ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the implications of digital transformation for the status and role of the journalistic expert, or 'pundit'. It also explores the implications of those challenges for the concept of the journalist as privileged definer of meanings in a world of proliferating online sources of news and commentary. The former News Corp Australia CEO, Kim Williams, argued at a public lecture after his resignation from the company in September 2013 that "data trumps punditry every time." In the contemporary newsroom, Williams argued, the solidity and ease of computerized access to data was making many of the more intuitive tasks of the journalist redundant. The critical response to Silver's work from some journalists in the United States and elsewhere illustrates many of the tensions around the growing role of big data in journalistic work, and the challenge computational journalism poses to the knowledge status of punditry.
