Preferred sources: Who will finance the future of journalism?

Journalism is facing a structural transformation in which the relationship between value creation and value capture is being radically reorganized within the platform order established by a new techno-bourgeoisie that exploits every piece of content it produces.

At a time when wars, economic crises, migration movements, and social tensions are deepening, the need for reliable information is greater than ever; yet newsrooms are shrinking, local newspapers are closing, reporting staffs are being reduced, and budgets allocated for investigative journalism are narrowing. A contradiction that is difficult to explain at first glance emerges here. Because while the importance of verified field reporting is increasing due to fake and junk content generated by artificial intelligence (AI) technologies, it is becoming increasingly difficult for news organizations to generate revenue and secure income streams.

In the era of traditional media and mass communication, news organizations that produced, distributed, and largely collected the economic return of news financed news production within their own ecosystem through newspaper sales, advertising, and subscription models. However, the internet, developing digital technologies, and social media disrupted the fixed value chain and market balance. Yet, in the early years of digitalization, many thought that news would reach wider audiences and the power of the media would increase even further. News did indeed reach wider audiences, but its economic value was collected not by those who produced the news, but by the platforms that circulated it on the infrastructure they built.

In this context, platforms are actors that shape user behavior and manage the production of economic value through their content distribution infrastructures. Especially in the platform economy, the algorithm policies and filters of platforms largely decide whether a piece of news will be read today. Most of the advertising revenue goes not to news organizations, but to technology companies. Reader behaviors accumulate not in the databases of media organizations, but on the servers of platforms. While newsrooms bear the costs of news, the new techno-bourgeoisie accumulates economic power on a scale unprecedented in history by controlling the circulation of information. Therefore, the majority of the advertising revenue that news organizations should be receiving is concentrated in the hands of non-industry actors, namely platform companies.

In the system called platform capitalism, what journalism is experiencing is a kind of "Uberization." The Uberization of journalism is the production of news by journalists and the capture of its value by platforms.

It is the widening divergence between value creation and value capture. While platform capitalism commodifies the labor of journalists and the content investments of media organizations, it appropriates a significant portion of the value generated in this process without assuming any copyright, licensing, or payment responsibility. Just as Uber is not a taxi owner despite being one of the world's largest transportation platforms, and just as Airbnb is not a hotel owner despite being one of the world's largest accommodation platforms, in platform capitalism, one does not have to produce news or cover news costs while building the world's largest information infrastructure. As a result, while production rises on the shoulders of the journalist, a labor-intensive sector, the financial and data value created by this labor accumulates in monopolized platform companies. Today, the rise of generative AI is accelerating this value theft in a way unprecedented in history. Content produced by news and information platforms is scraped in seconds and integrated into AI systems. Viewed in this light, journalism has become a factory of "first-party data" produced with human labor in the field, significant financial risks, and intellectual capital.

When a user asks a question about a current event, the search engine no longer directs them to the original source of the news, but confronts them with an answer processed and re-presented by AI. Thus, news content is detached from its source, incorporated into the property domain of AI platforms, and presented to the user as if it were an output produced by these platforms. From a political-economy perspective, this situation can be defined as an asymmetric transfer of value. As journalism resources and assets shrink, this is one of the dynamics behind the market values of technology companies entering the media industrial field reaching trillions of dollars.

For all these reasons, although the importance of the "Preferred Sources" issue may seem like an ordinary user setting at first glance, it is actually a small but important intervention regarding who will receive the economic value of the news. Consciously preferring specific publications in a browser, news app, or RSS reader contributes to re-establishing the broken relationship between the producer and the consumer of news. And this preference can create three important results. First, it helps reduce the publisher's platform dependency. Direct orientation to news sources reduces this dependency to some extent, allowing media organizations to gain a more predictable ground for visibility. Second, it contributes to ensuring that economic value returns to the producer. The reader's direct engagement with the news source weakens the profit mechanism that intermediary platforms provide through advertising and data. This can make it possible for the economic value of news to return to the structures that produce it in a more visible and direct way. Third, reader-centered revenue models can be strengthened. The decrease in the influence of intermediary platforms reduces the pressure on media organizations to produce content solely dependent on click traffic. These conditions can support the sustainability of financing forms based on direct relationships with the reader, such as subscriptions, donations, crowdfunding, cooperative structures, or community-supported models.

Therefore, the problem we are facing today is not limited to how and where we access news. The essence of the problem is how and by whom the future of news based on human labor and journalism will be financed. Because it is not the companies owned by the techno-bourgeoisie, their algorithms, and their AI that will uncover workers' strikes, miners' resistance, students seeking rights and holding authorities accountable, teachers who cannot make ends meet, villagers defending their land, and how public resources are being plundered.