RECLAIMING DIGITAL INFRASTRUCTURES FOR JOURNALISM
Ownership, Dependency, and Public Interest Alternatives
Pre-conference to the ECREA Journalism Studies Section 2027
April 21, 2026 – University of National and World Economy
Conference Topic
This pre-conference asks how journalism can imagine, and more importantly, realize alternatives to the infrastructural dependencies that shape news in platform societies (van Dijck et al., 2018). Over the past 5+ years, research has made it very clear how news organizations increasingly depend on external digital platforms, cloud services, recommender systems, audience analytics, artificial intelligence tools, content moderation systems, and other infrastructures that condition how journalism is produced, distributed, measured, and governed (Dodds et al., 2023). As platform-based services acquire characteristics of infrastructure, these infrastructures enable and constrain communication, expression, and media freedom (Plantin et al., 2018). For journalism, therefore, the crises of trust, value, legitimacy, and authority are increasingly also a question of the technologies and infrastructures journalism uses.
There are many important reasons why journalism needs to make more conscious technology choices: platforms, chatbots, LLMs, and virtual assistants are more than simple channels through which journalism circulates. They reorganize information flows and distribution, and re-invent what news consumption could be tomorrow. Many of these technologies perform increasingly media-like functions but evade the regulatory and ethical frameworks historically developed for journalism and news institutions (Napoli, 2019). They come with their own values, which do not necessarily align with those of journalism.
Infrastructural questions are also questions of power, ownership, and data justice. From a decolonial and Global South perspective, data assemblages and extractive practices that power platforms and LLMs can amplify historical forms of colonization, and there is an urgent need to identify ways of resisting data and infrastructural colonization and to imagine alternative epistemologies respectful of the populations, cultural diversity, environments, and their rights and values (Ricaurte, 2019). For journalism, reclaiming and repurposing infrastructures is inherently tangled with issues of data sovereignty, technological self-determination, unequal capacity, and the political economy of global platforms. These technological choices that media organizations make today, or will make tomorrow, affect the quality, fairness, and value of the public information ecosystem. They challenge news organizations to expand journalism’s ethical horizon to include the responsible selection of recommender systems, virtual agents, AI assistants, cloud services, social networks, and generative AI tools (Helberger, 2026). The problem and urgency are clear. Now we need to act!
Conference
The purpose of this pre-conference is to move from diagnosis to action. We invite scholars, practitioners, technologists, policy specialists, journalists, and civil society actors to examine how journalism can reclaim, repurpose, redesign, or build digital infrastructures in the public interest. What are digital infrastructures in the public interest, and when exactly are technological dependencies problematic? How can journalism reduce dependency on privately owned platforms? What would open-source, federated, cooperative, nonprofit, public, or commons-based infrastructures for journalism look like (Scholz, 2016)? How can regulation and policy support media freedom, editorial autonomy, and democratic accountability? What can public-interest technology labs, including initiatives such as the Public Tech Media Lab, newsroom-centered AI projects, and open-source investigative tools, contribute to this effort?
Because reclaiming digital infrastructures cannot be addressed by academic research alone, the pre-conference is conceived as a space of encounters across academia, policy, media, civil society, and activism. It fosters dialogue among scholars, practitioners, and those who build, govern, fund, or resist digital journalism infrastructures. In addition to practitioners, we especially encourage submissions from PhD students, early-career researchers, and members of the YECREA network.
Proposed Topics:
- Mapping infrastructural dependency in journalism: How to make visible the way platforms, cloud services, APIs, recommender systems, generative AI tools, metrics, and content moderation systems shape news production, circulation, visibility, and governance.
- The political economy of alternative journalistic infrastructures, including ownership, control, monetization, business cases, audience measurement, and the challenges of overcoming the concentration of infrastructural power in privately owned platforms.
- (Alternative) Digital infrastructures as conditions of media freedom, editorial autonomy, accountability, and journalism’s capacity to serve the public interest.
- Case studies of newsroom choices that adopt, reject, adapt, or repurpose alternative platforms and technologies.
- What is the role of the audience in demanding, rejecting, switching to alternative platforms, and the role of technology in reclaiming the audience? What are new governance challenges of moving to alternatives? Which policies and regulatory frameworks help, and which maintain and legitimate the power of established players?
Different types of submissions are possible. You can submit a traditional research talk on one of the pre-conference topics, but you can also submit “work-in-progress” contributions, as well as a case study or applied research. For the latter, the conference provides an opportunity to discuss theoretical and methodological approaches, research designs, data collection, conceptual development, emerging findings, and other matters of interest.
Abstracts of no more than 500 words, references excluded, should be sent to doddsrojas@wisc.edu by January 17, 23:59 Central European Time.
All submitted abstracts will be peer reviewed.
When submitting, please note:
- Speakers are expected to be present. Virtual presentations are not possible.
- Submissions must be in English and submitted as a .pdf file.
- Please state whether your contribution is a research talk, applied research, or a work-in-progress talk.
- Please indicate whether the first author is a student.
- The abstracts should include the main idea/argument, research questions, theoretical perspectives, and/or information on methodology and empirical findings, if relevant.
The pre-conference will take place on April 21, 2027, at the University of National and World Economy, Sofia, Bulgaria.
There is no conference fee. Participants with special needs are kindly asked to contact the organizers. Participants are expected to fund their own travel.
Conference Organization
- Tomás Dodds, University of Wisconsin-Madison
- Natali Helberger, University of Amsterdam
- Seth C. Lewis, University of Virginia
- Elohim Monard, University of Wisconsin-Madison
- Colin Porlezza, Università della Svizzera italiana
- Valeria Resendez, University of Twente
- Theresa Josephine Seipp, University of Amsterdam
References
- Dodds, T., de Vreese, C. H., Helberger, N., Resendez, V., & Seipp, T. (2023). Popularity-driven metrics: Audience analytics and shifting opinion power to digital platforms. Journalism Studies, 24(3), 403–421. https://doi.org/10.1080/1461670X.2023.2167104
- Gillespie, T. (2018). Custodians of the Internet: Platforms, Content Moderation, and the Hidden Decisions That Shape Social Media. Yale University Press.
- Helberger, N. (2026). Infrastructures of media freedom: Expanding journalism’s ethical horizon. Digital Journalism. https://doi.org/10.1080/21670811.2026.2652342
- Napoli, P. M. (2019). Social Media and the Public Interest: Media Regulation in the Disinformation Age. Columbia University Press.
- Plantin, J.-C., Lagoze, C., Edwards, P. N., & Sandvig, C. (2018). Infrastructure studies meet platform studies in the age of Google and Facebook. New Media & Society, 20(1), 293–310. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444816661553
- Ricaurte, P. (2019). Data epistemologies, the coloniality of power, and resistance. Television & New Media, 20(4), 350–365. https://doi.org/10.1177/1527476419831640
- van Dijck, J., Poell, T., & de Waal, M. (2018). The Platform Society: Public Values in a Connective World. Oxford University Press.