Capture Beyond the Platforms: The Material and Infrastructural Conditions for Digital Journalism

Abstract

News organisations are growing increasingly dependent on digital infrastructures for the distribution of news, AI implementation, and management of data. In this article, we argue that this dependency goes beyond the level of platforms, reaching into the internet backbone infrastructures that transmit, peer, deliver and host data on which journalism relies. Using Norway as a case, we map the actors involved in the subsea cable sectors, internet exchange points, content delivery networks and the data centres and cloud services that traffic, store and process digital journalism. Given the private, foreign nature of most of the actors involved in these infrastructures, we ask how these backbone infrastructures create interdependencies for the news industries in terms of data sovereignty, distribution control and regulatory jurisdiction. We discuss journalism’s dependency on each of these infrastructural sectors using sociotechnical theory, the contribution to which is to extend the range at which platform capture is considered in journalism scholarship.