following the routine for breaking news, the live editors in the local newsroom had published an article about what they knew, and the researcher observed the technician and the anchor talking to the breaking team through phone conferencing.
The local desk editor asked if the reporter was ready to go live, and the reporter gave a tentative yes, adding that the broadcast will be based solely on what was in the published article. The anchor and the headed-out reporter began a conversation about the upcoming live broadcast, and the reporter answered some questions from the anchor, who wrote them down on the script. The anchor prepped the reporter for what kinds of questions would be asked and gave examples of answers that the reporter could provide. The anchor concluded by asking if there was something that the reporter thought that the anchor should ask, and the reporter answered, “No, we don’t know anything more than what is written in the article, you know. So, I guess it is not. There is not so much more to tell now.” Then the reporter suggested how to start the report where the anchor said that precisely that information would be included already in the introduction, saying, “You may surely say that again, maybe a bit later, but you can listen to the introduction so that we don’t repeat each other, but say that also, absolutely.”
Sometime after the first broadcast, the breaking team also published another broadcast where the anchor interviewed the police press contact over the telephone about the suspected murder. The backdrop for this interview was the live stream from the reporter team. During the interview, the technician asks the reporter to stand in front of the camera for a quick Q&A after the interview, adding this would cover “just about how it is on the location and if something new has happened. Is that alright?” The reported replied, “Yes, absolutely. Yet, nothing has happened.” The technician said he understood that, but the report could “say that it is still blocked and calm there. Have in mind that this is a brand-new broadcast you know, so, we can repeat some.” The reporter answered with an “Okay.” The technician directed the reporter to “stand in front of the camera now,” which the reported did.
Hence, the journalists produced a broadcast about already published information, claiming the value of being on site and continuously report. Later, while explicating that they try to return live with different types of broadcasts, the anchor said the following to the breaking team when talking about the corporate group broadcasting strategy: “This first broadcast is incredibly good and important, that we can be on site, to show that we are close to where it happens.” As the corporate prioritized broadcasting, this team was in a position to make such statements. Because of the differences between the affordances of an article and a broadcast, it is possible to produce news several times. This is comparable to a situation where, after a short initial article, the breaking team would publish another short article, one with the same information but rephrased. This is, in essence, what was done— yet the information had simply moved to another format, ultimately toning down the repetition by claiming the value of being on location. In addition, the affordances of the publishing formats wherein both news articles and broadcasts can be of whatever length and published at whatever time make it possible to adjust to when no new information is available, such as making a short live comment after the police interview about how nothing has happened, simply to repeat that they are on site. The discourses within the respective formats tone down this repetition when, for instance, a breaking news article has the news flash section with a red “Direct” and “Right now” right before the headline. Correspondingly, the anchor finished the broadcast saying, “We are trying to get to know more right now and will come back as soon as we know something. Then you can find it here on the website and in our app.” Such discourse embeds the information in an appropriate newness, which is necessary for the claim of being there live. This interaction makes the event repeated and ultimately maximizes what is in making the event large in terms published attention volume.
Mechanism 3 – reproducing what is
The empirical example below illustrates a mechanism that reproduce what is through an interaction in between claimed values of the journalists, and the applied technology. The journalists knew from metrics that audiences read articles about alarms and interpreted this as a question from audiences about what is happening, for which they claim the value of providing them with answers. This journalistic claim interacts with the affordances of SOS Alarm notifications that provide through “the beep”, and to the inbox, automatic such answers to ultimately reproduce this form of reporting (as well as interest in it).
Example
In October 2024, the researcher was back in the same newsroom as 2018. As the researcher sat by the desks of two live editors on day shift, the editors monitored their inbox for subscribed notifications from SOS Alarm. They also always had the “beep” on their desk that signals whenever an SOS alarm for certain geographical areas goes off and the emergency service is involved. The desk staff knew that the articles resulting from the alarms were well read, and they wrote an article about almost every alarm they got from “the beep” or the inbox, with some exceptions, such as when the category was “other alarm,” which most often meant examples such as that someone had fallen and needed assistance or that there was a leakage of water somewhere, etc.
Metrics is key technology for the live desk with a large live metrics feed just next to them. The live editors described that they have learnt how to communicate with their audiences in the right way, meaning in a way that makes them listen (read the articles). As one live editor put it, “I think it is fun to see how things go sometimes, to get to know if I have put a worthless headline or not.” Another live editor gave some examples of when it was of crucial importance when and how detailed information should be included in the headline or not. Two examples were the big highway nearby and a popular shopping mall; to explicitly include such information attracted the audiences, whereas if an event happened somewhere else, it was better to not include the actual location, only the crime or accident. These detailed analyses were made continuously and over time, both by individuals in front of their screens and collectively in front of the newsroom screen or at the morning meetings where metrics were reported.
Later, the researcher sat by the desks of two other live editors on evening shift. When asked why they published breaking news about alarms, they explained that their audiences want to know about these stories, that they would go onto the website and read about it: “people wonder,” as one of them put it. This claim of how it is valuable to provide answers to such wonder was repeated in the newsroom, and the live editors also mentioned that even alarms that turned out to be nothing were well read, claiming it was of value for their audiences to get that answer as well. As one of the live editors said, “Not every alarm is very exciting in the end, but you don’t know that from the beginning. But I mean, then you know those kinds of alarms about a smell of smoke somewhere can still be of value. People at least get to know what it is, why the fire truck drove by near home.”
In contrast to tacit and self-evident ways of doing news work where journalists have a hard time articulating how things are being done and why (e.g., Kronstad, 2014), the breaking news production in this newsroom was explicit and with arguments. The live editors always knew exactly what to do and why. As one live editor put it, “Breaking is, I think, the most straightforward, you know. It is almost the easiest when it comes to knowing how to act. (…) We have a very clear routine for how we should do when alarms come in; yes, so we write ‘alarm about’ that we send out, we call the emergency service to check, you now. There is a very clear routine. Everybody knows what is happening.” However, it was when talking to the live editors about why they think people have this quest for accidents that a tacit dimension was actualized. The researcher asked what they thought about the focus on topics such as crime, fires or accidents from the audiences, and one live editor said that, when not working, these alarms were not of interest to this person at all: “It is not an interest to me personally, so I actually can get a bit surprised sometimes that it is such a big interest.” These comments illustrate a relationship where things are done as routine, one in which the parts can never talk to each other about what they are doing. As metrics formed a key guideline for action, there was no superior reason to reflect about doing otherwise. Another live editor raised the perspective of how they also might have shaped this behavior, saying, “And maybe that we over the years might also have taught the readers that they in fact can visit [the newspaper website] if it beeps on town, as we say. If they hear a call-out, then they can go to the [the newspaper website]. I don’t think our competitors have the same alarm awareness that we have.”
Hence, the claiming of the value of providing answers to constant questions from audiences about topics such as accidents, crime and fires, interact with a slew of technological affordances —the incoming SOS notifications (emails/beeps), the routine for reporting about the alarms and to check for metrics, the adjusting of texts in open editable formats to make the audiences read if they do not, the sending of push notifications in case the audiences do not listen at all (not present in the news app)—to form a relationship wherein both journalists and audiences do what is expected from them. Arguably, through confirming the interest of audiences, and hence the producing practices of the journalists, breaking news reproduce what is, causing the continuous production of breaking news be upheld over time.
Breaking news as a form of knowledge: Conclusions
This article has crafted and employed a theoretical framework combining news epistemology with STS approaches to investigate: In what ways do journalistic claims about the value of providing breaking news to audiences interact with the applied technology and offer a certain form of knowledge about reality? The findings identify: (RQ1) how the journalists claim the value of newness and presence, in line with previous research (e.g. Montgomery, 2007), (RQ2) a list of key technologies involved in the production, where concrete claims and technologies are exemplified through the examples above. Importantly, the findings additionally show that (RQ3) by putting the lens on how journalists and the technology they use interact in the producing practices, it is clear that it is not journalistic ambition (or technologies) alone that determines the character of the genre (Nielsen, 2017) produced. To the contrary the analysis showcases three distinct interaction mechanisms (Latour, 2005; Lewis and Westlund, 2015; Turner, 2005), both shaping and maintaining breaking news as knowledge. The mechanisms (1) stretches, and (2) maximizes what is, ultimately shaping the character of breaking news as knowledge, as well as (3) reproduces what is, where the interaction even continuously maintains a reproducing form of knowledge that is taken for granted as a vital part of news production. Hence, the mechanisms signal that the efforts of allowing for pluralism in the study of news as knowledges (Nielsen, 2017) should include not only characterizing how the knowledges are characterized (Park, 1940), but also why that is.
The introduction raised the puzzle why journalists prioritize this form of production, despite their own, as well as researchers’, hesitance over its value for society? (Lewis and Cushion, 2009; Usher, 2018) Surely, one obvious answer is that journalists know that audiences (their customers) consume breaking news, and hence they provide it to keep them as subscribers. Yet, as this article displays, this is only one dimension of the explanation. The claims and technology continuously reproduce the legitimization of the prioritized knowledge, in this loud and voluminous style, through everyday practices with little space for questioning it. At the same time, while findings show that emotional responses to tragedies (prevalent in breaking news) seem to be an important driver for news avoidance (Villi et al., 2022), maybe there is a strong reason to actualize more such discussions. Empirical studies ahead should also demonstrate if the findings are totally generalizable to newsrooms not as digital first oriented and specialized in breaking news as the case for this study.
In sum, the contributions of this article to scholarly discussions are mainly threefold: (1) Through merging news epistemology with STS, the article has presented a theoretical approach for future studies of what form of knowledge is offered through the production of digital news reporting (Ekström and Westlund, 2019). (2) By focusing on the production of news as knowledge, the article has also addressed what Anderson (2019) describes as a gap in the inclusion of STS perspectives into journalism research more broadly in considering journalistic practices themselves to be generators of knowledge. (3) Following this, in striving for re-investigating news as forms of knowledge to complement chapters of the sociology of news as knowledge (Nielsen, 2017; Park, 1940), this article has empirically applied its theoretical framework to characterize a currently prioritized and fundamental form of modern digital news, breaking news, as a form of knowledge.
To conclude, this article argues in broad terms that evolving forms of digital news should not just be considered as additional types of news consumption, but instead that comprehending reality from the news today entails choosing radically different forms of knowledge. This approach is worthwhile in a mediascape with continuously developing technological solutions, and future research should continue to characterize what form of knowledge audiences get from assorted news genres, and why. Such investigations will help us resist taking for granted, as something straightforward, the process of creation or depiction of knowledge.
Footnotes
Declaration of conflicting interests
The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The authors disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This work was supported by Riksbankens Jubileumsfond (The Swedish Foundation for Humanities and Social Science) [grant number RJ P16-0715].
