THEORISING THE DIGITAL NEWS OBJECT: TOWARDS AN ONTOLOGY FOR CONTEMPORARY NEWS ECOSYSTEMS

Abstract

Digital news has undergone profound transformation, yet much research continues to treat it as content delivered through digital channels rather than as an entity reshaped by digital materiality itself. Building on theories of digital objects and IT artifacts, this paper argues that news in contemporary environments has undergone an ontological shift: it no longer exists as a stable, bounded product but as a modular, editable, interactive, and distributed digital object. Synthesizing insights from information systems, digital media, and journalism studies, we develop the concept of the Digital News Object (DNO) and articulate its constitutive properties, lifecycle, and socio-technical embeddedness. We demonstrate how digital infrastructures, algorithmic processes, and audience practices co-produce the form, identity, and meaning of news as it circulates across platforms. By offering an ontological framework grounded in digital object theory, the paper advances a unified conceptual account of digital news and clarifies how contemporary news ecosystems operate as dynamic, networked socio-technical environments.

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