The Platformisation of Newsroom Data Intermediaries in India

The next speaker in this AoIR 2024 conference session is Simran Agarwal, whose interest is in platformisation intermediaries in the Indian news industry. Her interest here is especially in the meso-layer of intermediaries, where AI-driven machine learning tools provide strategic counsel to newsrooms, broker interactions between platforms and publishers with the aim to ‘help’, ‘assist’, or ‘free’ journalists, and appear as certified partners.

Such intermediaries may be understood as cultural intermediaries, algorithmic experts, metricians, or content recommendation platforms; they may complement platforms or assist content production, and AI systems in particular retool, reshape, and rationalise the news. To explore this, Simran’s story identified and interviewed a broad range of news publishers and intermediaries, and classified them variously as analytics, monetisation, production, and distribution services.

Services like Echobox optimise news for platform distribution and impact; services like iZooto optimise platform infrastructure and integration; other services optimise platform governance processes. This also leads to platformisation amongst such tools themselves, as they acquire and amalgamate each other to provide an integrated multifaceted service.

This, in turn, reinforces platform dependence, adds to newsroom costs, reduces editorial autonomy, and reorganise public interest value; this removes the ‘gut feel’ from editorial strategy and puts business interests ahead of journalistic imperatives. It also standardises news coverage to focus on a small number of especially attractive areas of coverage and newsbeats.