Why Infrastructure Studies for Journalism?

Abstract

This article makes a case for the value of infrastructure studies in analyzing journalism’s evolving landscape. It argues that infrastructural thinking is valuable to understand the changing neighbourhood of journalism, encompassing not just newsrooms but also the broader sociotechnical systems and resources, values and practices shaping news production, distribution, and consumption. Through a careful reading of the literature on infrastructure thinking and its application to journalism studies, it highlights how infrastructural thinking has been used for new and conventional research objects from micro, meso and macro levels of the field. We identify four themes that journalism scholars have focused on: journalism institutions, platforms and platform power, adjacent institutions and applications, and sociotechnical apparatus. We argue that infrastructure studies provides a timely two-way lens to deconstruct the “always there” nature of prior journalism systems and how they shape both the scope of scholarly inquiry and journalism.

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