This thesis examines the futures knowledge, journalistic norms and professional practices of so-called pioneer journalists. These journalists, who include news startup founders or other entrepreneurial journalists, are often perceived as vanguards of journalism’s futures whose models can eventually be adopted in the wider journalistic field. Rather than providing foresight into journalism’s possible futures, this study critically examined how these actors envision journalism’s futures and translate these visions into new journalistic practices. The futures knowledge they produce in doing so is conceptualised as socially constructed and shaped by expectations grounded in the present media landscape as well as the broader social imaginaries of digital culture.

The empirical data were collected from 2015–2019 from semi-structured interviews with Finnish entrepreneurial journalists, the ‘About Us’ pages of European and American news startups, the yearly predictions by pioneer journalists and journalism experts as collected by the Nieman Lab of Harvard University, textual practices in entrepreneurial journalists’ daily news and the on-stage, live journalism manuscripts of pioneering intrapreneurs at the Finnish legacy newspaper Helsingin Sanomat.

The journalists who were examined in this study envisioned journalism that is oriented towards users and their interests. Enacting these user-centric expectations, they privileged audience-funded, specialised, interpretive, participatory and non-algorithmic approaches to news. They expected these approaches to provide solutions to the challenges facing journalism in contemporary algorithmic digital media environments: the erosion of journalisms’ business models, the oversupply and declining quality of news, waning audience interest, attention, and trust, and limited diversity in news coverage.

Normatively, these practices drew on and were legitimised by three imaginaries: dialogic journalism, peer-to-peer and the Californian Ideology. Each of these imaginaries valorises journalism that is produced through audience-journalist collaborations. However, the individualist undertones of the peer-to-peer imaginary and the Californian Ideology diverge from foundational journalistic norms. They emphasise journalism that caters to users' specialised interests, is organised through decentralised networks, and is sustained by communities of shared interest. Despite their emancipatory and inclusive promises, these two technological imaginaries may reinforce the influence of already privileged information elites and reproduce existing inequalities in news access and participation. The study, therefore, conceptualises such participatory news models as ‘used futures’ that circulate idealised notions of digital media without fully addressing the tensions they create in relation to journalistic norms.

The study contributes to research on journalism’s ongoing transformations, to the methodology of pioneer analysis and to the broader integration of futures studies with sociological approaches. Within futures studies, it advocates an approach in which futures are more carefully grounded in the present socio-material conditions rather than projected into temporal spaces emptied of the complexities of actualised, lived futures. It concludes that journalism’s future trajectories cannot be reduced to pragmatist-realist foresight but must also be understood as contested, socially and materially embedded processes in which ideals, practices and expectations intersect with structural constraints and affordances.