The Authority of the Live: The Rise of Live Publishing in American Journalism
Christine Larson, Stanford University

Live publishing—the production of editorially driven live events and spin-off content by media companies—has become a significant media platform for many of America’s largest newspapers and business magazines.This article draws on interviews with executives at ten media companies involved in live publishing, and on participant-observation at two conferences produced by The Wall Street Journal, America’s largest newspaper. Contrary to narratives positing the decline of journalistic authority, this research presents live publishing as a site where journalists deploy traditional discourses of authority and expertise to establish their position as conveners of intersecting networks of sources, audience members and sponsors. In this way, they extract value from the immaterial networks of sources and readers that underlie their work. Taken more broadly, live publishing demonstrates how workers and organizations in cultural industries transform and redeploy authority into new systems of networked power.

Christine Larson is a researcher at Stanford University and an award-winning freelance journalist whose work has appeared frequently in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, US News & World Report and many other publications. She often writes about money, business and health. She worked on staff at Adweek, Cosmopolitan and Glamour, and is the co-author of four books including The Family CFO with Mary Claire Allvine. A graduate of Princeton University, Larson was a 2010 Knight Fellow at Stanford University.