Why Infrastructure Studies for Journalism?
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
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.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it