Interview with Prof. Dr. Karin Wahl-Jorgensen
30. October 2026
We are proud to announce that Karin Wahl-Jorgensen is one of this year’s ZeMKI Visiting Research Fellows. Before her upcoming ComAI Lecture, we had the opportunity to hold an interview about her recent research.
In your upcoming ComAI Lecture on November 4 you want to introduce the concept of boutique media. Where does the term “boutique” come from?
It’s a term that I’m using to describe sort of small-scale, personality-driven forms of media production that are increasingly taking place outside of mainstream traditional media organizations and take place on algorithmically curated platforms. Anything from X and TikTok to things like Substack. What I’m interested in is looking at the consequences for the authority of journalists – for their epistemic authority, their ability to be believed by their audiences. And specifically, I’m interested in when you have more of a focus on the individual creator, like the individual journalist and their brand and their personality, then there’s an element around what you might call affective authority or emotional authority and how they connect with their audience at an emotional level, which is also becoming increasingly important in the context of this new type of production.
So, I’m using the term boutique media because I’m drawing on literature about boutique businesses. Boutique businesses are these kinds of very small-scale, niche, specialist forms of shops that are often very much dependent on the charisma, initiative, drive and brand of an individual boutique owner and often they’re a little bit upscale in nature. I’m using that term to suggest that there’s this kind of shift from having large-scale, industrial media production focused on big media organizations, big news businesses to a much more smaller scale, specialist and niche kind of production. That shift is what I’m interested in and I’m interested specifically in understanding what that means for individual creators’ relationships with their audiences. And that’s where I think this metaphor of the boutique is helpful.
In your abstract you already mention the increasing salience of affective authority in the context of algorithmic curation of content. What do you think this means for the long-term role of epistemic authority?
It’s one of the key kinds of things that I’m interested in investigating. But obviously, one phenomenon that we’ve seen with the rise of social media platforms is that when you have an algorithm curating the content, first of all, you don’t have a lot of control in the hands of creators to say, “actually, I think this is a really important story in terms of the information that it contains”. Instead, you have these algorithms which tend to privilege more emotionally charged content and tend to privilege content that’s likely to engage the audiences again at a more emotional level. I think what we’re seeing with this shift is that you do have a situation where affective authority becomes increasingly salient and where the sort of epistemic authority and the quality of information that’s provided by creators, including journalists, is perhaps more at risk of taking a back seat.
Do you think a majority of news creators will choose to play more into the affective authority role rather than the epistemic authority role in the future?
Well, I think that there’s a big risk in terms of creators understanding what kind of content is more likely to be prioritized by the algorithm. I think you are seeing that very much. Obviously, the creator economy is one that’s very rapidly changing and where there’s a lot of informal swapping of information about what things work down to incredible detail. For instance, down to what kinds of camera angles you should use for short form content on TikTok, what is the length, what kind of speech or talking works, what doesn’t work. So it’s very much a situation where the creators are playing catch up with the algorithms and then very clearly seeing that certain types of content appeal more than other types of content.
Though having said that, some of the first things I’m researching now as part of this project is Substack. That’s a newsletter platform where individual creators can gain subscribers, including paying subscribers, to their regular newsletters. And that platform is very much selling itself on being the home of long form, thoughtful, carefully researched, very human writing, and very much less of an algorithmically curated experience for audiences. One of the things I’m seeing in my research is that there’s almost a trend, particularly for Gen Z, to say, “okay, we are tired of doomscrolling, we are tired of wasting hours on TikTok and so we are actually prioritizing quality content experiences like going on Substack”. In fact, there’s a growth in social tracking platforms like Goodreads, for example, where you track what you’ve been reading. So platforms and apps that basically allow you to record and socially share ways in which you consume more higher quality content, which is underpinned by epistemic authority. It’s very unsettled at the moment, you could go in many different directions, but there are signs that there’s a sort of pushback, particularly from younger audience members who have grown up in an environment that’s completely dominated by smartphones and short form video content. There’s a pushback because people feel like it’s not good for their mental health. It’s not good for their brain. So brain rot was word of the year in 2025 of Time Magazine. You do get a resistance to the algorithmic curation that tends to prioritize more emotionally engaging content – almost like fast food in terms of consumption of media.
You speak of the decline of industrial news production and much of journalism research was built around large news organisations. What does it mean for the field that its object of study is becoming smaller and more personal?
That’s a really, really good question and again, something that I’m very interested in looking at. One of the ways that I’m talking about in my work is through this metaphor of post-industrial news production. I think it’s something that has very, very significant methodological, theoretical and normative indications for journalism research.
Methodologically, to start with the perhaps more obvious points, in terms of what kinds of methods you use as a researcher: It’s obviously completely different if what you’re studying is some guy who does a substack or some kind of pop star who decides to do videos on TikTok with news content. So if you suddenly have this very diversified landscape, it’s much more complicated how you’re going to study it, what kinds of methods you’re going to use and how to characterize the sort of broader news ecosystem – methodologically huge headache. Again, very unsettled. But this is something that we’ve been seeing emerging for a longer period of time and something where there is now sort of a beginning consensus on how we might go about studying this. But it looks very different from what it did when I first started doing my research in journalism studies.
Normatively and theoretically, it’s also a significant shift. By normative, I mean our vision of what media should look like. Mainstream news organizations have always played a central role in a democratic society, and it’s their epistemic authority, as trusted sources of knowledge, that allows them to hold powerful actors to account, whether that’s Donald Trump or Benjamin Netanyahu or whoever, or powerful individuals and companies. That ability comes from that epistemic authority. So with the undermining of those institutions, it creates a gap in the functioning of a democratic society.
And then obviously theoretically, that leads us to a lot of questions about, you know, what should our democratic society look like? What kinds of theories do we need to think about these new forms of media production? And are the kind of models and theories that we’ve used conventionally still relevant for a landscape that looks so dramatically different now?
We are delighted to have you here as a Visiting Research Fellow at ZeMKI. What has brought you here and what insights do you hope to gain from interacting with our local colleagues?
Yes, so I’m coming here and working with the labs of Andreas Hepp and Christian Schwarzenegger and Christian Katzenbach. And what interests me about the approach that’s being taken to media here in ZeMKI is that colleagues here deal with a lot of very similar questions in some ways to what I’m looking at. Even though I think that my colleagues here have a broader view that’s not so narrowly focused just on journalism, but media more broadly and platforms and technologies. And so I think there’s a lot of innovation in terms of how ZeMKI scholars approach the technological context in which media operates. But really what I think is very important to me is that scholars here tend to be very rigorous in their theoretical approach to studying media. That’s something that for me is often missing in journalism studies research, also including some of my own research. For me, it’s an opportunity to both look at these kinds of developments in a broader context of changes in media and technology, but also to have a more rigorous kind of exchange about the theoretical approaches to studying media and technology at this particular time.