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Running head: EPISTEMIC INTEROPERABILITY Sharing the News:Toward a Construct of Epistemic Interoperability Josh BraunCornell Dept. of Communication
 Author’s Note: This is an early draft of a dissertation chapter laying out a theoretical  framework for understanding changes in the practice of publishing news stories, asnews distribution has moved in the digital age from “push” to “pull.” It looks at how, inan environment where news organizations rely on sharing and search for visibility,news products may be designed to spread particularly well among specific, desirableaudiences. It will eventually be paired with a chapter on “architectural interoperability,” that outlines the manner in which the technological infrastructuresof online publishing are designed to open channels to desirable platforms for sharingand search, while “effectively frustrating” the spread of content in spaces that are lessdesirable to the publishers for economic or branding reasons. Drafts of both chapterswill be presented at conferences this year—ask me for details.
Epistemic Interoperability 1
 
Introduction/AbstractIn 1978, Gaye Tuchman encouraged sociologists and media scholars to consider journalism as a system of knowledge. In this paper, I take up her challenge with an eyetoward online news. I begin by arguing that much of the classic sociological research incommunication that examines journalistic practices, coming as it does from decades when the influence of mass media was at its height, has tended to focus on the mannerin which journalists serve as gatekeepers, limiting public access to information. I assertthat today, in the digital age, journalists are much more explicitly embedded in—andreliant on—an online information ecosystem in which many other systems of knowledgecoexist and circulate information alongside the news media. I argue that mediaresearchers would therefore do well to implement insights from science and technology studies, where sociologists and historians have developed tools for examining how systems of knowledge are constructed and how they interact. Borrowing from thesociology of scientific knowledge on the one hand and Tuchman’s (1978) work on theother, I flesh out what it would mean to think of news and other centers of culturalproduction online as epistemic cultures (Knorr Cetina, 1999) centered around distinctsystems of knowledge. Subsequently, I review several existing lenses withincommunication and science studies that examine how different systems of knowledgeinteract and trade with one another. And finally, I conclude by attempting to tietogether the various literatures discussed throughout the paper into a theoretical lensfor examining how the interaction of various systems of knowledge online might beconsidered in relation to news production, as well as the production practices of otherepistemic cultures.Epistemic Interoperability 2
 
The Logic of GatesSince the 1950s, both scholars and practitioners examining the gatekeeperfunction of the news media have sought to explain why some issues and events becomenewsworthy while others remain obscure. Answers have been offered up in the form of classic newsroom ethnographies like “The Gate-keeper” (White, 1950),
 Making News
 (Tuchman, 1978) and
 Deciding What’s News
(Gans, 1979); critical studies of newscontent such as Stuart Hall’s (1973) “The Determination of News Photographs;” andinnumerable lists of news values in the tradition of Galtung and Ruge’s (1965) “TheStructure of Foreign News.” This body of research ultimately dispensed with what Gans(1979) called “mirror theory,” the naïve assumption—if it ever existed—that newsproducts represent complete, veridical accounts of reality.And no sooner had it been established that the content of the news media isneither unequivocally, “the way it is,” nor “all the news that’s fit to print,” than theattention of sociologists began quickly to encompass the implications of these findingsfor social movements and societal change. At first, this project largely demonstrated themanner in which social movements had been marginalized. Tuchman (1978), forinstance, documented the various ways in which the women’s movement was ignored,then subsequently maligned and ridiculed by the press before ultimately managing toestablish itself as a legitimate voice in the mainstream media. In his own take on thenews media’s framing practices, Todd Gitlin (1980) famously implicated the mass mediaas a factor in the eventual dissolution of the 1960s student movement, detailing the ways in which Students for a Democratic Society ultimately lost control over their imageto the news media. But as Tuchman (1978) and Gitlin (1980) both pointed out, despiteEpistemic Interoperability 3
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