2019 Reports

Friend and Foe: The Platform Press at the Heart of Journalism

Rashidian, Nushin; Brown, Peter D.; Hansen, Elizabeth; Bell, Emily J.; Albright, Jonathan R.

The relationship between technology platforms and news publishers has endured a fraught 18 months. Even so, the external forces of civic and regulatory pressure are hastening a convergence between the two fields at an accelerated rate beyond what we saw when we published our first report from this study, “The Platform Press: How Silicon Valley Reengineered Journalism,” in March 2017. Journalism has played a critical part in pushing for accountability into the practices of companies such as Facebook, Google and Twitter, yet newsrooms are increasingly oriented toward understanding and leveraging platforms as part of finding a sustainable future.

In the latest phase of our multi-year research into the relationship between platforms and publishers, we found that despite negative rhetoric and sentiment in newsrooms toward technology companies, there is a rapid and ongoing merging in the functions of publishers and platforms, and an often surprisingly high level of involvement from platform companies in influencing news production.