Epistemic governance in journalism: Editorial, algorithmic, and regulatory logics in a contested epistemic space

Journalism’s epistemic authority—its capacity to produce and legitimate public knowledge—is shaped beyond the newsroom. Editorial judgment now operates alongside algorithmic systems that structure visibility and distribution, and regulatory frameworks that impose obligations and safeguards. Although scholarship has examined these domains separately, it lacks an integrated account of how epistemic authority is enacted across them. This article develops an Epistemic Governance Framework that conceptualizes journalism’s authority as a governed outcome of three interdependent logics: editorial, algorithmic, and regulatory. Drawing on Actor-Network Theory, the article treats these logics as overlapping sociotechnical arrangements and proposes their intersection as a Contested Epistemic Space in which competing criteria of visibility, credibility, and accountability are negotiated. The article contributes a framework for analyzing how journalistic authority is assembled, contested, and stabilized, and outlines implications for future empirical research and normative debate on the governance of public knowledge.