Facebook and Google care deeply about journalism’? Mapping audience-based monetization projects and the impact on journalistic practices and values
Date Issued
November 4, 2023
Author(s)
Abstract
Facebook and Google launches in 2017 and 2020, ‘Google News Initiative’ and ‘Facebook Journalism
Project’ respectively to provide cutting-edge tools to help journalists understand and connect with
their users, improve their products and power their technological infrastructure. This goes in line with
the strategy of ‘infrastructuralization’ applied by Google and Facebook to centralize international
flows and reinvent relationships between diverse publics (Plantin et.al., 2018). Along with this, news
organizations have been forced to reinvent the ways by adapting their editorial decisions, shaping
their forms in search of alternatives by which they can monetize their news stories through a ‘platform
native strategy’. Thus, technological platforms are seen as ‘digital intermediaries’ with specific
business models where data-power processes tackle the production, monetization and visibility of
journalistic content. While this is evident, publishers and news organizations might reinvigorate their
institutional practices and values to priorities and values of the platforms in a process of “institutional
isomorphism” (Caplan and Boyd, 2018). Whereas significant empirical and theoretical work has been
focused on the promises of technology on journalism per se, little is known about innovation projects
that take place within technological corporations and are vastly applied in news organisations. Thus,
little is known about human aspects of technological approaches in influencing journalistic identities.
This article combines the fields of digital journalism, affordance theory and critical data studies,
engaging in a sociotechnical analysis of ‘big techs projects’ to understand the material means by
which technological corporations strives to engage journalists vis-à-vis their business models. Empirically,
the study draws on two sets of projects (‘Google News Initiative’ and ‘Facebook Journalism
Project) to explore the following questions: what kind of ‘tools’ social media platforms provide journalists
to harmonize with established power structures and how these tools mediate the practices and
news values of journalists? Our aim, is to explore the ways by which ‘big techs’ attempt to engage
journalists and render corporate platforms more accessible to them?
Regarding the method of analysis, we proceeded in three steps. First, we studied all texts related to
the projects’ websites (descriptions, instructions of use, available tools, etc.) and other sources linked
to by their websites (e.g. media articles, commentaries, interviews) to get a sense of the projects’
philosophy. Second, to explore the affordances of each project, we performed a discursive interface
analysis of the selected cases. Stanfill (2015) explains how discursive interface analysis interprets the
assumptions built in websites and applications through the analysis of their affordances, to reveal
‘how norms for technologies and their users are produced and with what implications’ (p. 1059). Based
on the premise that ‘the interface of a computing technology is the manifestation of its implicit politics
and ideology’ (Sun and Hart-Davidson, 2014: 3534), affordances entail normative claims ‘about
what Users should do’ (Stanfill, 2015: 1062) in our case journalists. In this method, affordances are seen
as producing discourses, articulating ‘structural ideals that position particular behavior as “correct” or
“normal”’ thus ‘reflecting social logics and non-deterministically reinforcing them’ (Stanfill, 2015: 1060).
Third, we documented and analysed through thematic content analysis 620 ‘success’ stories of implementation
of different tools suggested by: a) Facebook Journalism project (e.g., Breaking News Label,
Facebook Watch, Crowd Tangle, Facebook Live) within newsrooms in Africa, Asia-Pacific, Europe, Latin
America and North America b) Google News Initiative project (e.g. Monetization, Storytelling, Distribution
and Management, Data and Infrastructure) within news rooms around the world. Preliminary
findings indicate that data literacies (data identification/data understandings/data uses) are a prerequisite
to practice journalism which in turn creates a sort of ‘datafied’ journalistic identities. Similarly,
journalists are paying attention to the actions and tools which are encouraged by ‘big tech’ affordances,
creating the impression that these tools are technological ‘fixes’ aiming to empower and
protect ‘journalists’ in their everyday practices, instead of promoting the quality of their news stories.
Project’ respectively to provide cutting-edge tools to help journalists understand and connect with
their users, improve their products and power their technological infrastructure. This goes in line with
the strategy of ‘infrastructuralization’ applied by Google and Facebook to centralize international
flows and reinvent relationships between diverse publics (Plantin et.al., 2018). Along with this, news
organizations have been forced to reinvent the ways by adapting their editorial decisions, shaping
their forms in search of alternatives by which they can monetize their news stories through a ‘platform
native strategy’. Thus, technological platforms are seen as ‘digital intermediaries’ with specific
business models where data-power processes tackle the production, monetization and visibility of
journalistic content. While this is evident, publishers and news organizations might reinvigorate their
institutional practices and values to priorities and values of the platforms in a process of “institutional
isomorphism” (Caplan and Boyd, 2018). Whereas significant empirical and theoretical work has been
focused on the promises of technology on journalism per se, little is known about innovation projects
that take place within technological corporations and are vastly applied in news organisations. Thus,
little is known about human aspects of technological approaches in influencing journalistic identities.
This article combines the fields of digital journalism, affordance theory and critical data studies,
engaging in a sociotechnical analysis of ‘big techs projects’ to understand the material means by
which technological corporations strives to engage journalists vis-à-vis their business models. Empirically,
the study draws on two sets of projects (‘Google News Initiative’ and ‘Facebook Journalism
Project) to explore the following questions: what kind of ‘tools’ social media platforms provide journalists
to harmonize with established power structures and how these tools mediate the practices and
news values of journalists? Our aim, is to explore the ways by which ‘big techs’ attempt to engage
journalists and render corporate platforms more accessible to them?
Regarding the method of analysis, we proceeded in three steps. First, we studied all texts related to
the projects’ websites (descriptions, instructions of use, available tools, etc.) and other sources linked
to by their websites (e.g. media articles, commentaries, interviews) to get a sense of the projects’
philosophy. Second, to explore the affordances of each project, we performed a discursive interface
analysis of the selected cases. Stanfill (2015) explains how discursive interface analysis interprets the
assumptions built in websites and applications through the analysis of their affordances, to reveal
‘how norms for technologies and their users are produced and with what implications’ (p. 1059). Based
on the premise that ‘the interface of a computing technology is the manifestation of its implicit politics
and ideology’ (Sun and Hart-Davidson, 2014: 3534), affordances entail normative claims ‘about
what Users should do’ (Stanfill, 2015: 1062) in our case journalists. In this method, affordances are seen
as producing discourses, articulating ‘structural ideals that position particular behavior as “correct” or
“normal”’ thus ‘reflecting social logics and non-deterministically reinforcing them’ (Stanfill, 2015: 1060).
Third, we documented and analysed through thematic content analysis 620 ‘success’ stories of implementation
of different tools suggested by: a) Facebook Journalism project (e.g., Breaking News Label,
Facebook Watch, Crowd Tangle, Facebook Live) within newsrooms in Africa, Asia-Pacific, Europe, Latin
America and North America b) Google News Initiative project (e.g. Monetization, Storytelling, Distribution
and Management, Data and Infrastructure) within news rooms around the world. Preliminary
findings indicate that data literacies (data identification/data understandings/data uses) are a prerequisite
to practice journalism which in turn creates a sort of ‘datafied’ journalistic identities. Similarly,
journalists are paying attention to the actions and tools which are encouraged by ‘big tech’ affordances,
creating the impression that these tools are technological ‘fixes’ aiming to empower and
protect ‘journalists’ in their everyday practices, instead of promoting the quality of their news stories.
File(s)![Thumbnail Image]()
Name
Papa.pdf
Size
32.7 KB
Format
Adobe PDF
Checksum (MD5)
f12cec04bcff31100b7e28100648cec8