by Kate Warren
To what extent can academics and the tech industry work together to build tools that might actually enable smaller publishers to use technology? They cannot afford to pay for enterprise solutions. But through skill training and targeted innovation, we might be able to help them.
The idea that news publishers are solely “dependent” on Big Tech is only half the story. According to James Meese, the relationship is far more incestuous.
“If platforms are the dominant companies… it would make sense that news companies would start to adopt their logic,” he said.
Meese, an associate professor at RMIT University in Melbourne and Faculty Associate at the Public Tech Media Lab, co-authored the paper “The Press as Platform: Institutional Isomorphism and the Strategic Adoption of Platform Logics” with Theresa J. Seipp (University of Amsterdam, PTML). There, they argue that we are witnessing a shift toward “institutional isomorphism,” where newsrooms aren’t just using social media platforms for news distribution. They are mimicking the structures of companies like Uber and Amazon.
From newsrooms locking content behind paywalls and logins to media publishers turning into gaming platforms, Meese argues that newsrooms are actively trying to become the platform they view as their rivals.
But as Meese points out, when a news publisher starts acting like a tech giant, it risks leaving the “news” part of the equation behind.
This conversation has been edited for clarity and concision.
Q. For years, the narrative has been that news publishers are “dependent” on platforms like Facebook and Google for traffic. Your paper argues that the relationship has shifted to something called “institutional isomorphism.” The idea that these news publishers are copying, as you said, their “leading peers”. Can you explain what that means in this context and why you believe publishers are now mimicking the companies they view as rivals?
A. Business theory is the idea that companies and institutions operate in this space, where they don’t just make decisions independently. They look at their competitors and consider what leading competitors in that space are doing.
To some degree, we know that Facebook and Google at one point were these key intermediaries for news traffic. What we’re seeing increasingly is what lots of people have called the “platformization of the news.” But we wanted to take that a little bit further. We said: What if platforms and the news media are operating in a similar space?
If you look at the dominant companies today, not just Facebook and Google, but everything from Amazon to Uber to ChatGPT, they all operate as platforms. It makes sense that news companies would start to adopt that same logic to replicate that success.
We see this happening now: Publishers are collecting more data and asking for logins, doing all the kinds of things that the platforms we’re familiar with do.
The New York Times is the most laudable example of a company getting it right. When you go to their site, you can do everything: read sports, read the news, or play games. In some sense, this is not a surprise because the newspaper was the “original” platform. In the past, you used the paper to check shipping reports, the weather, or the news. So, what we are seeing now is just a transformation of that concept into a modern digital environment.
Q. You mention that adopting these platform strategies, like advanced personalization and data collection, is expensive. If becoming ‘isomorphic’ with platforms is the only way to survive, what happens to smaller local newsrooms that can’t afford these expensive AI tools?
A. Well, it’s not the only way to survive; it’s a strategic one that these companies have made. Obviously, we’re seeing that small newsrooms just don’t have the capacity, don’t have literacy, and don’t have the skills to invest in this same way.
For a long time, we’ve seen a clear divide. On one side, you have international newsrooms like The New York Times and major publishers. On the other hand, you have much smaller regional and local papers, particularly in the United States, where there is a strong culture of local news. Unfortunately, that sector is struggling so much that scholars have started identifying those areas as “news deserts.”
To what extent can academics and the tech industry work together to build tools that might actually enable smaller publishers to use technology? They cannot afford to pay for enterprise solutions. But through skill training and targeted innovation, we might be able to help them.
Q. Do you worry that in trying to disentangle themselves from Facebook and Google, newsrooms are inadvertently changing their own DNA? At what point does a newspaper stop being a publisher and start just being a “tech company that sells news”?
In some sense, I think it’s never going to be that way. There is a strong culture in newsrooms of continuing to do news. They are not interested in business, surprisingly. They are interested in political power, in shaping conversations.
I think this is kind of a problem, though, because in a way, newsrooms don’t realize they’re becoming tech companies. Every news company that rails against Big Tech and privacy is also sitting on its own store of data. You are engaged in the same practice. It’s not to accuse newsrooms, but a provocation to suggest that you might be closer [to them] than you think.
Q. You are noting that “platform logic” is expensive. Adopting these platform logics requires expensive technology that only the biggest “winners” can afford. Does this model kill off small/local journalism?
One reason that they’re not adopting this is partly because that’s not their job. Their job is to report on who won the sports day in the local community or what happened in the local races.
In a sense, their loss is really not about the fact that they don’t have a full-stack subscription platform. It’s that they lack some of those efficiencies which are really important for a local newsroom, like maybe doing AI transcription in another language. The extent to which they can enable that becomes really challenging.
The survival of local news is under threat. It’s not a good time. But I think that the only benefit of that is that people are starting to realize that in a really pressing way.
In our country, Australia, there have been really strategic moves from the government to direct advertising to local and regional news. Because they recognized that the government’s advertising is basically subsidizing these newspapers. So if there’s an ad for a CEO, they’re going to advertise in all of these regional outposts, because that brings in revenue.
It’s clearly on the agenda of at least some governments globally that there needs to be some sort of subsidy or some sort of long-term support for local and regional news.
Q. We’ve talked about all the risks: copying the platforms, losing our data, and leaving local news behind. If you could change one thing about how newsrooms are currently using technology, what would it be?
I think the challenge that has not yet been resolved is the integration of technology into the newsroom in a way that’s not an add-on…
We’ve seen since the birth of the internet that it [technology] wasn’t taken seriously by the newsroom. Newsrooms and journalism still treat technology and the internet as something of an interloper. And there’s still that integration piece to happen, and a lot of that might even come down to how the newsroom itself is organized.
The sector’s quite reactionary towards technology, but to some degree, journalism might be the most amenable in some respects. We saw the introduction of radio, and we saw the introduction of television in the 1950s. News and journalism survived all that, so there’s no reason why they shouldn’t survive another era.