Breaking news as a form of knowledge

Amid the flourishing digital pluralism of news, researchers are grappling with the epistemological implications for journalism and its audiences. In contributing to the sociological literature on news as knowledge, this article suggests a framework for empirical analysis of how the evolution of digital news alters and adds to ways of knowing about reality. Following a science and technology scholarship approach to knowledge production as social practice, the article investigates the interaction between journalistic claims about how publications are valuable for audiences and the applied technology when producing and presenting news. The study applies the framework to investigate breaking news as a form of knowledge, a digital news genre pivotal to modern news culture that is likewise questioned for its societal value. The study takes an ethnographic approach with a newsroom study of a local metropolitan newspaper in Sweden in 2018 with a revisit in 2024. The findings show three mechanisms that produce breaking news as a particular form of knowledge wherein journalistic claims and applied technology interact to stretch and maximize what is reported and likewise continuously reproduce this dominant form of mass attention.