Autonomies and Dependencies: Shifting Configurations of Power in the Platformization of News

Abstract

In this introduction, we draw together the articles in the special issue on the platformization of news, highlighting that the articles contribute by answering two central questions. First, what is the extent of contemporary journalists and news organizations’ platform dependence, and how does this vary according to geographic context, organizational resources, and other factors? Second, what is the nature of journalism’s platform dependency? Platforms’ most overt editorial influence on news publishers (e.g., dictating areas of coverage, reshaping headlines, and so on) has arguably waned in recent years – and was never straightforward to begin with. The articles in this special issue encourage us to consider how the platform/publisher relationship is now defined by more subtle, or even hidden, dependencies that are nevertheless impactful. We further argue that various forms of power are at play in the shifting, contextual and embedded configurations of dependency and autonomy in the platform/publisher relationship. The forms of power, which we can observe across the articles, and which matter for dependence/autonomy configurations, are infrastructural, cultural, and geopolitical.

Keywords:

• Platformatization
• power
• publishers
• new
• journalism
• dependence
• autonomy

Introduction

Recent years have seen a proliferation in media studies and communication scholarship on the ‘platformization of news’ – that is, broadly speaking, the enmeshment of news producers and digital technology platforms.¹ And with good reason: platformization is occurring against the backdrop of a troubling political climate. Public trust in social institutions generally – and news media in particular – continues to decline in a range of national contexts (Newman et al. 2022; United Nations Social Development Network (UNSDN), 2021) as ‘democratic backsliding’ is on the rise (Carothers and Press 2023). The proliferation of networked digital devices, coupled with platform affordances, enable the spread of disinformation, propaganda, and hate speech at scale. Meanwhile, news organizations continue to struggle to find a stable and viable business model in the digital age, rendering them ill-equipped to regain public trust or serve as a counterweight to antidemocratic public sentiment. This constellation of economic, social, and political factors has rendered research on the nature and implications of ‘platformized news’ ever more urgent.

Fortunately, a rich and varied literature has emerged to meet this challenge. In early work on the platformization of news, journalism scholars mostly explored how social media platforms caused change, (re)negotiation, and/or normalization of the work journalists and other news workers do. Though not uncritical, this body of work was mainly occupied with questions that relate to journalistic and editorial practices, and how the advent of new technologies changes them (see, e.g., Hedman 2016; Hedman and Djerf-Pierre 2013; Hermida 2010; Lasorsa, Lewis, and Holton 2012) for a more technology-focused perspective, see Gillespie 2010). While some scholars heralded these changes, particularly the way in which traditional notions of journalistic objectivity become de-emphasized on platforms in favor of a new genre of ‘social news’ exhibiting ‘a strong and explicit positionality’ (Hurcombe, Burgess, and Harrington 2021), others expressed concerns that the asymmetry of resources and reach between platforms and news organizations meant that the latter were systematically disempowered by their dependence on platforms, with deleterious consequences for democracy (Tandoc 2014; Tandoc and Maitra 2018).

In recent years, journalism studies have expanded and intensified this critical perspective, drawing on critical platform studies. This body of work has focused on how journalism and the news media have been dominated by technology companies (Nielsen and Ganter 2018) operating from other institutional logics and strategic goals (which may be at odds with journalism’s ideological allegiance to the public) (van Dijck, Poell, and Waal 2018). Put another way, there has been a move toward scholarship that critically interrogates the imbalances of power built into the platforms with a strong focus on the increasing infrastructural dependencies. News organizations’ disillusionment with platforms – particularly Facebook – is mounting after the company’s waning commitment to news (Mosseri 2018), inflated traffic metrics (Oremus 2018), and seemingly ever-changing algorithmic dictates (Hook 2020) came to light. More recently, Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter, and subsequent suspension from the platform of high-profile journalists who cover him, has made it harder to ignore what has always been the case: journalists are present on platforms because platform owners have allowed them to be, and they can change their minds at any time.

Browsing through the articles in this special issue, metaphors like ‘Facebook’s Death Grip’ and ‘the grip of walled-garden platforms’ (Ratner, Dvir Gvirsman, and Ben-David 2023, in this issue) and ‘platform schooling’ (Papa and Kouros 2023, in this issue) are figurative language for this critical approach to platform power that implicitly but clearly evaluate the imbalanced power relationship – a framing much in line with earlier concepts like platform ‘domination’ (Helmond, Nieborg, and van der Vlist 2019) or ‘penetration’ of news organizations (Nieborg and Poell 2018). Other studies in this special issue describe the platformization process more as an ongoing and contingent process of ‘mutual shaping’ (Kuai et al. 2022, in this issue), in which news organizations seek to carve out ‘spaces of negotiation’ wherever they can (Poell, Nieborg, and Duffy 2022, in this issue). Though still taking a critical perspective, this language reflects recent developments in which journalism’s platform dependence has also become less absolute.

As it has become increasingly clear that platforms are unreliable ‘partners’ in the distribution of news content at scale (Meese and Hurcombe 2021), many news organizations have in recent years sought to reconfigure their dependency by ‘diversifying’ their modes of online distribution. For example, Danish news startup Zetland has developed its digital offerings themselves to shield itself from haphazard changes to platform’s technological setups. A 2019 Reuters Institute survey of news organizations in 38 global media markets found evidence of a “pivot to paid” – in which news organizations that had previously offered content online for free were transitioning to metered paywalls and other reader-funded revenue sources, with the aim of decreasing their reliance on online advertising. Because of developments such as these, some have gone so far as to declare the ‘end of an era’ in the relationship between platforms and news publishers, as evidenced by publishers’ abandonment of ‘the belief that the massive audiences offered by platforms would lead to meaningful advertising revenue for publishers’ as they focus instead on achieving ‘post-scale’ success (Rashidian 2019). A more global perspective might induce a more pessimistic view of the relationship between news media and platforms, often linked to the fact that social media is becoming a source for news for more and more people, especially in the Global South. In South Africa recent figures show that print continues to decline as a source of news and TV news is also down after COVID-19 highs. Conversely, the number of people using social media for news has grown across all platforms except for Twitter, with news use via TikTok and YouTube both increasing by 7 percentage points (Newman et al. 2023). In Nigeria Meta-owned products such as Facebook and WhatsApp remain most widely used for news, followed by Twitter and YouTube. The messaging service Telegram has grown rapidly in recent years and Nigeria’s youthful population is now vigorously embracing short-form video via TikTok – accessed by 56% of 18–24s (Ibid.). Thus, while Western news organizations might be able to afford to lose out on the reach they can get from social media platforms, the context in the Global South creates a different autonomy/dependency configuration.

News organizations’ efforts to distance themselves from platforms stem not only from a realization that platform-dependence has been a financial disappointment, but also from an understanding that journalists who are overly beholden to platforms (like those who are excessively indebted to politicians, advertisers, sources, and so on) cannot be truly autonomous. In an example of this kind of reasoning, NRK Nyheter, the news branch of the Norwegian public service broadcaster, closed its Facebook page in June, 2022, because “audience dialogue is too important to leave to algorithms in Palo Alto”, as news director Espen Olsen argued (Nyhetsbyrået NTB, 2022). If journalists are too focused on catering to the Facebook algorithm, the thinking goes, they are not autonomous; if they are not autonomous, they will be unable to perform the public service that is foundational to both journalistic professionalism and democracy (Örnebring and Karlsson, 2022).

Yet journalistic autonomy as a concept is notoriously complex. In his widely cited essay “Autonomy from what?”, Michael Schudson (2005) questions whether journalistic autonomy, characterized as freedom from constraints imposed by external actors, is in fact desirable in a profession that is inherently public-facing. Extending this point, Ananny (2018) has persuasively argued that the “freedom from” style of journalistic autonomy is a mirage: the press has always been dependent on some external actors as it separates itself from others (see also Örnebring and Karlsson, 2022, who argue that journalistic autonomy is by definition relational, and that to pretend otherwise is not only empirically incorrect but also further entrenches longstanding social inequalities within news institutions). These configurations of separation and dependency shift over time in response to evolving political, economic, cultural, and technological circumstances (Ananny 2018). Crucially, some configurations are more conducive to a press that can give us “the kind of publics that we need” (Ananny 2018,: 2), and it is incumbent upon media scholars to determine which these are. In his commentary to this special issue, Ananny argues for conceptual clarity in terms of choosing journalism/news/the Press as analytical objects and highlights that focusing on the press can show the conditions—social, cultural, economic, political, epistemological, technological, normative, historical—that give rise to some types of journalism and news over others.

Therefore, rather than conceptualizing news publishers as either dependent on or autonomous from platforms, this special issue seeks to map and provide new knowledge on the ‘separations and dependencies’ (Ananny 2018) that characterize this complex and evolving relationship. In this spirit, the special issue orbits around two questions. First, what is the extent of contemporary journalists and news organizations’ platform dependence, and how does this vary according to geographic context, organizational resources, and other factors? Second, what is the nature of journalism’s platform dependence, and how might this be changing over time? Scholars studying the dissemination of news on Facebook, for example, have found that outlets have historically catered to platform dictates by selecting ‘softer’ articles (Lamot 2022; Lischka 2021) or adapting the language of news to increase engagement (Hågvar 2019; Haim et al. 2021). Yet, platforms’ most overt editorial influence on news publishers (e.g., dictating areas of coverage, reshaping headlines, and so on) has arguably waned in recent years, as publishers seek to re-establish boundaries (Wang 2020, 510). For example, Hase et al. (2023, in this special issue) show that news media do not systematically select or adapt news on a more communicative level, for instance by preferring specific topics for social media or by using more engaging language on platforms. The articles in this special issue encourage us to consider how the platform/publisher relationship is now defined by more subtle, or even hidden, dependencies that are nevertheless impactful. Often these reside deep in technical infrastructures and are thus not always visible or understood within newsrooms or to scholars who center the newsroom and news content in their analysis. In other cases, platform power can be observed in the expectations and demands that are reshaping journalistic norms in ways that are becoming increasingly taken-for-granted and thus difficult to identify and name.

As Nielsen and Ganter (2022) have pointed out, the power of platforms is generative in that it enables forms of action that were not possible without a given platform (p. 169). They argue that the platform power is relational in that it is the product of how end-users and various third parties embrace the opportunities platforms offer and premised on platforms’ ability to attract users and complementors (ibid). Analyzing platform power has never been an easy task; it has arguably become even more challenging as the most obvious manifestations of platforms’ influence on news are being supplanted by more subtle counterparts. via new methodologies, approaches, and frameworks, the articles in this special issue offer a way to analyze contemporary platform power as it becomes more nuanced, contingent, and contextually specific. In the following, we draw on the articles in the special issue to highlight various forms of power at play in the shifting, contextual and embedded configurations of dependency and autonomy in the platform/publisher relationship.

Forms of Power and Their Manifestations

The forms of power, which we can observe across the articles and which we argue matter for dependence/autonomy configurations, are infrastructural, cultural, and geopolitical. In the following paragraphs, we explain what we mean by these different forms of power and refer to the articles in this special issue and how they touch on these.

Infrastructural Power

The first form of power to which we want to call attention is infrastructural power, understood as power manifested through ownership and management of ‘sociotechnical systems that are centrally designed and controlled, typically in the invention and development phases of new technologies’ (Plantin et al. 2018). Increasingly, literature engages with the infrastructures introduced by platformization. In much recent literature which focuses on the development of AI in newsrooms, such a ‘platformization of infrastructures’ can be observed, meaning that platforms are developing many of the tools and services that are essential for news media’s ability to both produce and distribute their content. In a previous special issue of Digital Journalism, this has been conceptualized by Felix M. Simon (2022) as ‘infrastructure capture’, a concept he borrows from Efrat Nechushtai. Simon argues that the concept offers a way to understand how actors external to the news industry, such as platform companies, might be able to control them—and what implications this control might have (Ibid, 1839). What he defines as control is a purposive influence towards a predetermined goal’, where one agent A (in practice e.g., an individual, state, or organization) has influence or power over another agent B (e.g., a news organization), meaning that the former can cause changes in the actions or condition of the latter according to some prior goal (ibid). Kristensen and Hartley (2023) have shown how dependencies of platforms in news organizations are playing out via logics of standardization, classification and datafication which are negotiated in every step from simple login solutions to more complex AI systems. The autonomy/dependency configurations should be understood also as driven by data needs or software compliance, visible in media companies’ tech stacks on the editorial level, distribution level, and commercial level. This matters when news organizations for example increasingly seek to personalize their news flows (Kristensen and Hartley 2023).

Similar conclusions can be found in a study by de-Lima-Santos et al. (2023). Analyzing GNI funding in an African and Middle Eastern context, they found that the funded news organizations heavily depend on Google’s technological and financial infrastructure to “serve as the backbone for data flows and technological processes”, posing risks to responsible innovation in journalism.

However, the articles in this special issue suggest that this form of power is not always and only a one-way platform capture or control. News media negotiate, adapt to, and attempt to mold these infrastructural dependencies for their own benefit and have different opportunities and different structural positions from which to do so.

The contingent and shifting nature of platforms’ infrastructural power is captured by Thomas Poell, David B. Nieborg and Brooke Erin Duffy’s (2022, in this issue) contribution to this special issue. Drawing on previous literature (Christin 2020; Meese and Hurcombe 2021; Petre 2021), Poell, Nieborg, and Duffy highlight how news media frequently contest metric demands and systems of algorithmic visibility, invent creative ‘workarounds’ in response to platform governance, and challenge platform business models by developing their own online monetization strategies. To account for these practices, Poell, Nieborg, and Duffy introduce the concept of ‘spaces of negotiation,’ in which news organizations can find opportunities to determine how they produce, distribute and monetize content vis a vis platforms. While pushing back against deterministic understandings of platform power, the authors nevertheless note that some news organizations enjoy bigger ‘spaces’ than others, and they identify three variables that shape the contours of the space in which news media can negotiate platform dictates: (1) platform evolution, (2) stage of production, and (3) type of news organization.

Along the same lines, Yariv Ratner, Shira Dvir Gvirsman, and Anat Ben-David’s study (2023, in this issue) highlights the need not only to focus on the differences in platformization effects between smaller and larger news sites, but also between smaller and larger platforms that provide tech services to news organizations. While content recommender services like Taboola and Outbrain are often overlooked, the authors demonstrate the significant impact of the ‘partnerships’ these companies develop with news organizations – for example, by transferring the relationship between media and their audiences to external providers such that neither the media organization nor the users can see specifically how news content changes as a consequence of users’ engagement with the external recommender algorithms. Ratner et al. also show that by installing the recommender platforms’ widgets, news organizations make themselves dependent on these platforms, giving them infrastructural power and allowing them to capitalize on the trust that users have in the news media organizations. This kind of infrastructural power thus manifests itself as a form of hidden dependence that nevertheless involves very high costs of opting out, when for example the technical features of a news website are built and adapted to fit the infrastructural solutions provided by platforms and other smaller tech intermediaries. This work highlights how journalistic content is utilized for commercial purposes and other third-party interests made possible because of the infrastructural provisions of Taboola and Outbrain. Thus, the infrastructural form of power blurs who is dependent on whom, and furthermore highlights the complexities both analytically and methodologically of mapping out such infrastructural power configurations.

The fact that platformization of news involves an infrastructural form of power is further illustrated in the work of Bernat Ivancsics, Eve Washington, Helen Yang, Emily Sidnam-Mauch, Ayana Monroe, Errol Francis II, Joseph Bonneau, Kelly Caine, and Susan E. McGregor (2023, in this special issue) which examines ‘markup’ practices by US news media. Markup refers to the bits of text encoded into a document (e.g., a website) to control its structure or formatting: HTML, which ‘builds’ websites, is an example of a markup language. While it is possible to find the markup through, for example, source-code analysis, it is not visible to the naked eye. However, Ivancsics et al. illustrate how, despite their obscurity, markup practices affect publishers’ visibility to audiences given the platform-driven, algorithmically curated information economy. As such, infrastructural power is also the power to dominate the markup categorizations and standardizations of, for example, meta-data, enabling content to flow from news media to the wider internet. As the authors argue, markup therefore constitutes an infrastructure of visibility by which news sources and voices are rendered accessible—or conversely—invisible in the wider platform economy of journalism (Ivancsics et al. 2023, in this special issue). Finally, the authors reveal patterns and discrepancies in markup deployment across publications with different target audiences and resource profiles.

Building on the insights from these articles, we can argue that the infrastructural forms of power both empowers the media by broadening their reach, while also making them more dependent by structuring the visibility and invisibilities of certain forms of content. The papers illustrate that different publishers are able to respond to or challenge such infrastructural power to varying degrees.

Cultural Power

The second form of power we observe across many of the papers is cultural power. Previous literature has juxtaposed news judgment and platform logics, often to argue that journalists must sacrifice the former to follow the latter. However, by drawing attention to cultural forms of power, we want to highlight the fact that platform logics increasingly infuse news judgment and practices to the extent that it no longer makes sense to position them as separate and oppositional entities. The articles across this special issue suggest that the influence and cultural power of platforms are becoming more embedded and embodied in journalistic practice – a sense of what stories and framings will ‘play’ on platforms is a key ingredient of news judgment, rather than competing with it (see also Tenenboim 2022, in this journal, for an analysis of an understanding of the underlying logics of media production in triple-party news-spaces in different national/cultural contexts).

For example, as pointed out by Nelson (2023) in this special issue, journalists now routinely post observations, comments, and links to other stories or media to participate in what scholars refer to as ‘social media performance’ (Mellado and Hermida 2021) or ‘personal branding’ (Brems et al. 2017; Canter 2015). Thus, platform logic and news logic are merged and embodied in the journalistic routines and everyday working practices. Furthermore, Nelson shows how the tools linking news content to platforms gives journalists a direct feedback mechanism that produces many salutary effects: Journalists are presented with the opportunity to gain followers, promote their work, and cultivate a wider network of potential sources. At the same time, however, journalists’ public presence on platforms like Twitter opens them up to networked harassment, and it is striking ill-equipped news organizations seem to be to respond.

Similar logics can be found in the tools offered for journalistic practice that are introduced and embedded via funding and training schemes introduced by platforms, as shown in the article by Papa and Kouros in this special issue (2023). The authors analyze the Google News Initiative (GNI) and the Facebook Journalism Project (FJP), which offer news organizations access to platform-owned technological tools for monitoring audience engagement, tracking trending topics, and fact-checking stories, as well as trainings in how to use these tools. Through an analysis of the user interfaces of these technological artifacts, Papa and Kouros show that the affordances of GNI and FJP tools seek to shape not only journalistic practices to align with platform expectations and business models, but also journalists’ norms concerning what counts as ‘successful’ journalism, how to define a ‘loyal’ audience, and so on – a process they refer to as ‘platform schooling’. As both images and text are increasingly being generated by AI solutions provided by platforms, for example through free datasets for AI-training, or access to Large Language Models and Transformers, we are likely to see an increase in such ‘schooling’ and other cultural forms of platform power embedding themselves into the norms of journalists and news organizations in ways that are more subtle – and often less visible – than the kind of overt platform editorial influence that was predicted in earlier worries about the rise of journalistic ‘clickbait’ and ‘sharebait’.

Valerie Hase, Karin Boczek, and Michael Scharkow’s contribution to the special issue also extends our understanding of cultural power, by taking a cross-platform, multi-modal approach to analyzing how German outlets select and adapt existing stories for Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, and Twitter. Combining computational and manual content analysis, the study shows that systematic selection and adaptation primarily happen on a technical level (e.g., electing to distribute relatively more content on Twitter because of that platform’s news focus), and not on a communication level: selecting stories with platform-friendly topics for social-media distribution or tweaking language to appeal to particular platforms only happen to a minimal extent. In showing that outlets do not follow social media logics as one might have thought, this article challenges our ingrained understanding of how platforms’ cultural power manifests (Hase, Boczek, and Scharkow 2022, in this special issue).

Geopolitical Power

The last form of power we want to highlight in this introduction article is geopolitical power. Across the articles in this special issue, we can observe that platforms operate as geopolitical actors whose political power plays out in vastly different ways across geographic contexts. As Wang (2020) has used the term media differentiation to argue that, as a counter trend to media convergence, media develops differently in different contexts. Using China as an example, she found functional differentiation between Chinese state media and commercial online media in terms of their role in covering public affairs and engaging the public (Wang 2018): China’s state media largely lead the media agenda and align closely with the party line, but as they are subject to stricter regulation and self-regulation, they play a weaker role in engaging the public online.

Other examples of media differentiation with regard to platformization abound worldwide: The realization that social media platforms play an increasing role for public engagement led the Indian government to ban Tik Tok June 2020 (alongside 58 others Chinese apps), citing national security concerns (Pahwa 2020). The concerns over Chinese state involvement meant that Danish Public Service Broadcaster DR followed other national government institutions in removing Tik Tok from their phones; meanwhile, the Danish tabloid Ekstra Bladet is expanding its Tik Tok News Desk due to the high number of younger audiences using the platform.

At the time of this writing (the Summer of 2023) a high-stakes game of chicken is taking place in Canada, where the recently passed Online News Act stipulates that platforms must enter into agreements with publishers before sharing their editorial content; in response, Google and Facebook have announced they will remove or downplay links to news sites (Bhuiyan 2023). This face-off largely echoes the 2021 conflict between Facebook on the one side and the Australian government and news industry on the other, where the platform initially decided to block all news content in response to the country’s media bargaining code. Similar actions have been taken in South Africa, where an association made up of the South Africa’s largest media houses, the Publisher Support Services (PSS), wants Google and Meta to compensate news outlets for the content they use on their platforms, a move which it says is meant to ensure the sustainability of the local news industry. Several articles in this special issue offer analytical frameworks to help make sense of these ongoing developments.

The article by Joanne Kuai, Bibo Lin, Michael Karlsson and Seth Lewis exemplifies how platforms negotiate with news organizations, the public, and regulators in ‘politically restrictive environments’ (Kuai et al. 2022, in this special issue). Zooming in on Jinri Toutiao, a Chinese news aggregator owned by Bytedance (the company behind TikTok), the article shows how the platform was engaged in constant negotiation between lawsuits from media companies for exploiting their content to direct partnerships with the same media companies – all against the backdrop of an increasingly restrictive regulatory environment. To be sure, platforms are subject to the legal and institutional structure of their geo-political setting. Yet Kuai et al. demonstrate that ‘even in a seemingly totalitarian system such as China’, platform logics can be powerfully disruptive and that platforms can leverage their power to negotiate favorable conditions and partnerships outside their geopolitical context. As Kuai et al. put it; ‘platforms, when capitalizing on the potential power and scale of algorithms, may be successful in exporting their institutional logic to other institutions in the broader information ecosystem’ (Kuai et al. 2022).

This geopolitical power poses challenges to existing ways of regulating media, as shown by Theresa Josephine Seipp, Natali Helberger, Claes de Vreese, and Jef Ausloos in their contribution to this special issue. Media concentration law has been the traditional tool to prevent excessive consolidation of what the authors call ‘opinion power’ – but this body of law, in its current form, is not applicable to the platform context. Seipp et al. argue that platforms wield systemic power that makes them ‘regulatory structures of the social’ and ‘facilitators of free speech’ (Seipp et al. 2023, inthis special issue); they possess the ability to impact not only competition but also the diversity and pluralism of opinions and views. Current legal frameworks regarding media concentration, such as ownership rules and transparency and oversight measures, cannot fully apprehend this far-reaching potential. Instead, Seipp and her colleagues advocate for more holistic interventions that cross national boundaries and ‘rethink media concentration law as a complementary approach to platform regulation’.

Whether the power of platforms concerns infrastructures, culture, or geopolitics (or combinations of them), the collection of articles in this special issue highlights how platforms do, indeed, influence and shape the news media and journalism – but the contributions also emphasize and discuss strategies, practices, and initiatives to counter the exercise of this power. Media organizations, news workers, and journalism as an institution are not just powerless actors that are a priori subsumed to the workings of the platforms. They have agency (although to varying degrees): the question is how that agency is used, and how a sustainable equilibrium between actors with different modes of operation and different ambitions comes into existence. This is a question for, among others, the news industry, journalists, regulators, and the platforms to answer – and those negotiations will remain a vital focus for research in years to come.

Concluding Remarks

The articles in this issue make two things clear. First the power of the platforms is formidable, far-reaching, and multifaceted. Second, and just as important: The power of the platforms is deeply contextual and is not absolute; on the contrary, there is room for negotiation and contestation by news organizations as well as individuals. Media organizations have different starting points for entering the relationship with platforms, from which they must negotiate the infrastructural, cultural, and geopolitical forms of power at stake in this ongoing struggle for audiences and advertising revenue. By conceptualizing this ongoing, multi-stakeholder struggle as The Press, as Mike Annany suggests in his commentary to this special issue (Ananny 2023, forthcoming), we can situate specific concerns about the content of news and the practice of journalism in the platform era within larger questions of how sociotechnical change happens, how news and platforms co-construct publics, and what power news organizations have to counter platforms (ibid.).

Furthermore, it is also useful to consider how media organizations are embedded in vastly different media systems, in which publishers might share certain traits (e.g., practices, news culture, and political environment) (Hallin and Mancini 2004). As highlighted in this special issue, these system-level traits can bring much to bear on how news organizations become dependent on, and/or autonomous from, platforms. Thus, it does not make sense to talk of platformization of news as a singular process with a singular result. Rather, we see great value in the many perspectives from different media systems offered in this special issue. From a media-systems perspective, Hallin and Mancini (2004) argue that all media systems move toward the liberal model that characterizes the US;the spread of the same platforms on a global level could lead to the hypothesis that media systems where platforms play an important role do, indeed, become more homogeneous. However, the articles in this special issue show that even though many platforms operate on a global scale, differences in journalistic cultures, media structures, and regulatory environments result in different responses to the platform logics and technological affordances (see also Humprecht et al. 2022).

Building on this, we could further hypothesize that actors in a democratic-corporatist system with strong public service media will have different incentives for engaging with platforms than actors in more clear-cut commercial or liberal media systems. For example, at the time of this writing, several Danish news media are in a process of restricting users’ access to commenting on their Facebook posts, realizing the discussions on this platform may cause harm to public discourse rather than contributing to it. Such an intervention would likely take a different shape in other media systemic contexts (though it bears noting that the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, which is a public broadcaster operating in a liberal media system, also limited users’ ability to comment on its Facebook news posts – indicating that organization’s individual funding model is also significant factor in how it engages with platforms).

Furthermore, political regime matters as well: Right-wing leaders from Jair Bolsonaro to Donald Trump have weaponized social media platforms to target journalists and the press. In sum, organizational policies are shaped by the broader context they exist within, as are journalistic cultures, and the articles have shown that it remains important to take these differences into account.

Contextually- or media systems-focused analysis can also help us make sense of how changes in particular regulatory contexts influence platform operations and the exercise of platform power. While platforms operate across geographical boundaries, enforcing similar terms of use across different cultural, political, and social settings – they remain legal entities bound to specific jurisdictional and regulatory frameworks (where they are registered as companies), and even they must comply with legislation. Thus, platforms’ geopolitical power is not absolute, as many of the articles also highlight. For example, despite efforts to challenge legislation in courts or stall implementation, platforms operating within EU member states must comply with the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). As of this writing, the Artificial Intelligence Act is (slowly) moving through the legislative system of the EU, aiming to regulating where AI can be lawfully applied; the AI Act has already had a tangible impact beyond the European Union as it inspired a 2021 bill passed by Brazil’s Congress. Future research might explore the consequences of such regulation are, and how they differ between national contexts and media systems. In sum, comparative studies are needed to identify and highlight the consequences of media-systemic characteristics on the processes of platformization.

As we mention above, the power of the platforms is not absolute, and even the mightiest of them have experienced pushback in recent years. The turning point was arguably the Facebook-Cambridge Analytica scandal in the late 2010s that turned the public eye to the extensive data capture made possible by the platforms’ digital infrastructure (Hinds, Williams, and Joinson 2020). More recently, the early 2020s have experienced massive layoffs in the tech industry (Stringer 2023) as well as looming regulation (e.g., the AI Act in the European Union and some high-profile legal cases presented at the US Supreme Court).

A sign of the shifting waters, the phrase ‘pivot to video’ (named from Facebook’s 2015 strategic shift toward prioritizing video in the news feed, which the platform abruptly abandoned after news organizations had spent substantial resources adapting to it) has become ridiculing industry shorthand for the kind of new, platform-initiated activities that promise to help the news industry but ultimately prove to be a waste of newsroom resources. It has become increasingly clear among many media executives is that while platforms are vehicles to reach audiences, they might be just as dependent upon content providers; as Maureen Dowd (2013) has noted ‘digital platforms are worthless without content. They’re shiny sacks with bells and whistles, but without content, they’re empty sacks’. Brügger (2015) talks of Facebook as an ‘empty structure’; that is, as something that depends on users to fill in content. And as news organizations increasingly turn toward digital subscription or similar revenue sources rather than attention-based business models based on reach (Newman 2019; Bakke and Barland 2022), platforms such as Facebook become less important for them.

Still, it’s not clear how platforms’ increasing vulnerabilities will affect journalism, whether news organizations can truly shift towards less dependence and how this is likely to differ from publisher to publisher. Even subscription-based news organizations are unlikely to fully wean themselves from platforms soon: indeed, as the number of people worldwide who rely on platforms for news continues to grow (Newman et al. 2023), news organizations that deprioritize them risk irrelevancy. Yet at the same time, organizations that are committed to maintaining their presence on platforms are likely to face ever-stronger headwinds: some of the layoffs at the platforms were high-level news people, which suggests that platforms’ commitment to news may be further waning. In addition, developments like Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter, which has long been a crucial communication infrastructure for journalists, Instagram’s launch of the Threads app, a Twitter competitor that will not ‘encourage’ the dissemination of news (Peters 2023), and Jeff Bezos’ rumored interest in selling the Washington Post, highlight just how entangled journalists and big tech still are, as well as how precarious (and largely out of journalists’ control) those relationships can turn out to be (Helmore 2023). Furthermore, there are questions about how emerging developments – such as the growing role of newer platforms like TikTok in news dissemination (particularly in Africa, Latin America, and parts of Asia (Newman et al. 2023)), as well as the development of technologies such as ChatGPT (created by OpenAI and Microsoft) will impact journalism and whether they will upend the configuration of dependencies and autonomy yet again. It is our hope that this special issue will inspire further analysis of the different forms and dynamics of power configurations discussed in this introduction and in the collection of contributions this special issue on ‘the platformatization of news’ presents.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This article is funded by Velux Foundation.

Notes

1 We use the definition from Reuver et al. where a digital platform is thought of as ‘a sociotechnical assemblage encompassing the technical elements (of software and hardware) and associated organizational processes and standards’ (de Reuver, Sørensen, and Basole 2018, p. 126).