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Can journalists use data in order to produce better journalism? In this text, C.W. Anderson traces the genealogy of data journalism and its material and technological underpinnings, arguing that the use of data in news reporting is inevitably intertwined with national politics, the evolution of computable databases, and the history of professional scientific fields. This work shows how the changes in specifically journalistic understandings of evidence can help us think through the current 'digital data moment' in ways that go beyond simply journalism.

Historically, scholars of journalism have concerned themselves with meaning. It is ironic, then, that much of the most influential scholarship on digital media over the past two decades has concerned itself primarily with media practices. This line of thought was inaugurated by Couldry's call to "decenter media research from the study of media texts or production structures and to redirect it onto the study of the open-ended range of practices." This article uses research on journalism and digital political communication as a case study through which to assess the balance of gains and losses stemming from the practice turn and propose some paths forward for future scholarship. Across this article, I argue that alternate perspectives on practice (as found, for instance, in the work of the late James W. Carey) can recenter the very valuable research on media practice through a focus on the ritualized aspects of media practice, a concern with very real media texts, and by remembering that texts are not free-floating pieces of culture but are rather embedded in historically specific mediums which are only partially reducible to practice.

Building on earlier empirical work in newsrooms, this paper contends that a fundamental transformation has occurred in journalists' understanding of their audiences. A new level of responsiveness to the agenda of the audience is becoming built into the DNA of contemporary news work. This article argues, however, that this journalistic responsiveness to the "agenda of the audience" has multiple, often contradictory meanings. It traces these out through a critical-historical sketch of key moments in the journalism-audience relationship, including the public journalism movement, Independent Media Center (Indymedia), and Demand Media. These different visions of the audience are correlated to different images of democracy, and they have different sociological implications. The public journalism movement believed in a form of democracy that was conversational and deliberative; in contrast, traditional journalism embraced an aggregative understanding of democracy, while Indymedia's democratic vision could best be seen as agonistic in nature. Demand Media and similar ventures, this article concludes, may be presaging an image of public that can best be described as algorithmic. Understanding this algorithmic conception of the audience may be the first step into launching a broader inquiry into the sociology and politics of algorithms.