Order versus access: news search engines and the challenge to traditional journalistic roles

Abstract

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.