Parasitic Platforms and the Crisis in News

The boarded-up building of the McKeesport Daily News near Philadelphia

The viability of news has been in rapid decline since the mid-2000s. This post presents a critical analysis of how news publishers themselves helped precipitate the crisis by enthusiastically adopting Big Tech platform technologies and audience-building strategies. I show how search and social media platforms disrupted publishers’ relationships with audiences and advertisers by appropriating control over news distribution and revenue. I use Anthony Giddens’ structuration theory and Bruno Latour’s actor-network theory to explore the restructuring of the news industry by the sociotechnical practices and surveillance economics of today’s dominating platforms. Leveraging Michel Serres’ discourse on social parasitism, I present a research framework for assessing symbiotic and parasitic relationships in sociotechnical systems using historical, quantitative, and qualitative methods, and to identify where news publishers still have agency to begin resolving the crisis. And I suggest the urgency of this research framework as publishers rapidly adopt new AI technologies.

The Application of Artificial Intelligence to Journalism: An Analysis of Academic Production – Annotation & Notes

This paper presents a summary of academic research on AI use in journalism, based on the authors’ review of 358 texts published between 2010 and January 2021. The materials they reviewed were found through academic databases including Scopus and Web of Science, in addition to Google Scholar. Most of the articles were published in English, and the majority was from the United States. Given significant developments with AI, and AI in journalism, since 2021, this paper is really a snapshot of research published for the period covered. The authors do note a rapid increase in research until 2019, with a dropoff in 2020 presumably from disruptions of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Reshaping the public radio newsroom for the digital future, by Nikki Usher – Annotation

Published in 2012 based on field research conducted by Nikki Usher from 2008 to 2010, this paper presents an account of NPR’s response to a rapidly changing digital media environment. As audiences increasingly looked to the web for news, management at NPR understood a need for fundamental change in its operations and identity, from an organization focused entirely on news production for radio broadcast, to a digital media company producing multimedia for online distribution along with traditional NPR broadcast content.

Newsrooms and the Disruption of the Internet: A Short History of Disruptive Technologies, 1990–2010 – Annotation & Notes

A view of news on a computer, a tablet, and a smart phone

This book is a detailed account of how news organizations in the U.S. and U.K responded to society-wide changes brought by internet technologies and the World Wide Web. The account is informative in many ways, recounting key events year-by-year and the discourse by news professionals and executives. Not surprisingly, the gist is that they couldn’t predict the future, responded the best they could, got some things right and some things wrong.

Going Web-First at The Christian Science Monitor: A Three-Part Study of Change, by Nikki Usher – Annotation & Notes

In 2009 the Christian Science Monitor was among the daily newspapers ceasing print publication in favor of web-only distribution. This paper presents ethnographic research on that transition by former journalist and current associate professor of Communication Studies at the University of San Diego Nikki Usher. Usher observed editorial operations and interviewed news staff at the Monitor during three periods between February 2009 and February 2010: before the transition to web-only, after the transition but before adopting a new content management system, and after CMS implementation. Their goal was to understand the meaning of the change to Monitor’s journalists and its impact on their organizational and journalistic values.

The Future Of News and How To Stop It

A crowd around a newspaper with headline that says fake news

Today we have an abundance of information resources undreamed of in past centuries, but are exposed via the Internet to more disinformation than any previous generation. Digital media technologies are being massively leveraged to spread propagandistic messages designed to undermine trust in all forms of information, and to stimulate strongly affective responses and an entrenchment of political, cultural, and social divisions. The critical demands of the digital age have outpaced development of a corresponding information literacy. Meanwhile journalists are accused by authoritarian leaders of being “enemies of the people” while facing layoffs from newsrooms no longer supported by a sustainable business model. Short of reinvention, professional journalism will be increasingly endangered and the relevance of news organizations will continue to decline. In this paper I propose a new collaborative model for news production and curation combining the expertise of librarians, journalists, educators, and technologists, with the objectives of addressing today’s information literacy deficit, bolstering the credibility and verifiability of news, and restoring reasoned deliberation in the public sphere.