“Join the Coalition”: How Pioneer Journalism Communities Reimagine Journalistic Epistemology from the Periphery

Abstract

This article examines how pioneer journalism communities reimagine journalistic epistemology from the periphery, and traces how ideas about journalism as a form of knowledge are embodied in their metadiscourses and enacted in their epistemic practice. Empirically grounded in metajournalistic discourse analysis of manifestos, event descriptions, and semi-structured interviews, this cross-national multi-method study explicates (1) pioneer journalism communities’ epistemic values found in the manifestos of 20 journalism startups from different parts of the globe and online descriptions of seven innovation-focused industry events; and (2) how pioneer journalism communities put these values into epistemic practice, based on interviews with 30 pioneer journalism producers from four startups located in different journalistic cultures—Bureau Local (UK), The Current (Pakistan), DoR (Romania), and New Naratif (Malaysia). The study findings suggest that pioneer journalism communities around the world imagine their knowledge production praxis as relational and meaningful, and through their metadiscourses and storytelling practices, create self-contained spaces of collective action, where publics play an equally important role in the negotiation of knowledge. Pioneer journalism communities around journalism startups/cooperatives go beyond their traditional epistemic role as facilitators of knowledge and adopt a semi-political, knowledge-based advocacy role, seeking to act upon their visions of “a better future” (Rappler).