Mapping the Technology Stacks of News Publishers

And the final speaker for this session, and the whole of the Future of Journalism 2023 conference is Lisa Kristensen, whose focus is on the infrastructure of news, much of which is provided by external technology providers. These infrastructures include software, data, and technologies; search engines and related systems; and protocols and related systems.

The project began by mapping the digital infrastructures of news by examining the technology stacks used by different news organisations; this was done through interviews and observations, trade conferences, Stackshare, and methods identifying third-party tools on Websites. This distinguished production and publishing technologies; distribution technologies; and technologies that sustain the commercial viability of media; but these technologies are also highly interconnected, and often offered by the same technology providers (such as Google or Amazon).

As news companies build their technology stacks, then, they negotiate with technology providers and often attempt to remain compliant with the key technologies they are likely to draw on; this gives the technology providers considerable shaping power over news processes and practices. Even those media groups that go their own way do so somewhat reluctantly, in full awareness of the amount of development time they must invest to build their own systems rather than use existing solutions.

Infrastructure capture through the use of existing technologies manifests in classification, standardisation, and datafication, therefore; third-party systems shape news processes, but news organisations do not give away their autonomy without engaging at least in internal negotiations. Some build their own systems in order to take back control of their technology stacks, but this comes at a high cost; how these decisions are being made requires more empirical research and pragmatic consideration.

And that’s it for Cardiff – next stop, AoIR 2023 in Philadelphia in October!