The Power of Platforms: Shaping Media and Society

More people today get news via Facebook and Google than from any news organization in history, and smaller platforms like Twitter serve news to more users than all but the biggest media companies. In The Power of Platforms, Rasmus Kleis Nielsen and Sarah Anne Ganter draw on original interviews and other qualitative evidence to analyze the ＂platform power＂ that a few technology companies have come to exercise in public life, the reservations publishers have about platforms, as well as the reasons why publishers often embrace them nonetheless.

Nielsen and Ganter trace how relations between publishers and platforms have evolved across the United States, France, Germany, and the United Kingdom. They identify the new, distinct relational and generative forms of power that platforms exercise as people increasingly rely on them to find and access news. Most of the news content we rely on is still produced by journalists working for news organizations, but Nielsen and Ganter chronicle rapid change in the ways in which we discover news, how it is distributed, where decisions are made on what to display (and what not), and in who profits from these flows of information. By examining the different ways publishers have responded to these changes and how various platform companies have in turn handled the increasingly important and controversial role they play in society, The Power of Platforms draws out the implications of a fundamental feature of the contemporary world that we all need to understand: previously powerful and relatively independent institutions like the news media are increasingly in a position similar to that of ordinary individual users, simultaneously empowered by and dependent upon a small number of centrally placed and powerful platforms.

Rasmus Kleis Nielsen is Director of the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism and Professor of Political Communication at the University of Oxford. His research is focused on the changing role of news and media in our societies. He has written extensively about journalism, digital media, the
business of news, political communication, and related topics in dozens of scholarly articles, edited volumes, and books, including Ground Wars: Personalized Communication in Political Campaigns. He is also the co-author of the annual Reuters Institute Digital News Report, and has provided expert
advice to both governments and news media companies in several countries. His work has been covered by a wide variety of media all over the world, and he has written for El País, The Indian Express, The Washington Post, and several other publications.

Sarah Anne Ganter is Assistant Professor of Communication and Cultural Policy in the School of Communication at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver. She has published widely on media governance, digital policy and regulation, and journalism, and analyzes media and digital policy transformations
from a theoretical perspective that focuses on the dynamics and interactions shaping institutional fields. Her work is published in scholarly journals, international book projects, and featured in various media outlets such as ABC Radio Australia, Rappler.com, The Hill Times, The National Post, The
Seattle Times, and Tilt- UOL. Her co-edited book, Media Governance: A Cosmopolitan Critique, is forthcoming with Palgrave MacMillan.