Dealing with digital intermediaries: A case study of the relations between publishers and platforms
By Rasmus Kleis Nielsen, Sarah Anne Ganter. New Media & Society, 2018
391 citations recorded by the source corpus.
The rise of digital intermediaries such as search engines and social media is profoundly changing our media environment. Here, we analyze how news media organizations handle their relations to these increasingly important intermediaries. Based on a strategic case study, we argue that relationships between publishers and platforms are characterized by a tension between (1) short-term, operational opportunities and (2) long-term strategic worries about becoming too dependent on intermediaries. We argue that these relationships are shaped by news media’s fear of missing out, the difficulties of evaluating the risk/reward ratios, and a sense of asymmetry. The implication is that news media that developed into an increasingly independent institution in the 20th century—in part enabled by news media organizations’ control over channels of communication—are becoming dependent upon new digital intermediaries that structure the media environment in ways that not only individual citizens but also large, resource-rich, powerful organizations have to adapt to.
Subfields: Communication, Sociology and Political Science
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/af508a5428bbbca2f1cedf9c835f6171e28a95f1
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Citations in the corpus
- Are people incidentally exposed to news on social media? A comparative analysis (2018, background): “Although all three networks initially focussed on user-generated content, they now increasingly act as ‘intermediaries’ between established publishers and consumers (Nielsen and Ganter, 2018).”
- The platformization of cultural production: Theorizing the contingent cultural commodity (2018, neutral): “Hence, for researchers it is crucial to observe that platformization has both significant economic and cultural implications; it makes publishers increasingly dependent on platforms (Nielsen and Ganter, 2018) and, thus, subject to the political economy of multisided markets.”
- Nathaniel Persily e Joshua A. Tucker (a cura di). Social Media and Democracy. The State of the Field, Prospects for Reform (2021, background): “News media are thus actively embracing many of the products and services offered by some of their main competitors for attention and advertising, increasingly empowered by but also dependent on platform companies like Google and Facebook (Nielsen and Ganter 2017) that provide them with everything fr”