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Comparing the platformization of news media systems: A cross-country analysis
Abstract
Platformization has been used to describe how platforms such as Facebook, Google, Twitter, WhatsApp and TikTok have become increasingly important for how people communicate and access information, including news. But to what extent have news media systems in different countries become platformized? Using online survey data from 46 countries, we show that: (a) although over 90% of internet users use at least one social platform, there are large country differences in the proportion that use them to access news; and (b) large country difference in the proportion that still go directly to news websites and apps. Furthermore, we find (c) that country differences at least partly reflect path dependency, more specifically the historic strength of the newspaper market leading to lower levels of news platformization and continued high levels of direct access. These findings show how platformization varies in different parts of the world, provide a framework for capturing how it changes over time, and highlight the potential benefits of bringing together platform studies and comparative media systems research.
... Platformization is a dynamic process, occurring in different degrees, which can be driven and defined by the extension and intensity of digital platforms usage ((Van Dijck et al., 2018;Nielsen & Fletcher, 2023). Platform studies is the inter-disciplinary field of research supporting analysis about the role and impact of such platforms and the companies that run them, with implications on how people communicate, use media, access news, information and cultural contents (Duffy et al., 2020;Burgess, 2021;Nielsen & Fletche, 2023). ...
... For each CSP we identify the distinctive strategic elements related to the three analytical dimensions that allow the co-creation, retention, and appropriation of value as ecosystem coordinators (Van Dijck, 2020; Nielsen & Fletcher, 2023;Rangaswamy et al., 2020). ...
... Our study goes beyond this assumption by demonstrating a growing infrastructural interdependence. Through analysis of how different CSPs use and integrate various dominant global digital platforms, we aim to understand the level of platformization(Rangaswamy et al., 2020;Nielsen & Fletcher, 2023) within CF ecosystems. The research reveals how CSPs' evolution is influenced by platformization processes, encompassing both positive and negative consequences. ...
Crowdfunding is a business model where diverse stakeholders operate in a context considered an example of innovation in value co-creation. Based on literature about service ecosystems and value co-creation this study adopts the platformization of society as critical theoretical approach and analytical framework to study the relations between human and technological agents within four crowdfunding ecosystems in Europe. Conceiving Crowdfunding Service Providers (CSPs) as specialized organizations, regulated to operate multi-sided markets and to serve roles as ecosystems’ coordinators, we aim to identify the innovation strategies adopted by CSPs platforms from Italy, France, Spain and Portugal to support their core functions related to governance mechanisms, business models and infrastructural components. To understand the motives for innovation implementation and to compare the competitive adaptation from an ecosystemic perspective, we triangulate qualitative data from multiple sources to explain how and why these strategic choices affect the dynamics of value co-creation. The multiple cases-study systematizes and discusses similarities and differences, particularly as concerns the capacity of CFPs to orchestrate their governance and ICT components to innovate and take advantage of algorithms and AI implementation, collecting more data and money from user interactions. Conclusions highlight the non-neutrality of CSPs, which act as data analysts and translators, adopting more preventive, proactive or reactive strategies of usage and redistribution of the value, created, acquired and aggregated through data. Each CSP can be characterized by its infrastructure and data management approach, metaphorically being more eco-centred or ego-centred.
... Ipsos collected data using an online questionnaire fielded between 1st and 25th October 2024 in eight countries: Argentina, Brazil, Germany, Japan, South Korea, Spain, the UK, and the USA. The country sample provides a range of different high-income democracies that previous research has documented have all embraced digital media and platforms, but have done so in quite different ways (Newman et al. 2024;Nielsen and Fletcher 2023). Japan and South Korea, for example, are important examples of countries where domestic platform companies are in many ways more prominent than US technology companies. ...
... In Japan and South Korea, where parts of the platform ecosystem look very different, social media is relatively marginal when it comes to politics (as are messaging apps), but video networks and search are both widely used. It is important to recognise that these variations are not driven by whether people use digital platforms generally -social media, for example, is used by virtually all internet users in all these countries -but are variations in whether and how people use them to access news and information about politics (Nielsen and Fletcher 2023). In the Reuters Institute Digital News Report (Newman et al. 2024), we often refer to Japan and South Korea as 'deeply aggregated' online news media environments, because the public there are much more likely to rely on search engines and news aggregators as a gateway to news. ...
... However, although the rise of big tech companies and the use of their social media platforms is a global phenomenon, the extent to which these platforms are used for news consumption varies significantly across countries (Nielsen & Fletcher, 2023). This variation is often rooted in the historical differences among national media systems, especially in terms of newspaper readership levels. ...
... However, it is essential to approach these structural changes with a balanced and nuanced perspective. This approach should recognize the distinct specificities and dynamics of media systems in various countries and regions, as underscored by Marques and Vos (2023) and Nielsen and Fletcher (2023). ...
A notable body of studies and essays explores the hypothesis that the platformization of media is fostering the fragmentation of the public sphere. Nonetheless, this body of knowledge presents conflicting assumptions and methodologies for understanding this relationship. By adopting a systemic approach to the public sphere, this study takes two steps to disentangle these inconsistencies. First, it defines clear differences between the fragmentation of the public sphere and the expansion of media choices. In doing so, it clarifies how concepts like echo chambers and political polarization frequently and inadvertently merge with the fragmentation hypothesis. Second, it identifies three distinct fragmentation types and their corresponding political effects: (a) fragmentation of the public agenda along partisan or ideological lines; (b) reduced agenda convergence; and (c) fewer issues with agenda-setting power. The present study suggests effective measurement techniques for each type of fragmentation, demonstrating how they address gaps in current research.
... Social media platforms play a crucial role in news consumption and dissemination (Hermida et al., 2012;Nielsen & Fletcher, 2023), offering instant access to global news stories and vast real-time multimedia content. Notably, journalists and news media organizations actively utilize these platforms to stay updated on highprofile news events (Djerf-Pierre et al., 2020;Schifferes et al., 2017). ...
This paper investigates the use of multimedia verification, in particular, computational tools and Open-source Intelligence (OSINT) methods, for verifying online multimedia content in the context of the ongoing wars in Ukraine and Gaza. Our study examines the workflows and tools used by several fact-checkers and journalists working at Faktisk, a Norwegian fact-checking organization. Our study showcases the effectiveness of diverse resources, including AI tools, geolocation tools, internet archives, and social media monitoring platforms , in enabling journalists and fact-checkers to efficiently process and corroborate evidence, ensuring the dissemination of accurate information. This research provides an in-depth analysis of the role of computational tools and OSINT methods for multimedia verification. It also underscores the potentials of currently available technology, and highlights its limitations while providing guidance for future development of digital multimedia verification tools and frameworks.
... After analysing the use of Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter, we were able to verify that the North Patagonian news media gather an important community of users on their social media accounts, in relation to the population of the region (RQ1). Now, 15 years after the creation of the first profiles, they continue to gain new followers, which indicates a growing platformisation in the access to regional news, in line with other cross-country studies (Nielsen and Fletcher 2023). ...
Studies on journalistic work and production on social media typically focus on large media outlets in developed countries. In this article, we shift the lens to a peripheral area of a peripheral country: Argentine Patagonia. Our objective was to analyse journalistic production on Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter in the eight most-followed local and regional news media outlets. We analysed the narratives, the extent to which they apply transmedia journalism, and how they have evolved compared to studies from 2021. We also conducted structured interviews with social media managers to gain insight into their professional practices. We conclude that, 15 years since the creation of the first profiles, promoting website content remains the primary goal of North Patagonian media networks. Since 2021, there have been more frequent updates but less native production, especially on Facebook and Twitter. Despite the shortage of staff and precarious working conditions, some news media outlets have been able to innovate on Instagram, introducing a variety of multimedia formats, a more conversational tone, diverse update rhythms, adapted content, and even specific content that is organised into sections. Information production for the platforms has been integrated into journalistic routines even when public interaction with the audience remains very limited.
... Social media play an increasingly central role in political participation, particularly among young citizens, and digital platforms have significantly altered how political parties strategically mobilise voters and influence public opinion (Perloff, 2022). Digital platforms have also become central venues for the distribution and circulation of news (Nielsen & Fletcher, 2023), encompassing traditional as well as alternative and hyperpartisan forms, while simultaneously serving as arenas for interactive public deliberation (Hase et al., 2023) There is no doubt that contemporary democratic societies have had much to gain from the structural changes in the media landscape that have taken place over the last decades. The endless supply of information -from a broad range of sources on various platforms -does come with a potential to increase information diversity, encompassing new actors, new voices, and new perspectives that potentially can enrich the structural conditions of the public sphere. ...
The digital transformations of contemporary media systems have had severe consequences for democracy and public debates. This introductory article addresses key challenges of what we refer to as varieties of “digital disintegration” within democratic societies. The eight contributions in the special issue are thematised in three parts. The first part explores disintegration within the context of political communication during elections, including data-driven campaigning, populism, and politicised forms of news production. The second part delves into the role of alternative news curators, audience polarisation, and issues of self-censorship in digital information environments. The third part centres on deliberative norms connected to content moderation of user comments within legacy media and the consequences digitalisation has had on journalistic sourcing practices and source diversity over time. The contributions offer valuable empirical insights, as well as new lines of thinking concerning democracy and digital and disintegrative transformations in the Nordic region and beyond.
Has China become a neo-colonizer, exporting its cultural and economic power to the world based on its agenda of building soft power? Existing scholarship on neocolonialism and data colonialism largely focuses on how China's infrastructural expansion and increasingly platformised cultural sectors can achieve its ambitious platformised cultural sectors overseas. Yet, how China's cultural power is manifested, negotiated, or resisted in people's daily lives in a South–South setting remains under-researched and under-theorised. This article uses everyday fashion in Kenya as a case study to investigate China's cultural and economic power expansion in the Global South. We examined how cultural differences are negotiated and mediated on two Chinese(-invested) e-commerce platforms. Through focus groups and platform walkthrough method, our findings serve to enrich existing theories of cultural production–platform relationships applicable in the study of various cultural and creative sectors, to offer new understandings of how symbolic, sociopolitical and cultural meanings of fashion are constructed through divergent platform affordances, and to reveal the various forms of cultural negotiations and resistance in different contexts, multiplying our frames of reference.
This article evaluates the extent of social media policing in fact-checking (as opposed
to verifying public figures’ statements) and the thematic convergence across eight
countries in Europe and Latin America. Based on audience reach, we collected
links from various organizations (independent outlets, legacy media, or global news
agencies). A representative stratified sample of 25% resulted in 3,154 articles.
Among the findings, the trend of social media policing prevails across countries and
organizations, except for most European legacy media. Independent news-born factchecking organizations follow a convergent path, sharing more similarities with their global counterparts than their national media peers.
Keywords: fact-checking journalism, media systems, platforms’ partnership, media convergence,
debunking turn, platformization
Recent developments in generative Artificial Intelligence (AI) have revitalized academic discourse on algorithmic systems, particularly on their potential, ethical considerations, risks, and regulatory challenges. Extensive research has examined how algorithms affect communication processes, focusing on their influence on news organizations, journalistic practices, public-media dynamics, media literacy, and combating disinformation and filter bubbles. An emergent strand of research defines and measures the multidimensional concept of algorithmic literacy. However limited research exists on the intersection of algorithmic literacy and journalism. This gap is particularly concerning given the pivotal role of journalism in shaping public discourse, informing citizens, upholding democratic values and contrasting disinformation. Understanding how journalists perceive and engage with algorithms is essential, as these technologies significantly influence their professional tasks, including content production and distribution. In Portugal, where newcomer journalists work in precarious conditions and digital media transformation is rapidly evolving, understanding how journalists interact with and perceive algorithms is vital. Our study, through a multi-phased approach, aims to fill this gap questioning how can algorithmic literacy, encompassing cognitive, attitudinal and behavioural dimensions, be effectively assessed among professional journalists? The exploratory results present a validated methodological tool, instrument based on a multi-dimensional analytical framework and specifically designed to measure algorithmic literacy levels and to assess journalists’ experiences. Critical discussion addresses the methodological procedures and preliminary findings from the pre-test, offering insights into Portuguese journalists' understanding, perceptions, and competencies regarding algorithmic systems. By shedding light on the cognitive, affective, and behavioural aspects of journalists’ engagement with algorithms, this study contributes to a deeper understanding of the algorithmic literacy among journalists, which is essential to sustain the quality of their work and for an effective counteraction against disinformation. It also opens avenues for similar studies in other geographical or professional contexts.
News has long been a contested concept but in the digital era it has become increasingly fractured and multidimensional. This discursive article explores some of the ways in which the news has been disrupted by technological and economic tensions and argues that the social value of news is worth articulating and, where necessary, struggling for. News values have never been universal or unproblematic, and the tension between commercial and social ways of valuing news is intensified today. News values are not fixed and must be open to critique as to how they are meeting citizens’ needs. Societally useful news may be at risk of being marginalized as news organizations struggle to survive, but it is not inevitable that disruption and digitization should undermine journalistic ethics and the social value of news. In arguing that scholars ought to approach news more holistically, to defend it as well as critique it, the article attempts to synthesize what typically appears as discrete approaches to studying news. The article concludes that, if the social value of news is not to suffer further diminution, there is a need to view news through a lens of struggle; a struggle in which journalists, audiences, scholars and, indeed, all citizens have a part to play.
Media systems have changed significantly as a result of the development of information technologies. However, typologies of media systems that incorporate aspects of digitalization are rare. This study fills this gap by identifying, operationalizing, and measuring indicators of media systems in the digital age. We build on previous work, extend it with new indicators that reflect changing conditions (such as online news use), and include media freedom indicators. We include 30 countries in our study and use cluster analysis to identify three clusters of media systems. Two of these clusters correspond to the media system models described by Hallin and Mancini, namely the democratic-corporatist and the polarized-pluralist model. However, the liberal model as described by Hallin and Mancini has vanished; instead, we find empirical evidence of a new cluster that we call “hybrid”: it is positioned in between the poles of the media-supportive democratic-corporatist and the polarized-pluralist clusters.
Since changing its algorithm in January 2018 to boost the content of family and friends over other content (including news), Facebook has signaled that it is less interested in news. However, the field is still trying to understand the long-term impacts of this change for news publishers. This is a problem because policymakers and legislators across the world are becoming concerned about the relationship between platforms and publishers. In particular, there are worries that platforms’ ability to make unilateral decisions about how their algorithms operate may harm the economic sustainability of journalism. This article provides some clarity around the relationship between these two parties through a longitudinal study of the Australian news media sector’s relationship with Facebook from 2014 to 2020, with a particular focus on the January 2018 algorithm change. We do this by analyzing Facebook data (2,082,804 posts from CrowdTangle) and external traffic data from 32 major Australian news outlets. These data are contextualized by additional desk research. We identify a range of trends including the decline of news sharing, the collapse in the performance of “social news,” the variable position of social media as a source of referral traffic, and, most critically, the diffused nature of the 2018 algorithm change. Our approach cannot make direct causal inferences. We can only identify trends in on-platform performance and referral traffic, which we then contextualize with industry reportage. However, the data provide vital longitudinal insights into the performance and responses of individual media outlets, news categories, and the Australian media sector as a whole during a critical moment of algorithmic change.
Does exposure to news affect what people know about politics? This old question attracted new scholarly interest as the political information environment is changing rapidly. In particular, since citizens have new channels at their disposal, such as Twitter and Facebook, which increasingly complement or even replace traditional channels of information. This study investigates to what extent citizens have knowledge about daily politics and to what extent news on social media can provide this knowledge. It does so by means of a large online survey in Belgium (Flanders), in which we measured what people know about current political events, their so-called general surveillance knowledge. Our findings demonstrate that unlike following news via traditional media channels, citizens do not gain more political knowledge from following news on social media. We even find a negative association between following the news on Facebook and political knowledge. We further investigate why this is the case. Our data demonstrate that this lack of learning on social media is not due to a narrow, personalized news diet, as is often suggested. Rather, we find evidence that following news via social media increases a feeling of information overload, which decreases what people actually learn, especially for citizens who combine news via social media with other news sources.
This article contextualises, defines, and operationalises the concept of platformisation. Drawing insights from different scholarly perspectives on platforms-software studies, critical political economy, business studies, and cultural studies-it develops a comprehensive approach to this process. Platformisation is defined as the penetration of infrastructures, economic processes and governmental frameworks of digital platforms in different economic sectors and spheres of life, as well as the reorganisation of cultural practices and imaginations around these platforms. Using app stores as an example, we show how this definition can be employed in research.
As the logic of data-driven metrification reconfigures various realms of social and economic life, cultural workers—from journalists and musicians to photographers and social media content creators—are pursuing online visibility in earnest. Despite workers’ patterned deployment of search engine optimization, reciprocal linking, and automated engagement-boosting, tech companies routinely denigrate such practices as gaming the system. This article critically probes discourses and practices of so-called system-gaming by analyzing three key moments when platforms accused cultural producers of algorithmic manipulation. Empirically, we draw upon textual analyses of news articles ( n = 105) and user guidelines published by Google, Facebook, and Instagram. Our findings suggest that the line between what platforms deem illegitimate algorithmic manipulation and legitimate strategy is nebulous and largely reflective of their material interests. However, the language used to invoke this distinction is strongly normative, condemning “system gamers” as morally bankrupt, while casting platform companies as neutral actors working to uphold the ideals of authenticity and integrity. We term this dynamic “platform paternalism” and conclude that gaming accusations constitute an important mechanism through which platforms legitimate their power and authority, to the detriment of less well-established cultural producers.
The purpose of this article is to operationalise an evolutionary perspective on the history of social media and to trace Facebook’s evolution from a social networking site to a “platform-as-infrastructure”. Social media platforms such as Facebook change constantly on the level of their platform architectures, interfaces, governance frameworks, and control mechanisms, all while responding to their larger environments. By examining the evolution of Facebook’s programmability and corporate partnerships, we develop an empirical historical analysis of the platform’s boundary dynamics that ultimately determine its operational scale and scope. Based on our analysis of a unique set of archived primary sources, we discern four main stages in Facebook’s long-term evolution and discuss the interplay between ongoing processes of “platformisation” and “infrastructuralisation”. We argue that these terms foreground complementary aspects of the platform’s efforts in balancing its expansion and adaptability to changing user needs and other “environmental dynamics” without risking its integrations and embedding in other domains, such as advertising, marketing, and publishing. Ultimately, our contribution illustrates how empirical platform histories can denaturalise the current dominant position of social media platforms, such as Facebook, revealing over a decade of incremental evolution rather than revolution.
Facebook's usage has reached a point that the platform's infrastructural ambitions are to be taken very seriously. To understand the company's evolution in the age of mobile media, we critically engage with the political economy of platformization. This article puts forward a conceptual framework and methodological apparatus to study Facebook's economic growth and expanding platform boundaries in the mobile ecosystem through an analysis of the Facebook Messenger app. Through financial and institutional analysis, we examine Messenger's business dimension and draw on platform studies and information systems research to survey its technical dimension. By retracing how Facebook, through Messenger, operationalizes platform power, this article attempts to bridge the gap between these various disciplines by demonstrating how platforms emerge and how their apps may evolve into platforms of their own, thereby gaining infrastructural properties. It is argued that Messenger functions as a 'platform instance' that facilitates transactions with a wide range of institutions within the boundaries of the app and far beyond.
This article explores how the political economy of the cultural industries changes through platformization: the penetration of economic and infrastructural extensions of online platforms into the web, affecting the production, distribution, and circulation of cultural content. It pursues this investigation in critical dialogue with current research in business studies, political economy, and software studies. Focusing on the production of news and games, the analysis shows that in economic terms platformization entails the replacement of two-sided market structures with complex multisided platform configurations, dominated by big platform corporations. Cultural content producers have to continuously grapple with seemingly serendipitous changes in platform governance, ranging from content curation to pricing strategies. Simultaneously, these producers are enticed by new platform services and infrastructural changes. In the process, cultural commodities become fundamentally "contingent," that is increasingly modular in design and continuously reworked and repackaged, informed by datafied user feedback.
Algorithms and data-driven technologies are increasingly being embraced by a variety of different sectors and institutions. This paper examines how algorithms and data-driven technologies, enacted by an organization like Facebook, can induce similarity across an industry. Using theories from organizational sociology and neoinstitutionalism, this paper traces the bureaucratic roots of Big Data and algorithms to examine the institutional dependencies that emerge and are mediated through data-driven and algorithmic logics. This type of analysis sheds light on how organizational contexts are embedded into algorithms, which can then become embedded within other organizational and individual practices. By investigating technical practices as organizational and bureaucratic, discussions about accountability and decision-making can be reframed.
The rise of digital intermediaries such as search engines and social media is profoundly changing our media environment. Here, we analyze how news media organizations handle their relations to these increasingly important intermediaries. Based on a strategic case study, we argue that relationships between publishers and platforms are characterized by a tension between (1) short-term, operational opportunities and (2) long-term strategic worries about becoming too dependent on intermediaries. We argue that these relationships are shaped by news media’s fear of missing out, the difficulties of evaluating the risk/reward ratios, and a sense of asymmetry. The implication is that news media that developed into an increasingly independent institution in the 20th century—in part enabled by news media organizations’ control over channels of communication—are becoming dependent upon new digital intermediaries that structure the media environment in ways that not only individual citizens but also large, resource-rich, powerful organizations have to adapt to.
How the World Changed Social Media is the first book in Why We Post, a book series that investigates the findings of nine anthropologists who each spent 15 months living in communities across the world. This book offers a comparative analysis summarising the results of the research and exploring the impact of social media on politics and gender, education and commerce. What is the result of the increased emphasis on visual communication? Are we becoming more individual or more social? Why is public social media so conservative? Why does equality online fail to shift inequality offline? How did memes become the moral police of the internet? Supported by an introduction to the project’s academic framework and theoretical terms that help to account for the findings, the book argues that the only way to appreciate and understand something as intimate and ubiquitous as social media is to be immersed in the lives of the people who post. Only then can we discover how people all around the world have already transformed social media in such unexpected ways and assess the consequences.
In this article, I inquire into Facebook’s development as a platform by situating it within the transformation of social network sites into social media platforms. I explore this shift with a historical perspective on, what I refer to as, platformization, or the rise of the platform as the dominant infrastructural and economic model of the social web and its consequences. Platformization entails the extension of social media platforms into the rest of the web and their drive to make external web data “platform ready.” The specific technological architecture and ontological distinctiveness of platforms will be examined by taking their programmability into account. I position platformization as a form of platform critique that inquires into the dynamics of the decentralization of platform features and the recentralization of “platform ready” data as a way to examine the consequences of the programmability of social media platforms for the web.
The analysis of media systems has become a cornerstone in the field of comparative communication research. Ten years after its publication, we revisit the landmark study in the field, Hallin and Mancini's “Comparing Media Systems”, and operationalize its framework for standardized measurement. The study at hand is, to the best of our knowledge, the first to comprehensively validate the original dimensions and models using aggregated data from the same sample of Western countries. Three out of four dimensions of media systems show relatively high levels of internal consistency, but “role of the state” should be disaggregated into 3 subdimensions. A cluster analysis reveals 4 empirical types of media systems that differentiate and extend the original typology.
List of tables List of figures Preface Part I. The News Media and Civic Malaise: 1. The news media and democracy 2. Evaluating media performance 3. Understanding political communications Part II. Trends in Political Communication: 4. The decline of newspapers? 5. The rise (and fall?) of the television age 6. The emerging internet era 7. The evolution of campaign communications 8. The rise of the post-modern campaign? Part III. The Impact on Democracy: 9. Negative news, negative public? 10. Knows little? Information and choice 11. Cares less? Cynical media, cynical public? 12. Stays home? Political mobilization 13. American exceptionalism? 14. A virtuous circle? Technical appendix Notes Select bibliography Author index Subject index.
More people today get news via Facebook and Google than via any news organization in history, and smaller platforms like Twitter serve news to more users than all but the biggest media companies. In The Power of Platforms, Rasmus Kleis Nielsen and Sarah Anne Ganter draw on original interviews and other qualitative evidence to analyze the “platform power” that a few technology companies as a consequence have come to exercise in public life, the reservations publishers have about platforms—as well as the reasons why they often embrace them nonetheless.
Nielsen and Ganter trace how relations between publishers and platforms have evolved across the United States, France, Germany, and the United Kingdom. They identify the new, distinct relational and generative forms of power that platforms exercise as people increasingly rely on them to find and access news. Most of the news content we all rely on is still produced by journalists working for news organizations. But the book chronicles rapid change in the ways in which we discover it, how it is distributed, where decisions are made on what to display (and what not), and in who profits from these flows of information.
Examining the different ways publishers have responded to these changes and how various platform companies have in turn handled the increasingly important and controversial role they play in society, this book draws out the implications of a fundamental feature of the contemporary world we all need to understand: that previously powerful and relatively independent institutions like the news media are increasingly in a position similar to that of ordinary individual users, simultaneously empowered by and dependent upon a small number of centrally placed and powerful platforms.
There is a growing concern around the dependency of news organisations on platforms like Facebook for audience traffic. However, scholars are still working out the extent of this dependency and how it manifests in practice. In this article, we draw on interviews with Australian news professionals and industry fieldwork to provide a nuanced account of this phenomenon. We find that news media organisations have recently started to diversify their distribution strategies and the business models associated with them in response to Facebook’s algorithm changes. While Facebook remains important, we suggest that greater attention needs to be paid to the complex relationships that news organisations have with platforms. This article ends by considering the implications of these findings for international policy discussions centred around the prospect of platform regulation.
Individuals all over the world can use Airbnb to rent an apartment in a foreign city, check Coursera to find a course on statistics, join PatientsLikeMe to exchange information about one’s disease, hail a cab using Uber, or read the news through Facebook’s Instant Articles. In The Platform Society, Van Dijck, Poell, and De Waal offer a comprehensive analysis of a connective world where platforms have penetrated the heart of societies—disrupting markets and labor relations, transforming social and civic practices, and affecting democratic processes. The Platform Society analyzes intense struggles between competing ideological systems and contesting societal actors—market, government, and civil society—asking who is or should be responsible for anchoring public values and the common good in a platform society. Public values include, of course, privacy, accuracy, safety, and security; but they also pertain to broader societal effects, such as fairness, accessibility, democratic control, and accountability. Such values are the very stakes in the struggle over the platformization of societies around the globe. The Platform Society highlights how these struggles play out in four private and public sectors: news, urban transport, health, and education. Some of these conflicts highlight local dimensions, for instance, fights over regulation between individual platforms and city councils, while others address the geopolitical level where power clashes between global markets and (supra-)national governments take place.
Public opinion, as necessary a concept it is to the underpinnings of democracy, is a socially constructed representation of the public that is forged by the methods and data from which it is derived, as well as how it is understood by those tasked with evaluating and utilizing it. I examine how social media manifests as public opinion in the news and how these practices shape journalistic routines. I draw from a content analysis of news stories about the 2016 US election, as well as interviews with journalists, to shed light on evolving practices that inform the use of social media to represent public opinion. I find that despite social media users not reflecting the electorate, the press reported online sentiments and trends as a form of public opinion that services the horserace narrative and complements survey polling and vox populi quotes. These practices are woven into professional routines – journalists looked to social media to reflect public opinion, especially in the wake of media events like debates. Journalists worried about an overreliance on social media to inform coverage, especially Dataminr alerts and journalists’ own highly curated Twitter feeds. Hybrid flows of information between journalists, campaigns, and social media companies inform conceptions of public opinion.
This article brings together perspectives from digital media studies and journalism scholarship to propose a working definition of digital journalism that can guide scholarship and applied research in this field. We define digital journalism as “those practices of newsgathering, reporting, textual production and ancillary communication that reflect, respond to, and shape the social, cultural and economic logics of the constantly changing digital media environment.” We elaborate and illustrate this definition through a discussion of the co-evolving relationship of journalism with the Internet and social media platforms since the 2000s and outline in detail how social news outlets such as BuzzFeed are paradigmatic examples of these dynamics and relationships. The article concludes by emphasizing the urgent need for both the study and practice of digital journalism in the public interest, especially in the context of an increasingly platformed and closed media system. We focus particularly on the methodological challenges and threat to public oversight that recent moves to platform enclosure and lockdown represent and provide some suggestions as to how these might be addressed.
IF... THEN provides an account of power and politics in the algorithmic media landscape that pays attention to the multiple realities of algorithms, and how these relate and coexist. The argument is made that algorithms do not merely have power and politics; they help to produce certain forms of acting and knowing in the world. In processing, classifying, sorting, and ranking data, algorithms are political in that they help to make the world appear in certain ways rather than others. Analyzing Facebook's news feed, social media user's everyday encounters with algorithmic systems, and the discourses and work practices of news professionals, the book makes a case for going beyond the narrow, technical definition of algorithms as step-by-step procedures for solving a problem in a finite number of steps. Drawing on a process-relational theoretical framework and empirical data from field observations and fifty-five interviews, the author demonstrates how algorithms exist in multiple ways beyond code. The analysis is concerned with the world-making capacities of algorithms, questioning how algorithmic systems shape encounters and orientations of different kinds, and how these systems are endowed with diffused personhood and relational agency. IF ... THEN argues that algorithmic power and politics is neither about algorithms determining how the social world is fabricated nor about what algorithms do per se. Rather it is about how and when different aspects of algorithms and the algorithmic become available to specific actors, under what circumstance, and who or what gets to be part of how algorithms are defined.
This article examines the relationship between the news industry and digital platforms, most notably Facebook and Google, through a political economy framework. The theory of regulatory capture suggests that regulators are prone to become captured by the businesses they oversee, whether through financial incentives (such as money transfers and revolving doors) or cognitive/cultural influence (such as advocacy and shared values). The theory was further expanded to suggest that businesses also attempt to capture non-governmental institutions tasked with scrutinizing them, such as the media. This article suggests that Google and Facebook are rapidly expanding their potential capability to do so. Alongside the forms of capture described in the literature, the most crucial element in Google and Facebook’s relationships with news organizations is the fact that they have come to provide the majority of audience for online news and are significant sources of potential growth in viewership. In addition, they equip news organizations with tools for news production, provide them with data on the reach of stories, and offer tools for analytics and insight. All this potentially amounts to a new form of capture that can be called infrastructural capture: circumstances in which a scrutinizing body is incapable of operating sustainably without the physical or digital resources and services provided by the businesses it oversees and is therefore dependent on them. This new category of capture, rooted in the dynamics of contemporary digital news markets, could pose serious challenges to the ability of news organizations to scrutinize the corporations that direct most of the traffic to their sites. Aside from potentially affecting the content of news, another important effect of compromising infrastructural autonomy to non-journalistic third-party actors might be a weakening of the legal protections that journalism benefits from.
Two theoretical approaches have recently emerged to characterize new digital objects of study in the media landscape: infrastructure studies and platform studies. Despite their separate origins and different features, we demonstrate in this article how the cross-articulation of these two perspectives improves our understanding of current digital media. We use case studies of the Open Web, Facebook, and Google to demonstrate that infrastructure studies provides a valuable approach to the evolution of shared, widely accessible systems and services of the type often provided or regulated by governments in the public interest. On the other hand, platform studies captures how communication and expression are both enabled and constrained by new digital systems and new media. In these environments, platform-based services acquire characteristics of infrastructure, while both new and existing infrastructures are built or reorganized on the logic of platforms. We conclude by underlining the potential of this combined framework for future case studies.
Building on a survey of media institutions in eighteen West European and North American democracies, Hallin and Mancini identify the principal dimensions of variation in media systems and the political variables which have shaped their evolution. They go on to identify three major models of media system development (the Polarized Pluralist, Democratic Corporatist and Liberal models) to explain why the media have played a different role in politics in each of these systems, and to explore the forces of change that are currently transforming them. It provides a key theoretical statement about the relation between media and political systems, a key statement about the methodology of comparative analysis in political communication and a clear overview of the variety of media institutions that have developed in the West, understood within their political and historical context.
This book studies the rise of social media in the first decade of the twenty-first century, up until 2012. It provides both a historical and a critical analysis of the emergence of networking services in the context of a changing ecosystem of connective media. Such history is needed to understand how the intricate constellation of platforms profoundly affects our experience of online sociality. In a short period of time, services like Facebook, YouTube and many others have come to deeply penetrate our daily habits of communication and creative production. While most sites started out as amateur-driven community platforms, half a decade later they have turned into large corporations that do not just facilitate user connectedness, but have become global information and data mining companies extracting and exploiting user connectivity. Offering a dual analytical prism to examine techno-cultural as well as socio-economic aspects of social media, the author dissects five major platforms: Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, YouTube, and Wikipedia. Each of these microsystems occupies a distinct position in the larger ecosystem of connective media, and yet, their underlying mechanisms for coding interfaces, steering users, filtering content, governance and business models rely on shared ideological principles. Reconstructing the premises on which these platforms are built, this study highlights how norms for online interaction and communication gradually changed. "Sharing," "friending," "liking," "following," "trending," and "favoriting" have come to denote online practices imbued with specific technological and economic meanings. This process of normalization is part of a larger political and ideological battle over information control in an online world where everything is bound to become "social."
Several comparative media researchers have hypothesized that the media systems of affluent Western democracies are becoming more and more structurally homogeneous—that they are becoming “Americanized.” This article uses data on newspaper industry revenues, commercial television revenues, Internet use, and funding for public service media from a strategic sample of six countries to test the structural version of the convergence hypothesis, looking at the period from 2000 to 2009. (The countries included are Finland, France, Germany, Italy, the United Kingdom, and the United States.) The analysis demonstrates an “absence of Americanization” as the six media systems have not become structurally more similar over the last decade. Instead, developments are summarized as a combination of (1) parallel displacements, (2) persistent particularities, and (3) the emergence of some new peculiarities. Theoretically, economic and technological forces were expected to drive convergence. The article suggests that the reason these forces have not driven convergence in recent years may be that the interplay between them have changed as part of a broader shift from the mass media, mass production, and mass markets characteristic of twentieth-century Western societies and toward the fragmented media landscapes, tailored production, and niche marketing increasingly characteristic of early-twenty-first century affluent democracies.
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We introduce platform studies, a family of approaches to digital media. In platform studies, close consideration is given to the detailed technical workings of computing systems. This allows the connections between platform technologies and creative production to be investigated. Two short studies of the Atari VCS (2600) and the Nintendo Wii show how close consideration of this sort can inform our understanding of the history, present, and future of new media. Platforms have been around for decades, right under our video games and digital art. Those studying new media are starting to explore the low level of code to learn more about how computers are used in culture, but there have been few attempts to go even deeper, to the metal — to look at the base hardware and software systems that provide the foundation for computational expression. Platform studies is such an attempt, investigating the relationships between the hardware and software design of standardized computing systems — platforms — and the creative works produced on those platforms. INTRODUCING PLATFORMS The hardware and software framework that supports other programs is referred to in computing as a platform. A platform in its purest form is an abstraction, simply a standard or specification. To be used by people and to take part in our culture directly, a
This paper represents an exploratory study into an emerging culture in UK online newsrooms—the practice of Search Engine Optimisation (SEO), which assesses its impact on news production. Comprising a short-term participant observational case study at a national online news publisher, and a series of semi-structured, in-depth interviews with SEO professionals at three further UK media organisations, the author sets out to establish how SEO is operationalised in the newsroom, and what consequences these practices have for online news production. SEO practice is found to be varied and application is not universal. Not all UK news organisations are making the most of SEO even though some publishers take a highly sophisticated approach. Efforts are constrained by time, resources and management support, as well as off-page technical issues. SEO policy is found, in some cases, to inform editorial policy, but there is resistance to the principal of SEO driving decision-making. Several themes are established which call for further research.
World Press Trends Database. World Association of Newspapers and News
- Wan-Ifra
Reuters Institute Digital News Report 2022
- N Newman
- R Fletcher
- C T Robertson