Could digital platforms capture the media through infrastructure?

Abstract

This article examines the relationship between the news industry and digital platforms, most notably Facebook and Google, through a political economy framework. The theory of regulatory capture suggests that regulators are prone to become captured by the businesses they oversee, whether through financial incentives (such as money transfers and revolving doors) or cognitive/cultural influence (such as advocacy and shared values). The theory was further expanded to suggest that businesses also attempt to capture non-governmental institutions tasked with scrutinizing them, such as the media. This article suggests that Google and Facebook are rapidly expanding their potential capability to do so. Alongside the forms of capture described in the literature, the most crucial element in Google and Facebook’s relationships with news organizations is the fact that they have come to provide the majority of audience for online news and are significant sources of potential growth in viewership. In addition, they equip news organizations with tools for news production, provide them with data on the reach of stories, and offer tools for analytics and insight. All this potentially amounts to a new form of capture that can be called infrastructural capture: circumstances in which a scrutinizing body is incapable of operating sustainably without the physical or digital resources and services provided by the businesses it oversees and is therefore dependent on them. This new category of capture, rooted in the dynamics of contemporary digital news markets, could pose serious challenges to the ability of news organizations to scrutinize the corporations that direct most of the traffic to their sites. Aside from potentially affecting the content of news, another important effect of compromising infrastructural autonomy to non-journalistic third-party actors might be a weakening of the legal protections that journalism benefits from.

Keywords

Capture digital journalism Facebook Google infrastructural capture journalism media capture news platforms technology journalism

Can Silicon Valley save journalism? In recent years, hope was often expressed that digital platforms for publishing and distributing content – a new institution that largely assumed the control news organizations used to have over these functions – could offer a new path for journalism. It has been suggested that these platforms, including (but not limited to) Facebook, Google, Apple, Snapchat, Twitter, Instagram, and YouTube, could potentially help rehabilitate journalism by allocating funds, providing journalists and editors with sophisticated tools and capabilities, highlighting and promoting quality news content, and directing audiences to news they are likely to find relevant (Bell, 2017; Bindrim, 2016; Mullin, 2016; Schlosberg, 2016; Tucker, 2015).

Yet a vision of mutually beneficial collaboration between financially distressed news organizations and successful digital platforms, for which the dissemination of news is at best a secondary activity, should not overlook some sources of inevitable tension. In his work on digital platforms as ‘infomediaries’, Smyrnaios (2012) highlights the ‘coopetitive’ nature of this relationship, since publishers and platforms simultaneously cooperate in the distribution of content and compete for advertising revenue. Smyrnaios notes the concerns expressed by executives in news organizations over the need to optimize search engine performance, or tailor their product to algorithmic standards set by other institutions. To be distributed publishers also need to comply with the platforms’ editorial and legal policies; this potential source of tension was demonstrated in 2016, when Facebook was widely criticized after removing the iconic ‘Napalm girl’ news photograph due to nudity. This condition is of increasing importance, as publishers are regularly producing platform-native content for Facebook and other platforms.

All these constraints erode news publishers’ traditionally sacred sense of autonomy. According to a 2015 report on Google’s collaboration with European news outlets and trade organizations,

Talking to editors in a number of companies involved in the discussions (none of whom wanted to talk on the record) there is a sense of mildly suppressed panic about these deals: Almost no one wants to do them, but it is for many of them worse to not be involved in negotiations with the companies that now control the pathways to the audience. The principal attraction of agreeing to publish straight to Facebook is higher traffic, and potentially shared revenue. The drawbacks are higher degrees of dependency on systems over which publishers have no control and little insight. (Bell, 2015)

A year later, following interviews and conversations with more than 60 employees of news organizations and platform companies, Bell (2016b) concludes that ‘tech companies are now actively involved in every aspect of journalism … newsroom personnel at every level expressed anxiety about loss of control’. A sense that digital platforms have ‘seized control’ over the news is evident in some accounts by journalists (Greenberg, 2016; see also Carr, 2014; Greenslade, 2016; Herrman, 2015; Newitz, 2016; Shontell, 2015).

This article aims to posit another, rarely discussed, source of tension in this relationship and situate these infringements of press autonomy in a broader context of political economy. While third-party digital platforms are becoming increasingly pivotal in the production and distribution of news, news organizations are covering the powerful corporations that own and operate these platforms.

Given this structural tension, it could be useful to introduce into the conversation a concept that has been in use in the study of media for more than a decade and develop it to reflect a new type of challenge for journalism. The theory of capture and its uses in media research will be introduced, as well as other concepts in media scholarship that address the gamut of external influences on news content. Then I will examine how this framework can be useful when studying the relationship between news organizations, whose role (among others) is to scrutinize digital companies, and the companies on which they are becoming increasingly reliant.

Although digital platforms might have been proven less profitable partners for journalism than some had hoped (Chyi and Tenenboim, 2016; Digital Content Next, 2017), few would argue that this partnership carries no value for journalism. In addition to their ability to reach billions of people and offer faster downloading times, companies such as Google and Facebook can enrich reporting: They index an astonishing amount of human activity around the world in real time and provide insight into elements that are typically difficult to map and report, such as popular sentiment and social and professional networks (see Hamilton, 2016). Neither is it my intention to suggest that once journalists use Google or Facebook products, they become incapable of critically assessing the conduct of these companies.

However, the unique ways in which Google and Facebook are increasingly capable of influencing news merit examination. The extent of cooperation between news organizations and these non-journalistic platforms, to the point of potential symbiosis, is unprecedented. Media and journalism scholars should heed the fact that the news organizations covering some of the most powerful and valuable corporations in the world are gaining most of their readership from the platforms built and owned by these corporations, as well as increasingly important means of production and monetization. The historical case of Western Union, which operated the telegraph networks that became indispensable for American newsrooms and was consequently able to guarantee coverage that aligned with its business interests (John, 2010: 149), makes this discussion particularly acute.

To conceptualize this challenge, I suggest the term infrastructural capture, referring to situations in which an organization tasked with scrutinizing another organization, institution, business, or industry is incapable of operating sustainably without the resources or services they provide; or in other words, is infrastructurally dependent on them. This situation appears increasingly evident in digital journalism.

Journalism scholars are highly attuned to some kinds of pressures and influences on news organizations, particularly those coming from governments, proprietors, and advertisers. Contemporary developments in journalism create new dynamics of power and call for new conceptualizations thereof (Reese, 2016). Given the clout that digital platforms came to have in the news ecosystem, it is perhaps time to adapt existing political economy frameworks to discussions on new digital realities and their impact on autonomy. As journalism is losing control over its own infrastructure, it is important to examine who is gaining it, and what the implications might be.

This suggestion taps into the increasing attention in media scholarship to issues of infrastructure, platform, and distribution (Braun, 2015; Gillespie, 2010; Helmond, 2015; Lewis and Westlund, 2015). Scholz and Schneider (2017) particularly emphasize the role of platform ownership in business, social, and cultural dynamics, and Ananny (2011) highlights the importance of infrastructure in studying press autonomy. The concept of infrastructural capture could hopefully be a useful addition to this conversation, highlighting dynamics of power and influence between the organizations that produce digital news and the organizations that distribute it.

The theory of capture

The notion that regulation often serves interests other than the public good has long been familiar in political science and history (Novak, 2013) and was introduced to economics in 1971. In a seminal essay, Stigler argued that regulatory bodies tend to become ‘subservient’ to the interests they formally oversee, ‘acquired’ by the industry and ‘designed and operated primarily for its benefit’ (Stigler, 1971: 3; see also Peltzman, 1976). While this critique now seems obvious to many, at the time, it was iconoclastic: The prevalent theory in economics did not consider the possibility that those working to promote the public interest could have conflicting private agendas or unconscious biases (Dal Bó, 2006; Levine and Forrence, 1990).

Research on regulatory capture indicates that private interests can gain influence on legislators and administrators, to the point of capture, by various means. Stigler emphasized what we now understand as the rawest form of capture – direct transfer of money. Materialist capture takes place when regulators benefit financially from the businesses or industries they oversee, for instance through campaign contributions, perks, gifts, or other forms of payment. A more tacit form of material gain is establishing a norm of revolving doors between regulatory agencies and the businesses they supervise. When an industry regularly offers better-paying positions to the people who regulate it, this incentivizes supervisors to be industry-friendly, as their good will could be generously rewarded.

Later contributions highlighted more nuanced forms of capture, sometimes called cultural or cognitive capture (Bagley, 2010; Kwak, 2013; Starkman, 2014). These types of capture do not manifest themselves in coopting regulators with actual or implied financial rewards. Instead, they refer to regulators adopting the mindset and point of view of those they oversee, to the point of becoming convinced that the public interest is identical to the interest of the industry. Interest in non-material capture increased following the financial crisis of 2008, after the extent to which financial regulators shared a worldview with the financial industry was revealed.

This type of capture too can be cultivated through two channels, explicit and implicit. The first entails formal advocacy, persuasion, and public relations efforts, comprising various initiatives to present the company’s worldview and make the case that its adoption by regulators would benefit the market as a whole. The second channel is that of informal relationships and non-rational influences (Kwak, 2013). Some regulators had previously worked in the industry they supervise, and they might retain their social and industry contacts; others are courted by interested parties. Of course, even if both regulators and the people whose actions they regulate belong to the same social circles, capture does not necessarily emerge. But as Kwak (2013) points out, there is a plethora of evidence that people tend to adopt the positions of those with whom they have relationships. One scholar argued that even the abstract threat of being complained about suffices to generate more lenient regulation (Hilton, 1972).

Cognitive biases are clearly difficult to monitor, and there is always the chance that regulators are genuinely convinced that policies with positive outcomes for businesses are also beneficial to the public (Kwak, 2013). Yet the fact that ideas, beliefs, and value judgments tend to spread through social networks demonstrates the importance of remaining alert to the risk that journalists will become overly influenced by the industries and the people they are covering. In this context, it is noteworthy that the metaphor Bell (2015) uses is an ‘overall adjustment in body language between Silicon Valley and news publishers’.

Media capture and other dynamics of influence on news content

Since it was first identified, scholars attempted to broaden the framework of regulatory capture to include additional actors and mechanisms. The propensity and capability of powerful businesses to capture institutions whose formal role is to oversee or critique them was argued to manifest itself through an array of dynamics – both explicit and implicit – and contexts, some purely economic or governmental and others more broadly defined. Some suggested that capture can go beyond government functions to include the media and academia (Hanson and Yosifon, 2003; Zingales, 2013). Much attention has also been paid to how governments themselves attempt to capture the news organizations whose role it is to scrutinize them (Besley and Prat, 2006; McMillan and Zoido, 2004; Prat and Strömberg, 2012).

These developments require theoretical flexibility, since the media is not a regulatory arm per se. Its mandate for oversight is much broader, potentially covering all types of institutions and every kind of practice deemed problematic. Yet it has no legal or executive authority, and it is not endowed with the power to implement any sanctions. Still, the similarities between the regulatory role of government and the watchdog role of journalism (Coronel, 2009; Dyck and Zingales, 2002; Miller, 2006) merit the expansion of the theory of capture to media and other fields where similar oversight takes place.

Moreover, media scholarship recognizes a vast array of potential influences on news content (Shoemaker and Reese, 2014), with many studies suggesting concepts that are strikingly reminiscent of capture – albeit phrased in different terms. Numerous scholars noted that even in developed democracies, the media is at risk of becoming subservient to the interests, companies, people, or industries it covers. Herman and Chomsky (1988) suggest five ‘filters’ that shape newswork and could prevent media from fulfilling its watchdog role: profit-seeking by owners, dependency on advertisers, dependency on sources, public pressure, and internalized ideology. All these concepts, echoed in later works on media failures, can be reframed as forms of material or non-material capture (see Baron, 2006; Hamilton, 2004; McChesney, 2008; Miller and Harkins, 2010).

Numerous studies demonstrate the disproportionate influence that sources can have on news selection and framing (Berkowitz and TerKeurst, 1999; Carlson, 2009), especially if they have an elite status (Bennett, 1990; Gans, 1979; Hallin, 1986; Tuchman, 1978). This dynamic, often referred to as access journalism, is described as generating capture (Schiffrin, 2010; Starkman, 2014). This critique highlights another element in the theory of capture, the problem of collective action, suggesting that small groups of powerful players typically acquire excessive influence on regulation (see also Olson, 1965). Access journalism likewise skews coverage toward the interests and concerns of elite groups, while the general public has little incentive, or ability, to guarantee that public interests are prioritized.

Other literature describes the modes in which the private sector can capture media by material means. Corneo (2006) suggests that a ‘multiplicity of private agents … may capture the media’ and

may eventually bribe the media to get their preferred messages transmitted …. Examples range from highly remunerated speaking engagements of anchormen and journalists before associations and corporations, provision of cushy jobs with industry, and private invitations to breathe the special air of the upper upperclass. (Corneo, 2006: 38–39)

Petrova (2008) lists the following as potential mechanisms for capturing media: ‘investment in media firms, political advertising and paid articles, subsidies, and bribes’ (p. 121).

These sensibilities, which previously might have been considered radical, became more widely acknowledged in recent years. A significant catalyst for this change was the financial crisis of 2008 and subsequent questions on how the financial media could have missed ‘the story of the century’ (Schiffrin, 2010). The answer, for some, was that it had become a tool for the interests it was supposed to scrutinize, whether through material benefits or more subtle ones. Business journalists ‘can, and usually do, spend their entire careers in the subculture … intellectual capture becomes an occupational hazard’ (Starkman, 2014: 43). Schiffrin (2015) examines the idea that ‘ideological “capture” impedes the ability of the press to be an effective check’ (p. 642) and finds that scholars and critics referred to business coverage in terms such as ‘cognitive capture’, ‘embedded’, and ‘Stockholm Syndrome’.

Capture and digital platforms

The problem of capture is now worth discussing in a new context: the relationship between prominent digital platforms and news organizations. This discussion will focus on the two largest and most influential digital platforms, Google and Facebook, whose degree and quality of potential influence on the news industry arguably come close to a new form of capture.

News organizations are heavily invested in increasing referrals to their content through Google and Google News, and many of them rely on Google for analytics and data on readership. News organizations collaborate with Google in an array of funding and innovation initiatives, such as the Google News Lab and Google Digital News Initiative. Many news outlets consult tools that analyze content indexed by Google, such as Google Trends, in their reporting. Many also use Google-powered technical tools such as Accelerated Mobile Pages, a service that shortens downloading times for news stories on mobile devices. Several news organizations reportedly contracted Google to manage their internal email services (Wagstaff, 2014).

Similarly, news outlets are pressed to generate maximal exposure and referral to their stories through Facebook. Data on the performance of news stories on Facebook are owned by Facebook, and the company offers news organizations tools for analysis and promotion, such as Page Insights and Audience Optimization. Facebook also offers publishers tools for reporting on content posted on Facebook. In the last 3 years, dozens of prominent news organizations partnered with Facebook in creating joint formats for news, such as Instant Articles and Facebook Live.

For news outlets, third-party digital platforms such as Facebook and Google provide a varied set of tools and capabilities. But most importantly, at present they provide the majority of eyeballs, and consequently, of digital advertising revenue. Performance on digital platforms is key for the success of news stories, and expanding reach through these platforms is considered the most effective way to cultivate new audiences.

For the platforms too, there are good reasons to deepen the relationship with news organizations. News are a free – and prominent – source of content and engagement on digital platforms. The partnership is beneficial in terms of reputation as well. Facebook was severely criticized in 2016 for its moderation standards and practices, as it was accused of repressing news stories from conservative publications (Nunez, 2016) and allowing the spread of ‘fake news’ around the Presidential election (Solon, 2016). Shortly thereafter, Facebook announced it will further expand its dialog and partnerships with news organizations.

As digital platforms become powerhouses of news distribution and production, their influence on news organizations is a topic of growing interest. The literature increasingly reflects an understanding that the relationships news organizations have with Facebook and Google are fundamentally different than those they have with other institutions and are shaping into unique codependency.

The majority of the modes of capture described above are evident in this case. On the material side, companies such as Google and Facebook make direct financial transfers to the news industry. Google’s efforts are especially keen in Europe, where the company is facing several antitrust charges. The Google Digital News Initiative announced it will give €150 million (nearly US$200 million) in Europe to projects which, according to the Initiative’s website, ‘demonstrate new thinking in the practice of digital journalism’. In two rounds so far, Google invested US$64 million in 252 projects across the continent. In Europe, the United States, and other countries, Google sponsors journalism fellowships and grants to news organizations. In some cases, digital platforms pay news organizations to use their formats or products (Bell, 2016b; LaFrance, 2016; Spayd, 2016); and they regularly share advertising revenue with them. Digital platforms regularly hire journalists, most notably to positions that include interaction with news organizations (like management of news products and public relations), and journalists reported that the public relations arms of technology companies often offer them expensive gifts (LaFrance, 2016).

Mechanisms of cognitive and cultural capture are evident in this relationship as well: Google and Facebook pay considerable attention to advocacy and public relations efforts directed at the news industry and regularly hold conventions, talks, seminars, and training sessions. The importance of access and relationships is evident in the technology beat too (Foremski, 2012; LaFrance, 2016). Technology reporting

presents one of the most profound accountability challenges in modern journalism … some of the world’s most powerful companies end up dictating a startling degree of coverage about them – because reporters often rely solely on information released by those companies. (LaFrance, 2016)

Most of these are fairly traditional modes of establishing influence over media and do not necessarily guarantee capture. The development of tools for journalism, however, poses a unique problem. In recent years, digital platforms have been developing and promoting tools aimed at helping news organizations both generate news and create platform-specific content. These could, perhaps, represent new breaches of journalistic autonomy. To suggest a thought experiment, it is as though Goldman Sachs were to provide training sessions to workers of the Securities and Exchange Commission.

In 2011, Facebook developed the Frictionless Sharing and Open Graph and partnered with news sites to implement them, enabling users to view the activity of their Facebook contacts on the news sites they visit and share stories on Facebook directly from news sites. Since then, the prominent social platforms have been constantly releasing new tools for distribution, production, and analytics of journalism. For example, both Facebook and YouTube created a Newswire service to assist journalists discover newsworthy content on their platforms; Google tailored many of its existing products to make them more friendly to newsrooms, in cooperation with several news organizations; and Facebook developed Insights, allowing news organizations to analyze how their content is performing on Facebook and potentially learn how to optimize it for Facebook

Both Facebook and Google offer online training for journalists on designated minisites, Google News Lab and Facebook Media. The trainings consist of various tutorials and courses, as well as introductions to tools that news producers are encouraged to use to integrate data available on these platforms into stories. According to Facebook Media’s homepage, courses ‘focus on the three core pillars of the news cycle: discovering content, creating stories, and building an audience’. Alongside general classes on ‘engaging storytelling’ and how to ‘best utilize Facebook and Instagram’, the platform offers tips for beat reporters.

Facebook’s most recent news-related initiative, the Facebook Journalism Project, aims to foster ‘an even deeper collaboration with news organizations across the spectrum’ (Simo, 2016). According to Facebook, the company will broaden its role as an intermediary between news and readers; ‘Our longer-term goal is to support news organizations with projects and ideas aimed at improving news literacy, including financial grants where needed’ (Simo, 2016). Facebook announced it will enhance collaborations with news organizations, develop additional journalism tools and products, and bolster its training operation by launching ‘a certificate curriculum for journalists’ and newsroom training (in cooperation with various nonprofit organizations).

Facebook also said that it wants to start helping news organizations create sustainable business models and announced it is already testing the possibility of offering newspaper subscriptions ‘right from within Instant Articles’ (Simo, 2016). In other words, Facebook is experimenting with mediating not only between news organizations and casual readers but also between news organizations and their subscribers.

Google News Lab likewise offers tutorials on various journalism tools and programs developed by Google, alongside information on journalism awards granted by the company. According to the ‘about’ page,

We created the News Lab to support the creation and distribution of… quality journalism. Today’s news organizations and media entrepreneurs are inventing new ways to discover, create and distribute news content – and we’re here to provide tools, data, and programs designed to help.

The site presents examples of prominent news outlets that utilized Google Trends in their reporting; in some cases, Google collaborated directly with newsrooms in creating data to complement their reporting.

In addition to online training, Google partnered in the United States with the Society of Professional Journalists to provide in-person training on Google tools in newsrooms. In the first year since the program launched in 2015, more than 4000 US journalists – roughly 10 percent of the national workforce – participated in these training sessions.¹ Google offers newsroom training in Europe as well, through training partnerships with various trade organizations.

Digital platforms are clearly interested in positioning themselves as primary, if not eventually indispensable, resources for newswork. And yet, the tools mentioned above have not yet become dominant. News organizations still rely mostly on traditional tools, such as tips, interviews, press releases, financial reports, documents, and academic studies when covering Facebook and Google (as well as other topics). There is one thing, however, that Google and Facebook (and other platforms) provide news organizations with, which they simply cannot exist without: audience.

Facebook and Google’s increasing control on the distribution of digital content makes it very difficult for news organizations to disseminate their product effectively, reach consumers, and produce revenue without Google and Facebook’s mediation. While in 2013 Siapera characterized the relationship between digital platforms and news organizations as ‘parasitic’, arguing that content mediators such as Google and Facebook extract value from the work of news organizations (Siapera, 2013: 17), the increasing reliance of news sites on services provided by these multibillion dollar global corporations – the supply of traffic and analytics being the primary ones – rendered it closer to symbiosis.

The strengthening hold that digital platforms have on the news industry largely stems from the hold they have over the audience. Even if news organizations retain sovereignty over their platforms and tools, most of their readership is now generated through platforms such as Google and Facebook. Different studies quote different figures regarding the share of traffic to news sites that originates from referrals on search engines and social media. Reports from 2011 to 2015 indicate that by now, roughly one-third of the traffic to news sites originates from queries on search engines (primarily Google), and roughly another third from social media (primarily Facebook; DeMers, 2015; Ingram, 2015; Newman, 2012; Olmstead et al., 2011). Two-thirds of Facebook users in 2016 used it to consume news, compared with 47 percent in 2014. 62 percent of those consuming news through Facebook did not look for news specifically (Pew Research Center, 2016).

I suggest, therefore, that a new kind of potential capture is evident in this case. It can be defined as infrastructural capture: circumstances in which an overseeing institution becomes incapable of operating sustainably without the physical or digital resources provided by the organizations it formally oversees. Returning to the Goldman Sachs metaphor, this would be as if the bank held the keys to the offices of the Securities and Exchange Commission. This potential capture could impact the coverage of digital companies directly, news production more broadly (driving it to comply with the logics, norms, or business strategies of external platforms), or both.

While numerous works examine the expanding role of social media platforms in news production (Belair-Gagnon et al., 2014; Cozma and Chen, 2013; Hermida, 2013; Paulussen and Harder, 2014; Sherwood and Nicholson, 2013; Vis, 2013), others focus on the emergence of an unparalleled role for them in news distribution. Digital ‘intermediaries’ were conceptualized as ‘new gatekeepers who may, deliberately or otherwise, control or constrain access to news, or affect its commercial viability… They are increasingly important for the distribution of and monetisation of news in the digital world’ (Foster, 2012: 15). The new media ecosystem alters and emphasizes

the process of information distribution, over and above the processes of production and consumption … instead of a democracy of distribution, what we actually have is an increased concentration of distributive power in the hands of a select group of platforms, which operate with their own logic. (Siapera, 2013: 2)

‘News organizations and social platforms are rapidly moving towards each other, mutually articulating each other’s strategies and activities in the news process’ (Poell and Van Dijck 2014: 188).

Since 2013, in accordance with the increasing clout of digital platforms within the news sphere, the language used to describe their influence has been growing more critical:

Powerful companies like Facebook and Google are major distributors of journalistic work, meaning newsrooms increasingly rely on tech giants to reach readers … Facebook, in particular, is also prompting major newsrooms to adjust their editorial and commercial strategies, including initiatives to broadcast live video to the social media site in exchange for payment. (LaFrance, 2016)

Bell (2016a) argues that Facebook is ‘swallowing’ the news industry and predicts that not before long, ‘posting journalism directly to Facebook or other platforms will become the rule rather than the exception’. According to Bell (2016a),

news publishers have lost control over distribution … the inevitable outcome of this is the increase in power of social media companies. The largest of the platform and social media companies, Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon, and even second order companies such as Twitter, Snapchat and emerging messaging app companies, have become extremely powerful in terms of controlling who publishes what to whom, and how that publication is monetized.

Utilizing external platforms to enable reporting, news production and news distribution are not new phenomena. From their early days, newspapers came to rely on products and platforms created by other institutions: the telephone and telegraph for communications, computers for news production, and postal services for distribution. The companies that assisted news organizations in these tasks were of considerable political and financial power as well, and many of them were recognized as monopolies.

Yet there are important differences between these traditional intermediaries and Google and Facebook. Facebook and Google are directly competing with news organizations for advertising revenue. In addition, they are designed to surveil the data that are managed on their platforms in real time. But most importantly, for the first time, different stages in the lifecycle of news are managed by the same third-party intermediary. Facebook and Google now influence all three stages of news production: internal and external communications, tools and platforms for crafting stories, and platforms for news distribution. A typical news story can start with a conversation on an Android phone and consultation on Gmail, be written on a Google doc, and include statistics and insights provided by Facebook- and Google-powered tools. It will then be packaged to optimize performance on Facebook and Google, and perhaps published as an Instant Article or on Accelerated Mobile Pages. Most of the readers will be referred to the story by Facebook and Google. They could engage with the story on Facebook, and their comments will possibly receive a response from the publisher there. The reach and impact of the story will then be analyzed using Google- and Facebook-powered tools, and the conclusions will likely influence the reporting, crafting, and packaging of future stories.

Discussion

The increasing infrastructural dependency of the news industry on digital platforms such as Facebook and Google poses a challenge to the news organizations covering these corporations. It is difficult to see how news organizations could avoid potential conditions of infrastructural capture in the contemporary digital news market. And while materialist, cognitive, and cultural forms of capture can be resisted by the individuals leading organizations or working for them, infrastructural dependency is uniquely difficult to surmount.

Another problematic aspect of the forming symbiosis between digital platforms and news organizations gained attention during the 2016 Presidential elections. The new separation between news production and distribution, and the migration of news distribution to third-party platforms, enabled producers of false information (fake news) to make their product formally and functionally indistinguishable from professional journalism. These mechanisms of distribution were not those of professional journalism organizations, and so, they were not able to moderate information as professional journalism does. The remedy suggested by Facebook after the election, the Facebook Journalism Project, further intensifies its ties with the news industry. This framework could potentially mitigate the spread of hoaxes while leaving other concerns related to the dominance of platforms in news distribution unresolved.

One other potential risk is that dependence on third-party platforms exposes news organizations and journalists to corporate and government surveillance of their work, which could pose problems for them and their sources. This risk is not unique to digital platforms: In 2015, Vodafone Australia admitted to hacking the phone of a reporter, herself a customer of the company, who published a negative story on Vodafone, in attempt to identify her source (Doherty, 2015). Facebook and Google, however, cannot be replaced with a competing vendor, and encryption is not always available on the proprietary platforms that are becoming increasingly pivotal in journalism. As news organizations and journalists cede control over parts of their work to third-party platforms, their ability to keep their communications and their work confidential is diminished.

News executives continue to expand their partnerships with digital platforms, hoping that a possible future for news could lie in broadening reach through social media. These companies offer innovative products that open up new markets for journalism, but in exchange for such opportunities, news outlets gradually relinquish the ownership and distribution of their product. The terminology suggested here could contribute to a critical conversation on this trade off. Scholars interested in infrastructural capture could measure the extent of influence on news content, if any, and examine attitudes toward this transition among creative, business and technological workers in news organizations and in platforms. There is also room for further theoretical work, revisiting classical theories of press autonomy in light of new conditions of infrastructural dependency.

The potential for infrastructural capture could serve as an argument for supporting news organizations in building their own tools and formats, enabling them to maintain their important historical achievements: editorial, financial, legal, and operational independence. Infrastructural independence would empower news outlets to truly scrutinize organizations of considerable global power. The tools and pipelines designed by these very organizations are not very likely to assist them in doing so.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank Anya Schiffrin, Seth C. Lewis, Richard R. John, James T. Hamilton, and two anonymous readers.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Notes

Author biography

Efrat Nechushtai is a PhD student in communications at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. She is a former journalist.

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