The Rise of Platforms

This chapter focuses on how the rise of platforms is changing our media environment, where publishers still control the production of news content, but platform companies increasingly control the channels through which people access it. It identifies the new, distinct, generative, and relational forms of power that platforms, including Facebook, Google, and Twitter, exercise and examines how news publishers have responded. It argues that previously powerful and relatively independent institutions like the news media are increasingly in a position akin to that of ordinary users—they are simultaneously increasingly empowered by and dependent on a small number of powerful platforms.