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.

More people today get news via Facebook and Google than via any news organization in history, and platforms like Twitter serve news to more people than all but the biggest media companies. This book draws on interviews and other data to analyze the platform power a few technology companies as a consequence have come to exercise in public life, the reservations publishers have about platforms—as well as the reasons why they often embrace them nonetheless. Most of the news content we rely on is still produced by journalists working for news organizations. But the way in which we discover it, how it is distributed, where decisions are made on what to display (and what not), and who profits from our behavior—all this is changing rapidly as people increasingly rely on social media, search engines, and aggregators offered by large platform companies to access news, and publishers in turn seek to reach people via the platforms they rely on. To understand the new, distinct relational and generative forms of power that platforms exercise, this book analyzes how they have evolved from the early days of Google’s first forays into news. Examining the different ways publishers have responded and how various platform companies have in turn handled the increasingly important and controversial role they play, it draws out the implications of a fundamental feature of our world we all need to understand: the news media are simultaneously empowered by and dependent on a few powerful private, for-profit technology companies.

This article investigates the flow of communication policy principles across the supranational, international and national levels, through the lens of policy transfer. Policy transfer is a new concept for the field of media and communication studies. The article utilizes and expands on the concept to study the case of digital policy flows between leading regional powers, the EU and USA and MERCOSUR. The article argues that EU and US policy priorities are reflected in the Latin American policy framework, which shifts from a focus on audiovisual and culture-centred objectives to the digital economy paradigm. MERCOSUR then functions as a policy broker between 'outside' interests and those of its member states through the influence of international key players whose interests clash with those of regional goals.

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Increasingly, researchers are conducting studies within a diversity of cultural contexts This paper discusses whether and how the researcher’s own cultural otherness plays a role in academic interview situations. The argument is based on Goffman’s theory of interaction under conditions of otherness and the empirical data from 118 interviews and notes during the years 2007 and 2010 and between 2013 and 2014. The empirical data presented in this paper illustrate how a lack of education, socialisation, and cultivation within the fieldwork context—one’s own cultural otherness—assumes ceremonial and substantial meaning in academic interview situations and merits being the subject of methodological considerations.