<p>Theme development and participant coverage table.</p>

Building on research showing that expertise is distributed across professional networks, this study examines how journalists describe the coordination through which dispersed knowledge becomes collectively usable under time-critical conditions. A cross-organizational LINE group comprising Taiwanese television political journalists provides a revelatory case of digitally mediated epistemic coordination.

Drawing on qualitative interviews with twelve participants across two experience cohorts, the study analytically reconstructs three interrelated mechanisms from recurrent patterns in participants’ accounts: the situational redistribution of epistemic authority, the externalization of tacit reasoning into interpretable cues, and the distributed assembly of interpretive support. The first author’s long-term insider experience served as interpretive context rather than independent evidence.