How Platforms Reshape Journalism’s Truth Claims

The final speaker in this ECREA 2018 panel is Oscar Westlund, who highlights the dislocation of news journalism in our contemporary multi-platform media environment. Journalists and news organisations have at times been eager to jump on new bandwagons and explore news delivery through new platforms – most recently, for instance, through voice-controlled information systems such as Alexa or Google Home.

This may mean changing the shape of the news itself, adjusting it to such new platforms – and it is often done in pursuit of greater reach for news content, but this reach is not usually rewarded by greater advertising revenue. In fact, direct revenue from reader subscriptions to proprietary media sites is now again becoming more important than advertising revenue from social media and other third-party platforms – so the embrace of new third-party platforms may ultimately be counterproductive.

To design the news for delivery across multiple platforms may mean working in a platform-agnostic way, and embedding meta-communication elements into news content itself: on their own platforms, news organisations can control the context of news consumption, but this is not as easily possible in other (and especially non-visual) platforms. Markers of news vs. opinion, or of the news organisation’s imprint, now need to be embedded into the content that audio devices read out, for instance; they can no longer be flagged through visual elements.

Much of this may also be understood through an analysis of power dependencies. News outlets depend on social media platform providers in certain ways, for instance, and rely on a variety of metrics to understand audience practices and flows; this is changing how journalists in mainstream news organisations are engaging in their news production practices. It also affects how news media articulate their truth claims and produce knowledge and engage in verification, and how audiences engage with such claims.

The circulation of news in new environments refashions and in some cases obscures the conventional truth claims made by journalism, sometimes even enabling deceptive practices; contexts of justification for journalists’ truth claims thus change, especially with respect to how this plays out in social media; and as a result audiences are also changing their approaches to accepting or rejecting the knowledge and truth claims made by news media, not least by engaging in more critical discussion with journalists.