People, Power, Platforms and the Business of Journalism

Abstract

This special issue marks a growing complexity and complicatedness in research on the business of digital journalism. This shift is appropriate and reflects a necessary deepening and increased rigor by scholars as the number of interconnected parts of digital media systems has grown, while the addition of platforms has made the business of journalism more opaque and challenging to negotiate. The scholars of the issue’s eight articles ably take on these conditions from a range of research questions, conceptual approaches methodologies, and geographic vantage points (Brazil, Europe and the United States). They add original approaches to understanding a professional field reorienting from the early business of digital journalism research focused on making online pay to conditions that remain about survival but within a more nuanced set of institutional, competitive and economic contexts.