"I do like to get in there and play with it myself": Affordances for Emerging Technology Experimentation in Post-COVID Newsroom Infrastructures

This paper inspects newsroom infrastructures and their affordances in the post-COVID era. It identifies shifts in two newsroom infrastructures that have already been defined in scholarly literature: the networked newsroom and the virtual newsroom. It also academically defines a new newsroom infrastructure that has emerged in journalists’ professional conversations in the post-COVID era: the distributed newsroom. By employing theories of infrastructure and affordances and conceptualizing the newsroom as a laboratory that creates facts, this paper unpacks how existing and emergent newsroom infrastructures afford for or prevent experimentation with new technology tools, including emergent data and artificial intelligence tools, in the news making process.