ABSTRACT
Journalistic epistemology has become a cornerstone of news and journalism research, serving as a conceptual anchor from the early ethnographic accounts of news work that shaped the field to contemporary efforts to grapple with the intricacies of digital news. The textual/procedural mode of journalistic epistemology attends to questions concerning the creation of news as a particular type of publicly accessible knowledge, developed through routinized procedures and textual forms. To lay the groundwork for greater awareness of the contextual/performative mode of journalistic epistemology, this section begins by considering the concept of “epistemic authority”. Journalistic epistemology is neither static nor abstract, but rather embedded in the broad social context of news production and consumption. The emphasis on context is joined by an accompanying emphasis on the performative aspects of journalistic epistemology.
