Between the technological hare and the journalistic tortoise: Minimization of knowledge claims in online news flashes

Abstract

A growing series of news platforms such as live blogging, tweeting, and push notifications are struggling with the extreme pressure of immediate reporting. The current study explores which strategies of knowledge acquisition and knowledge presentation journalists who operate immediate channels are using to address the mounting pressures and enhanced risk of error. It focuses on online news flashes that at least in the Israeli case enable systematic comparison of four types of output: routine and crisis news flashes and routine and crisis final items that follow them. Findings show that news flash editors develop special practices to acquire and present knowledge – the most prominent being minimization of knowledge claims. However, significantly higher use of modality, evidentiality, and source responses (measures for minimizing journalists’ knowledge claims) was found only in crisis flashes. This may suggest that journalists find themselves outside their epistemic comfort zone only under the convergence of crisis and immediacy. According to ‘inductive error’ theory, the studied websites act as responsible epistemic actors, who are so concerned about ‘false-positive’ errors (untrue publications) that they do not hesitate to make ‘false-negative’ ones (delaying publication, minimizing knowledge claims, and sharing them with third parties).