Configuring Journalistic Users: How Software Design Shapes News Work

Drawing on an ethnography of Astrid, the Swedish public-service broadcaster SVT's Content Management System, this paper contributes theoretical and empirical insights to studies of design in journalism. The paper develops a four-mechanism heuristic for studying how software development configures journalistic users and workflows. The four mechanisms – organizational configuration, user knowledge production, stabilization, and negotiation – provide a structured way of examining how design work is organized, how journalistic users are made knowable, how preferred forms of journalistic work become inscribed into technical systems, and how those inscriptions are negotiated in practice. Applying the heuristic to Astrid demonstrates how designers and product owners in news organizations can be active participants in producing normative visions about journalism and inscribing them in technologies, thereby shaping aspects of journalistic work.