What aggregators do: Towards a networked concept of journalistic expertise in the digital age

Abstract

This article analyzes expertise in the digital age through an ethnography of an increasingly valorized form of newswork – ‘serious, old fashioned reporting’ – and its purported occupational opposite, news aggregation. The article begins with a content analysis of the 4 March 2010 Federal Communications Commission workshop in which journalists tried to draw a sharp boundary between reporting and aggregation. In the second section the article explores the actual hybridized practices of journalistic aggregation. The empirical investigation serves as a scaffolding on which to build a theory of digital expertise that sees the nature and struggle over that expertise as networked properties. Expertise, according to the argument advanced in the final section, is neither a fixed property that can be ‘claimed’, nor is it simply the inevitable outcome of a clear occupational struggle over a particular jurisdiction. Specifically, the networks examined here coalesce around different conceptions of ‘what counts’ as a valid form of journalistic evidence under conditions of digitization.