Who's the "pioneer"? A critical examination of "pioneer journalism" from an indigenous perspective

Journalism scholarship has been preoccupied with discourses of futures thinking and reimagining what journalism could be (Zelizer, Boczkowski, and Anderson, 2022), leading to the emergence of new conceptual frameworks such as "pioneer journalism", which seeks to explain "the re-figurations of [journalism's] foundations" in a deeply mediatized ecosystem (Hepp and Loosen, 2021). Studies of "pioneers" - or transformation-focused collective and individual actors - in journalism (Anderson, 2021; Hepp and Loosen, 2021; Ruotsalainen et al., 2023) have examined how they reimagine journalism through their use of technology, their experimental practices, and novel ways of engaging audiences in their mission to "bring about media-related change" (Hepp, 2016, p. 927). The notion "pioneer journalism", however, has been almost exclusively applied to future-focused journalism communities in the Global North. The study will specifically look at indigenous journalists' knowledge production practices – in terms of how they position themselves in relation to their audiences and the world, how they make editorial decisions, and the material products of their epistemic praxis.