Reference:
Nielsen, Rasmus Kleis, and Sarah Anne Ganter. 2017. “Dealing with Digital Intermediaries: A Case Study of the Relations between Publishers and Platforms.” New Media & Society, April. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444817701318.
This paper documents the asymmetrical power relationship between a large, well-known and successful news organization, and the digital platforms on which it now depends for audience reach. And it points to a gap in similar research on smaller, more precarious news organizations.
In this article, published in 2017 in the journal New Media & Society, Nielsen and Ganter report on a series of interviews with editors, senior management, and product developers at a large, well-established European news media organization regarding their experiences and perspective on relationships with the main digital platforms that are now central to news distribution, namely Facebook and Google. (I suspect it’s The Guardian, but for reasons of confidentiality don’t say.) They find a great deal of concern about dependency on these powerful corporate digital platforms, and an awareness of how they are restructuring the media environment in general and news media in particular. The respondents acknowledge short-term benefits of news distribution on digital platforms potentially reaching billions of people worldwide. But at a longer-term strategic level, they worry about their dependence on digital intermediaries owned by increasingly powerful and resource-rich technology corporations whose interests are their own profit and market dominance. They fear losing control of their own channels of communication and distribution, and the power to shape their own future as they adapt to the changing technologies and priorities of the platforms.
And yet the news organization in this case study has embraced Facebook and Google so as to take advantage of their global reach. They believe they must adapt to the requirements of the platforms for fear of losing out on the new digital news distribution model, regardless of dependencies and other liabilities. At the most basic level, “newsrooms increasingly work systematically with search engine optimization and social media optimization as part of wider audience engagement or growth teams” (p.2). In some cases the relationship with platforms is much deeper. The news org in the case study is among those chosen by Facebook and Google to work (somewhat) collaboratively, a privilege reserved for more successful and visible news organizations.
Platforms as digital intermediaries
Over the 20th century news organizations came to see themselves as independent institutions, fulfilling and safeguarding a public role in the information landscape. The authors don’t discuss issues that muddy this water, such as consolidation of ownership and a business model based on advertising revenue. But today news organizations are increasingly dependent for their audience reach on digital intermediaries. The authors note that if the most successful news organizations are losing control of distribution and advertising revenue, the situation is likely more precarious with smaller newsrooms.
The authors are attempting to fill a gap in previous research, which has largely focused on how journalists and news organizations adopt new technologies, the impact of technology on organizational structures, work practices, and professional values. Other scholars have focused on how news organizations and journalists shape the technologies and how they use them, in contrast with the field of “platform studies,” which looks at how they adapt to the broader transformation of the information environment in which they are situated. Or in the authors’ words, “how news media not only shape but are also shaped by broader technological developments” (p.5). Or more specifically with regard to the dominant digital platforms, “how news media organizations adapt to the rise of platforms that restructure the media environment by developing widely shared systems and services” (p.6).
The field of platform studies as described here presents a less optimistic view of claims that digital technologies, social media, and the internet are inherently emancipatory and democratizing:
“A range of scholars have begun to suggest we need to pay attention to the development of an environment of connected media with a few large and many small players and dominated by digital intermediaries that enable actions (and transactions between different third parties) at scale, but do so in self-interested ways” (p.6).
Giddens’ structuration theory and Latour’s actor-network theory seem well suited for this kind of analysis.
Notes on methods
The authors conducted semi-structured interviews with 13 mostly senior leaders in the case news organization, who occupy positions in editorial direction, product development, and strategy/management. They supplemented the interviews with off-record conversations and other primary and secondary sources.
While the authors promised anonymity to the respondents and the name of the organization, they found that “it has been difficult to get people to talk, let alone talk relatively openly, under these terms.” (p.7). The organization itself was a strategic choice because is large, successful, and recognized as a digital news leader. As a European organization, it operates in a political environment relatively friendly to independent news media. The authors acknowledge that the choice of this organization was strategic for the above reasons, but not representative, “and though we cannot generalize from a single case study in a statistical sense, our case study allows for logical generalization in that most news media organizations are likely to be less privileged in their dealings with digital intermediaries than the case organization we analyze here” (p.7).
Findings
The authors find that the people they interviewed are aware of a tension between short-term operational value in their relationship with Google and Facebook, and longer-term strategic liabilities from becoming too dependent on them and thus loosing control of their editorial identity and business model. Interestingly, they report that the operational view was led by the newsroom, which was eager to experiment and possibly reach a wider audience. But senior management also bought into the potential operational value, and aggressively pursued opportunities offered by the platforms.
It seems clear that they felt there was no other choice, “We start from the premise that we need to be on the platforms where our audiences are,” said one news executive, “and that we need to be available in the ways that our audiences want our news to be available” (p.8). In my experience collaborating on with many public media organizations on digital strategy, the phrase “we need to be where the audience is” became a kind of mantra.
In the case organization, the question wasn’t whether to engage with the platforms, but how to engage with them. This engagement led to unanticipated consequences: a reshaping of newsroom responsibilities and practices, and reallocation of the news organization’s resources. Engagement with Google and Facebook meant new forms of news work, such as the incorporate of analytics in the editorial process, and optimization of digital news products for search rank (SEO) and social media. Several interviewees expressed a fear of losing traffic and search ranking if they didn’t use Google’s proprietary Accelerated Mobile Pages format (AMP), and Facebook’s Instant Articles in their digital news publishing.
I have heard the same thing in conversations with other major news organizations during my work in public media and digital news. Senior digital managers and developers expressed great frustration about having to retool their systems to comply with these formats, and the fact that they were now dealing with proprietary and not open standards.
The respondents also expressed fear of the long-term consequences of investing in a relationship with the platforms, including “socializing users into accessing content via these channels” (p.9). They were also aware that the platforms operate on the basis of their own interests, which may be directly at odds with news organizations. One senior strategy executive put it succinctly:
“You are being asked to sign up to a platform potentially not only as a short term additional route to market, but in the long term as a competitor to what you’re doing yourself. And equally, again it’s an obvious point to make, but you are signing up with a competitor who has control over their own road map” (p.9).
FOMO
Decisions at both the operational and strategic level were made based on a fear of missing out, both at the level of business-to consumer and business-to-business. The platforms aggressively promoted themselves as collaborators who could help news organizations increase their reach, especially to younger audiences. But for their own reasons, the platforms choose to engage with only some news organizations. Presumably, they chose to develop a relationship with the case organization due to its size, visibility, and existing digital savvy.
The platforms played on the fear of missing out by claims like “it’s gonna be amazing, we can’t tell you exactly how or why. You want to be part of it and it would be very bad for you to not be part of it” (p.11). But evaluating the actual benefits was difficult to assess. SEO and social media clearly increased the case organization’s reach, but a lack of detailed data made it difficult to assess how much. While the platforms provide audience analytics, they keep much of the data for their own purposes, resulting in a sort of black box for the news organization. Respondents expressed much frustration with data provided by the platforms’ analytics. As one sne senior executive put it, “As an absolute minimal position we expect to be getting sufficient amounts of data back to be able to inform our business decisions. I think it’s fair to say we’re not getting that today” (p.12)
This adds to the asymmetry of informational power to the advantage of the platforms. The authors note that this is even more true for smaller news orgs who don’t have working relationship with the platforms. And that asymmetry also applies to individuals in the news audience, as the authors note:
“We are, as individual, ordinary users, increasingly transparent to and monitored by large technology companies that we rely on (Van Dijck, 2013). Importantly, these platforms are in turn opaque not only to us as individual users (Pasquale, 2015) but also to other powerful institutions, like publishers, that increasingly depend upon them. It is, says one senior strategy person, “incredibly hard to evaluate. … [We are] punching in the dark from a strategy point of view” (p.12).
Symbiosis vs Parasitism
One senior social media editor used the word “symbiosis” to describe their relationship with the platforms, as the news organization increases its reach, while the platforms get news content that increases their value to users and advertisers. But the platforms have come to dominate digital advertising, while the share of advertising revenue for news organizations has dwindled to a point where viability for many is in doubt.
The platforms may need news content, but can get it from just about any news source. “Digital intermediaries may need news in a broad sense, or at least benefit from it,” write the authors. “But it is not at all clear that they need any one individual news media organization, even large ones” (p.14). And they point out that while the relationship may seem symbiotic to some, asymmetry in power is clearly demonstrated by the answer to the question of which party acts, and which party reacts? “Even in the most open and collaborative cases, it is still the case that digital intermediaries act, leaving news media organizations to react” (p.14).
As the search and social media platforms have consolidated their reach to billions of people, the societal position of news organizations has changed in a fundamental way. The platforms set technical standards on terms news orgs have little choice but to accepts. A news organization has far less control over their distribution as they have come to increasingly depend on channels owned and run by dominant digital platforms. The “infrastruturalization” platforms by private, for-profit corporations has created an asymmetry of control over informational power and the means of mass communication.
A better word for this asymmetry is not symbiosis, but parasitism. And the authors note that this is as true for social movements and political campaigns as it is for news.
Call for more research on smaller
The authors of this paper focused on the relationships with Google and Facebook of a large, well-resourced, and digitally savvy news organization. But they note there is a dearth of similar research on others news organizations, especially smaller ones with fewer resources. This is a call worth answering.
Adventures in Information Science 