On Mazda Stud and other kinds of illegitimate journalism platforms
This essay is about so-called boundary work in journalism. There is a growing need for clarifying the boundaries of what journalism is and who counts as journalists. The number of negotiations is increasing due to changes in journalism production in platforms and changes in the nature of information products in machine-learning enhanced digitalisation.
Sometimes it’s said in journalism that a story buries the lede. This is what happens here as well. More than just discussing boundary work as a concept and comment on its impact on journalism, this essay almost by accident reveals some parts of my comprehension on how to create a massively important and influential journalism platform.
Previously, in “journalism”
On a litany level, journalism has changed because of the emergence of new technologies. According to Bell et al (2017), the major technological changes of journalism are “moving from analogue to digital content, emergence of social media and emergence of smartphones”.
Nevertheless, I’m interested in a deeper rift in the meaning of journalism that is only partly influenced by the aforementioned technological innovations. The major changes I’m interested in are
- the changed conceptualisation of facts (as journalism by definition aims to be factual);
- the changed definitions of measures of success (as journalism as a concept only works if a meaningful discussion can be held on if it succeeds in its goals);
- the changing nature of information products (as the behavior of information products in the markets defines the realm of plausible opportunities to renew journalism production); and
- the changing nature of journalism production (that causes redefinition of who is a journalist).
Next, I’ll go through these four changes focusing in particular on the latter two. The perspective on all of these four following chapters is to investigate how the social comprehension of what journalism is might change because of the changes.
ONE. Meaning of facts has changed
Before Enlightening, as described by Weiderberger in Everyday Chaos (2019), particular information derived from senses was overlooked as something that also animals could possess. What separated humans from animals was the divine skill to come up with broad principles that explained what the eyes saw. These principles, such as “everything flows”, were considered as knowledge.
The series of conceptual and concrete revolutions from the Enlightenment onwards all the way to the Industrial Age changed the way facts were understood. In the Industrial Age they were collected with the scientific method, starting from what was perceived and creating models and theories that explained even the yet-to-be-made perceptions.
Philosophically, this was a satisfactory way of understanding the world to many, but in practice, it was often very problematic. The creator of the greatest theories, Isaac Newton himself, refused to help his friend Halley in estimating the emergence of a certain comet, because counting its trajectory would have included (based on the understanding of the said time) gravities of three planets, making it an infamous “three-body problem”.
Indeed, the real world was always too complicated and chaotic for theories to grasp. WIth theories, everything is obvious once you know the answer. Theories do explain the causes of events that have already happened, but they have very little predictive power in the “real” world, if the real is understood not as clean laboratory environments that are built to investigate the realities of the physical laws, but the chaotic social world we all populate.
It took me a long time to grasp why artificial intelligence (deep learning) is important. Now I understand that it’s much more than I first thought it would be: a tool. More than being a tool, it’s a second conceptual change in how we understand facts.
How? Once I won a small innovation competition in Forestry with my app concept “Chanterelles on a map”. The concept app tapped into a broad variety of data on how it had rained, how the terrain is shaped, what kind of forest there is around and how users had been walking and stopping in the forest.
This is not very interesting, as similar apps have been built for many uses (although the Finnish forestry data is superior). What is interesting is that there is absolutely no need for a theory on how chanterelles grow. Such a theory would be insufficient in any case, as the complexity of the forest means that a very sophisticated model would be needed for each location individually. Nevertheless, a machine learning application does not need a theory to be practically feasible, and even more importantly, it’s much better at predicting the locations of the mushrooms than a general theory.
There can now be predictions without explicit models and theories. As all facts are useful only in the sense that they help us to make better decisions regarding the future, this changes the meaning of facts. When the concept of facts change, journalism must change too. In any case, as Mark Deuze (2020) points out in Beyond Journalism, these days most boundaries between journalism and other forms of public communication are meaningless to media users.
The change of the meaning of facts impacts many things, one of which is the organising principle of information. This text you are now reading is unfortunately an example of industrial era organisation of facts that are linearly organised to end all enquiries on a particular topic. Books follow this structure too. Digital offers opportunities to do much better.
Indeed, information is no longer something that needs to be consumed as a whole. This makes sense if we are being honest, as there never really was such a thing as “the news” that one could fit into a paper (Weiderberger 2012). Nonfiction books and (other) journalism products are designed to explain things. But getting an explanation is a secondary goal when one adopts the new conceptualisation of facts. The primary goal of facts in the digital society is to create a representation of relevancy through linking new information collectively in a meaningful and self-correcting way.
TWO. Successful journalism
When the US Senate held discussions to limit the power of radio broadcasting in 1938, most radio stations were struggling financially due to the impacts of great depression to advertising and income. Despite that the questions the senators asked from the radio station owners were about the new technology’s impact on representation and democracy. Based on these discussions, the Senate decided to limit the broadcasting power of AM broadcasting stations to 50,000 watts. This limit, known as the Wheeler resolution, still stands.
Only 30 years later the Senate had to discuss legislating another ground-breaking media innovation: the television. But this time, at least according to James Allworth in the podcast Exponent, the discussion was strictly economical: no questions regarding the impacts of television to democracy or representation were asked.
During the summer 2020, the US Senate had to talk about perhaps even more disruptive technology. The CEOs of the largest platform companies were invited to the Senate to give their view on how platforms should be regulated. This time, the new technology met a far more divided house. It can be said that the democrats were interested only in economic matters, asking questions such as how advertisement based business models cope with privacy. The republicans, on the other hand, had a very different agenda. They were not interested in the business side of things. They were only talking about freedom of speech.
Freedom of speech is one aspect of representation and thus democracy, but it’s admittedly only one of the many freedoms that are changing due to the emergence of massive platform based cooperation. Focusing only to this one issue actually might help legitimising the economic aspect represented by the democrats.
But the economic approach too is too limited. Both parties failed to grasp what is important. Focusing only on the economic aspects of the media system and narrow topics within the realm of societal topics (freedom of speech) is not helpful in increasing our understanding on how the societal information distribution and creation system should operate.
Nonetheless, this (admittedly broad) economic gaze on successfulness of media systems has for more than 50 years shaped what has been accepted within the realm of journalism, and if the platform discussions in the US Senate are any indication, this will continue in the future too.
The economic focus on media systems has its price (pun intended). According to Chris Peters (2019), the biggest mistake in journalism has been connecting editorial independence to financial independence from government. This has left journalism to compete against other information providers in the market. Further, as Risto Kunelius (2006) points out, the increasing professionalism of journalism has led to more framing and dramatization of journalistic content. This is done to increase the perceived value of the journalistic product. But the more there is dramatisation and word twisting, the more suspect is the reputation of journalism as a fair mediator of public discussion.
Thus, “proper” journalism aims to be financially independent (i.e. a business) and its claim to be a type of information that people are willing to pay for relies on professionalism. The “how the sausage is made” of journalism, however, is not only about how to create factual and timely news. The secrets of the craft also include almost gimmicky skills of dramatisation and framing to maximize financial feasibility.
All this, interesting in its own right, shapes the process of legitimizing different forms of content production as journalism. A good example of how this mechanism works is the process through which the blogosphere was included within the sphere of legitimate journalism.
Blogs are journalism
First blogs were a counter movement to the mainstream information system. They were radical, amateurish, and niche. Of course there have always been all kinds of blogs, but if one thinks about how the blogosphere felt then and how it feels now, one can sense a clear distinction.
The last image, of course, is a new and popular blog. Currently, blogs are mostly what magazines used to be. The are lean back reading on lifestyle matters. Previously, blogs were something else.
Without delving too deep into the complex history of blogs, it’s remarkable to notice that their role as a form of legitimised public writing increased at the same time when their radicalness decreased. The Bloggers became influencers, the culture of cross-linking was supplemented by organising around advertising lead generation companies often founded by bloggers themselves and the layouts and texts became increasingly professional, repetitive and — dare I say — boring.
The boundaries of legitimate public writing started to include bloggers when mainstream journalists began to demand more professional practices from bloggers. Naturally, this demand was also influenced by other legitimising work done by others, including the changing reading habits of the broader audience. But broadening part of the professional code to include bloggers caused a problem that is still unresolved: how popular should an internet writer be before they should be treated as a mass media? This is a crucial problem, as there is a right for a common man to, say, talk bullshit. But journalists do not have this right, as it undermines the whole information infrastructure if this is allowed. However, it’s impossible to say a priori where to draw the line. Is a person advocating alternative medicine to a large following actually a mass media where different laws apply? What if I do it to my 2500 Twitter followers, and then it gets retweeted a thousand times? Whose discourse are we able to use to condemn conspiracy theorists or those using hate speech within their own community?
As an interesting side note, the Chinese have solved this particular problem regarding political speech — their special focus area in the realm of freedom of speech — by making it illegal to write “harmful content” when it is shared more than 500 times or clicked more than 5000 times (Strittmatter 2019). Creating such content would lead to time in prison for the author. So writing content that is shared less 500 times is private speech, where slightly less harsh laws apply, and having more than 500 shares or 5000 clicks is public speech. The clever trick here is that the number of shares is not controlled by the author directly, so all the popular bloggers and writers need to consider if their harmful words have too much resonance with the public. This trick is especially clever when one considers the motivations of those who share or do not share content: sharing harmful content becomes a form of punishment, not a form of encouragement or endorsements, blurring the public opinion to participating individuals.
Legitimation of the new is done by the old
The role of mainstream journalism outlets in legitimising new forms of public speech cannot be overstated. For example, Finnish public broadcasting YLE legitimises Youtube stars as a form of news distribution through their YLE Kioski service, which targets young people. Importantly, Youtube stars are not journalists in the traditional sense. They do not automatically subscribe to the ethical or practical journalistic guidelines and lack the education to do complex editorial choices required in the industrial era journalism. The notion by Risto Kunelius (2006) that professional core definition of journalism has become culturally fragile rings true in the practical sense here.
So what’s in it for YLE to help legitimize Youtube stars as journalists?
At least on the surface, the legitimation is an accidental outcome. What YLE was trying to do was something completely different. Their goal was to involve a hard to reach segment of the audience: the “young people”.
The whole idea of involving a new or underrepresented segment of the audience within the sphere of legitimate news is something that should be considered with a great suspect in the era of virally circulating facts and information. There are several reasons for this.
First, the whole audience is an imagined concept and division of the audience into its constituents based on age groups is an arbitrary choice.
Second, the idea that people should be reached directly and “fully” is based on industrial era conceptualisation of facts. When facts are no longer total but instead partial and linked, informing people works differently.
Third, what right does YLE have on dictating the sphere of legitimate information? Understanding that this is a complex issue, I want to point out that at least a part of the moral panic regarding the fact that “young people don’t read’’ dismisses the fact that semiotically images and videos are also text. These days most young people live very likely in more, not less, mediated and symbolised societies. This is, of course, not only a good or a bad thing. The whole concept of involving the whole audience is a possible goal only if one has an industrial era idea of what facts are and how they are delivered.
Why is this? Importantly and perhaps surprisingly, the role of the traditional media as an agenda setter has not diminished. There is a significant Swedish longitudinal study (Djerf-Pierre and Shehata 2017) that shows that the transformation to the digital society has not significantly impacted the way traditional information systems in the society set the agenda. According to this convincing study, the agenda-setting power of traditional media has not diminished during the last 25 years at all. How can this be? Because while the digital information clearly spreads and behaves differently, there are no new mechanisms for information production in place. The topics (issues), themes (set agenda) and facts (new information) that circulate in the media system are mostly produced and mostly amplified to a broad audience, and most definitely legitimised, in the same way they were produced, amplified and legitimised 25 years ago!
This might be surprising. But from a long perspective, at least according to Mark Deuze (2020), journalism has not changed much during its history. Indeed, journalism seems to be a very coherent construction when investigated afar. When one looks at individual journalists, a more messy picture emerges. These days journalism is increasingly practiced outside news organisations. Even legacy journalism is becoming more “post-industrial, entrepreneurial and post work” (Deuze 2020).
Changes in journalism are at the core changing answers to the questions such as “what is journalism” and “who is a journalist”. While the answers to these questions have remained surprisingly stable throughout times, it’s at the same time indisputable that the concept of journalism and a journalist are historically specific. It thus makes sense to consider what might cause the change in the answers to the aforementioned questions.
The following two chapters investigate this dilemma of surprisingly coherent and stable journalism and rapid change of who counts as journalist.
THREE. The products of journalism (What counts as journalism?)
What can change journalism? I have in previous texts identified a few significant changes in the basic fabric of the journalism consumption and production. The three main changes are the change of the nature of information products and the move to platform based production and delivery, discussed in this chapter, and the change of journalistic activity, discussed in the next chapter.
The characteristics of information products are different this time
Market failure and public goods and externalities enhanced market success look alike (Cooper 2006). To media corporations, public good information looks like a market failure, incentivizing them to create ways to turn naturally public good information into private goods. Currently, according to Chris Peters (2019), journalism is not a public good, because it’s not nonexcludable in the markets due to paywalls, subscriptions and licencing fees. Communication structures, however, have been traditionally considered to be public goods (Cooper 2006). Most journalism is thus artificially privatised. As private goods are exclusive by definition, privatising information goods means excluding a significant portion of potential users of the information. They then are forced to use secondary means of information gathering, including discussions with peers. If this exclusion continues, traditional media companies will have a hard time making the transition I’m describing next. The reliance on the privatised information goods is, I claim, the biggest obstacle on the road to maximizing the social potential of the digital information systems.
Digital information can be more than a public good. The cambrian explosion of the increased resolution and transparency in societal institutions, especially journalism institutions, offers opportunities for more participatory information goods. The combination of resolution and transparency in digital information goods means that they are not only used, they are also produced at the same time.
One example of such produsage (Bruns 2008) is people, who send feedback on the mistakes of an online newspaper story to the journalist. Digital goods can be edited on the fly, so the reader that comments on a mistake increases the value of the information for those who come after her. Another example is the ability to see which parts of a story or video are watched most carefully. And yet another one is the feature in Medium where one can highlight and comment on a sentence in a blog post for those who read it after you.
All these actions are people using the information product and also improving it while they use it. While currently this produsage is mostly active, as in “requiring activity from the user”, potentially the most value is derived from passive produsage where all use of a product increases its value, albeit slightly. This is what happens when a Youtube video shows the most watched parts.
This feature of a product increasing its value when used is very significant. Obviously, most products lose value when they are used. Thus, we are used to thinking products as something that is consumed (as in “burned”). Typically, products are more or less rival: they can be only used a certain number of times, often only once. But the ability of information products to be antirival (to have negative subtractability) changes the economics of information products completely. However, the aforementioned exclusion of information products as private goods limits their use and thus limits the value increase due to antirivalrity.
The opportunity of the antirival information goods and the current approach of creating artificially private information goods is in direct conflict. Legitimation of the former as a new way to do journalism is only now starting, but it’s impact on what counts as journalism will be significant in the long run. This is because it emphasizes produsage instead of consumption, hybrid media system (Chadwick 2011) instead of gatekeeping and fragmented and linked facts of the ambient news environment (Hermida 2010) instead of facts as quotes from official sources and the like. All these changes are changing what counts as journalism.
Legitimised news producers in the platform era
The change of the nature of the journalistic information product seems to hint to a society where news production is a wild west of public sphericules and competing narratives. This is somewhat true, but a new form of legitimised production is arising as well.
It’s very difficult to compete against antirival products that utilise produsage, as was evident before with encyclopedias and Wikipedia. The similar turn is happening in journalism, but before it was not possible due to the industrial era conceptualisation of knowledge. As the concept of knowledge has changed, it’s very much possible to create a algorithmically guided, produsage enhanced media system that transcends the current system.
So instead of the gatekeeping role of mass media editors, the legitimacy of news comes from the process the news is created. This process, or an algorithm, includes both computing and transparent participation by professionals and/or peers. At their core, this new way of conceptualising news production is based on platform business models. A necessary distinction is that I’m not referring to journalism on platforms (such as Facebook), but journalism platforms: economic models that produce and reproduce socially relevant information.
Platform models allow this kind of information production and use, essentially because platforms are a form of governance. From the governance perspective antirival journalistic information products require an increase in the participatory design of journalism, broadening the scope of people who have a claim to say they participate in news production as (citizen) journalists. Designing the governance system of this participation is the core function that decides if the produsage becomes, in due time, part or even the core of journalistic activity.
Combining two of the learnings in the text so far, the antirival features of information products and the changing nature of facts, leads to interesting directions. While it remains unclear how an ambient, participatory platform journalism creates collective actionable insights and understanding, one potentially interesting starting point is mentioned by Peters (2019). He claims that antirival journalistic goods require creating categories for “good journalism as pedagogy”. It’s an interesting idea that leads us to the question “who is a journalist (and who isn’t).”
FOUR. The journalists (Who counts as one?)
Journalism is a practice; it’s constantly becoming what it is by the acts of journalism. It’s thus essential to not only consider what journalism is, but also seek to answer the question “who is a journalist?” In the produsage era of journalism, clearly the concept of producers is in motion. But while the concept of journalism has been relatively stable, in fact there have been different answers to the question who is a journalist in different times.
From the Chinese Da-Bao to the Spectator of Victorian England, the idea of news production has been owned by different groups and entities — and simultaneously, then perhaps more than today, the actual news are created in communities, via opinion leaders, weak links and currently available belief systems. Clearly, the answer to the question “who is a journalist” has been changing. The most interesting question, of course, is not that question but a deeper one: how does that change come about?
Boundary work
Boundary work is a sociological concept that is used to explain how different social concepts are formed and how they change. According to Thomas Gieryn (e.g. 1983), whose research considers primarily the question on how the boundaries of science are created, there are three types of boundary work.
Expulsion work is conducted to banish unwanted behaviors, roles and people from the realm of the boundary. For example, journalists who break the mutually agreed norms of truthfulness or plagiarisation are publicly condemned and removed from their posts — often for a lifetime.
Not all boundary work is expulsionist. Participants within journalism can also collectively make an effort to expand the boundaries. This is what happened with blogs, as described earlier. Regarding blogs, one could say that the expansionist work led to a death by hugging, as most of the blogosphere adopted the journalistic norms and practices. Interestingly, what is currently visible with Substack is a continuation of this great merger: when the blogosphere has fully adopted the norms and practices of traditional journalism, journalism can finally “die to be reborn”. The long awaited transition to stronger individual journalists, a star culture if I may, is right now happening. This is a significant change, but it’s nonetheless a smaller change than the one that I’m arguing for in this text.
Lastly, a part of the boundary work is also about protection of autonomy. This refers to work done to prevent shifting of boundaries. In journalism, this means for example fighting against the influences of marketers and owners that might want to shape reporting and topics.
The concept of boundary work in journalism (Carlson and Lewis 2015) helps to explain how journalism is redefined when it encounters the aforementioned changes in products, production and producers.
Boundary work and changing journalism
Combining the ideas regarding the change of journalism and ideas regarding the change of journalists, it’s possible to understand how change of journalism becomes actualised in the practices of altering groups of public actors conceptualised here as journalists.
Importantly, while information products might be antirival, journalists are a rival resource (Kubiszewski 2010). If one hires them to do PR, they are no longer available to work for the society as a whole. This can be a big problem if widely participatory civic journalism is not functional or possible. And the brain drain of journalists might be an issue nonetheless. Professionalism has actual, concrete skill based value outside the conceptual limitations of social boundaries.
The skill limit is a hard boundary that makes boundary work regarding journalism sensible. Platforms can make journalism more accessible, however, due to their ability to do service standardisation. This is what happens when Uber is able to compete against professional cab drivers with drivers who do know how to drive, but are not trained about locations or other topics that professional cab drivers are trained about. It’s possible to imagine something similar happening within journalism.
Again, I imagine the emergence of journalism platforms to be two-fold.
First, the emergence of social media platforms have already caused massive boundary work, both to expand the set of activities done e.g. on Twitter by the journalists to the realm of journalism, and simultaneously to exclude social media publishing, especially by the laymen, from “real” journalism. This first wave, journalism on platforms, has caused significant business pressures for incumbents and it has had at least some implications to democracy and participation, although these impacts are congested.
But there are many things that are still done in a very industrial way. Just to give one example, digital content is endlessly and freely copied, but online newspapers still write each story themselves. This duplication of content is a massive waste of professional journalists’ time.
Thus, there is an opportunity for the second wave of platforms in journalism, what I’ve been calling journalism platforms. I think it’s possible to create massive journalism platforms. One reason to believe so is that it was also possible to create Tiktok — a massive entertainment platform.
Tiktok is interesting because it solves multiple problems simultaneously. It encourages a massive number of people to produce. Simultaneously, it’s able to filter out the diamonds from the rough without discouraging the production.
Similarly, a journalism platform would need to solve several problems at the same time.
- It would need to algorithmically sort beneficial and truthful information in a similar way that Tiktok algoritmically sorts video content based on preferences. But maybe journalistic content should not be based on individual preferences but instead based on group preferences?
- A journalism platform would need to list all relevant contexts or find some other way to direct the produsage work of participants to accumulate the network of facts. Wikipedia demonstrates that there is a cognitive surplus that could be used to do this kind of work. But compared to Wikipedia, which presents static information, information in a journalism platform would need to “breath with the world”.
- A journalism platform would also need to create a system of generalising from niche changes. A corpus of knowledge needs to be built. It should resemble a large interlinked open source software project that evolves through time with mostly small updates.
If one comes up with a solution to all these features, I believe it’s possible to create a massively successful factual information distribution and generation platform. The outcome of such a platform to journalism is massive, as described in this text regarding the change of product, production and producers. And the actualisation of the change would happen via boundary work in journalism.
Boundary work legitimising new forms of platform journalism
Journalism itself sets the criteria it is currently evaluated against, and thus imagining what journalism could be is restricted by what journalism is (Kunelius 2006). The boundary work defining what is journalism and who is a journalist starts from the journalists — despite the changing economic, technological, social and cultural conventions.
The expulsion work in platform journalism sets the norms of activities that count as journalism. To understand how different forms of journalism can be expulsed, it might be beneficial to do what Deuze (2020) recommends and look at people driving journalism forward instead of looking at the problems that legacy news organisations have. Journalism startups tend to be more relaxed concerning the division between financial and journalistic sides of their organisation and often operate under the governance of specific platforms. These are the new battlegrounds for redefining journalistic norms.
As journalism is increasingly practiced outside news organisations (Deuze 2020), the definition of a professional journalist is bound to be extended. A significant proportion of the content is already created by freelancers — a platform journalism side with skillful content producers is only a step away (and there even are proto-platforms that share the work of journalists in platform-like settings).
Lastly, it might seem that protection of autonomy is not needed, as the boundaries of journalism should change. But the opposite is true: the new forms of journalism cannot thrive if their autonomy is not protected. Protection of autonomy of the old system hurts the ability of journalism to reinvent itself, but lack of protection of autonomy later will render the whole concept useless. Truthful, accurate information needs to be separated from other forms of communication with protection of its autonomy. This means that some combination of actions, actors and actants of journalism should be legitimised, and what those are is crucial in protecting the society’s ability to deliberate and have shared concepts and understanding.
This legitimation by the boundary work of the profession is especially interesting, as new ways of journalism provide some alternatives to build legitimacy also without linking it to professional journalism as we currently understand it. These new ways include reputation and verification on platforms, transparency of algorithms and service standards, open data, using Oracles (trusted sources used e.g. in Ethereum contracts) and deliberative high resolution platform regulation.
When these new ways to build legitimacy are accepted by the professionals — whoever they may be — we can have the new answer to the questions “what is journalism” and “who is a journalist”.
References and reading
The explanation on how facts changed is taken from “Everyday Chaos” by Weidenberger.
The discussion regarding the US senate on metrics of media is based on a podcast episode from the podcast Exponent, which I recommend.
Bell, Emily J.; Owen, Taylor; Brown, Peter D.; Hauka, Codi (2017). The Platform Press: How Silicon Valley Reengineered Journalism. Tow report.
Bruns, Axel. 2008. Blogs, Wikipedia, Second Life, and Beyond. From Production to Produsage. New York: Peter Lang
Carlson, Matt & Lewis Seth (2015). Boundaries of journalism: Professionalism, practices and participation. Journalism and Mass Communication
Chadwick, Andrew. 2011. “The Political Information Cycle in a Hybrid News System: The British Prime Minister and the ‘Bullygate’ Affair.” The International Journal of Press/Politics 16 (1): 3–29.
Deuze, Mark (2020). Beyond Journalism
Djerf-Pierre, Monika & Shehata, Adam (2017). Still an Agenda Setter: Traditional News Media and Public Opinion During the Transition From Low to High Choice Media Environments. Journal of communication.
Gieryn, Thomas (1983). Boundary-Work and the Demarcation of Science from Non-Science: Strains and Interests in Professional Ideologies of Scientists. American Sociological Review, Vol. 48, №6 (Dec., 1983), pp. 781–795
Hermida, Alfred. 2010. “Twittering the News.” Journalism Practice 4 (3): 297–308.
Kunelius, Risto (2006): Good Journalism: On the evaluation criteria of some interested and experienced actors. Journalism Studies. Volume 7, 2006 — Issue 5
Peters, Chris (2019). Journalism needs a better argument: Aligning public goals with the realities of the digital news and information landscape. Journalism 2019, Vol. 20(1) 73–76
Strittmatter, Kai (2019). We have been harmonised.
Weiderberger (2012): Too Big to Know
Weiderberger (2019): Everyday Chaos