I studied journalism innovation programmes for years, these are the patterns I found

A guest post by Giordano Zambelli who spent four delightful years of his PhD looking at what happens when public institutions inject public money into the innovation trajectory of news organizations.

The brief marriage between news organizations and digital platforms has been one the defining journalism stories of the XXI century. “We’ll give you content, you’ll give us audience reach”. For some years, both sides invested in what seemed like a pragmatically convenient fit. Until it wasn’t. Or rather, until it became clear it never really was.

Yet, despite at least ten years of growing research into how publishers could stop “building their houses on someone else’s land”, it remains unclear if publishers are actually willing to disentangle from platforms. On the contrary, some have argued convincingly that publishers may want to disentangle in principle, but in practice, they still value too much certain platform benefits: audience reach and the revenue expectations tied to it, above all. And, in fact, while the ‘disentangle-from-platforms’ discourse grows popular, many news media are already “working out how to navigate distribution through AI platforms”. First it was SEO - trying …