Content
Prof. Carol Hsu (The University of Sydney Business School)
- Date: Friday, October 31, 2025
- Time: 2:00 pm - 3:30 pm
- Location: Ludwigstr. 28 VG/II, Room 211b
- Title: "Seizing the Moment: Kairotic Times of Investigative News Stories in the Digital Era"
- Abstract: The rise of social media and digital platforms has threatened the role of traditional institutional press as a watchdog of society. While social platforms have enabled greater public participation in news production, increased transparency and amplified diverse news, they also prioritize immediacy, speed and breaking stories. These priorities have led to the rise of high-speed newsrooms and fast journalism. Yet, slow, investigative journalism is also needed to provide quality news and in-depth analysis. In this work, we examine how to create and sustain momentum in slowly built, investigative news stories in the digital era. Using the case of the Post Office Horizon IT scandal in the UK and its 25-year history, we draw on the flow-oriented perspective that focuses on the temporal qualities and kairotic timing, which create opportune moments through which momentum is generated and sustained. Findings capture the extended and evolving nature of the scandal’s media pathways focusing on pivotal transitional moments of interwoven action lines (correspondences), through which we identified distinct flow patterns and different forms of momentum, sedimentary and accelerative, collectively contributing to the cumulative momentum to show sustainment over time. We offer a conceptual framework of Growing Momentum - Becoming a Symbiotic Media System which depicts a news ecology in which discrete media flows converge and become an isomorphic system oriented towards a shared direction, thereby amplifying and sustaining momentum over time. The study opens new theoretical avenues for investigating how seemingly minor, asynchronous or incidental media actions, when temporally layered, can catalyze transformative shifts in sociotechnical change processes.
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