The Ontology of News Journalism in the Age of Artificial Cognition

This book offers a groundbreaking rethinking of what news is ontologically, epistemologically, and civically at a moment when artificial intelligence is reshaping every layer of media production, distribution, and interpretation. Moving beyond familiar debates about automation or misinformation, the book interrogates the deeper conceptual shifts unfolding as machine cognition becomes embedded in journalistic practice. Across six interlocking chapters, the author traces how AI unsettles long-held assumptions about witnessing, authorship, temporality, truth, and public life. It begins by mapping the ontological transformation of news from a human-mediated account of events to a computational artifact shaped by algorithmic logics. It then examines the rise of machine authorship and the resulting crisis of journalistic voice, exploring how synthetic reporting, deepfakes, and automated summaries challenge the authority and ethics of human storytelling. The book further analyzes the temporal disruptions introduced by predictive systems, where real-time data streams and anticipatory models complicate journalism’s relationship to accuracy, responsibility, and civic imagination. A sustained epistemological inquiry follows, unpacking the datafication of news, the politics of algorithmic relevance, and the emergence of new forms of epistemic injustice and epistemic power. Crucially, the book foregrounds perspectives from the Global South, highlighting how communities resist algorithmic hegemony, reclaim voice through localized AI innovation, and articulate alternative ontologies of news grounded in contextual knowledge and pluriversal ethics. The final chapter advances the concept of post-human journalism, proposing editorial intelligence as a civic practice that integrates human judgment, machine capabilities, trauma-informed frameworks, and justice-oriented ethics. Positioning itself as a definitive scholarly intervention for understanding journalism’s future in an era of artificial cognition, it appeals to researchers and practitioners in media studies, communication, AI ethics, digital humanities, and global journalism, as well as policymakers and civic actors grappling with the democratic implications of synthetic media.