Jason Whittaker - Tech Giants, Artificial Intelligence, and the Future of Journalism

This book examines the impact of the Big Five technology companies Apple, Google, Amazon, Facebook, and Microsoft on journalism and the media industries. It looks at the current role of algorithms and artificial intelligence in curating how we consume media and their increasing influence on the production of the news.

Exploring the changes that the technology industry and automation have made in the past decade to the production, distribution, and consumption of news globally, the book considers what happens to journalism once it is produced and enters the media ecosystems of the Internet tech giants and the impact of social media and AI on such things as fake news in the post-truth age.

The audience for this book are students and researchers working in the field of digital media, and journalism studies or media studies more generally. It will also be useful to those who are looking for extended case studies of the role taken by tech giants such as Facebook and Google in the fake news scandal, or the role of Jeff Bezos in transforming The Washington Post.

Jason Whittaker is the Head of the School of English and Journalism at the University of Lincoln. He worked for 15 years as a tech journalist and has written extensively on magazine journalism and digital media, most recently as the co-editor of the collection Online Journalism in Africa (2013) and as the author of Magazine Production (2016).

Routledge Research in Journalism

19 News of Baltimore
Race, Rage and the City
Edited by Linda Steiner and Silvio Waisbord

20 The Trump Presidency, Journalism, and Democracy
Edited by Robert E. Gutsche, Jr.

21 Russias Liberal Media
Handcuffed but Free
Vera Slavtcheva-Petkova

22 Critical Perspectives on Journalistic Beliefs and Actions
Global Experiences
Edited by Eric Freedman, Robyn S. Goodman, and Elanie Steyn

23 Economic News
Informing the Inattentive Audience
Arjen van Dalen, Helle Svensson, Anotinus Kalogeropoulos, Erik Albk, Claes H. de Vreese

24 Reporting Humanitarian Disasters in a Social Media Age
Glenda Cooper

25 The Rise of Nonprofit Investigative Journalism in the United States
Bill Birnbauer

26 Tech Giants, Artificial Intelligence, and the Future of Journalism
Jason Whittaker

For more information about this series, please visit: https://www.routledge.com

First published 2019

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2019 Taylor & Francis

The right of Jason Whittaker to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

The Open Access version of this book, available at www.taylorfrancis.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.

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ISBN: 978-1-138-49997-3 (hbk)

ISBN: 978-1-351-01375-8 (ebk)

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To Sam for her patience and support

This book has developed over a series of discussions with a number of colleagues, students, and friends who have had the patience to sit through presentations and debates on various aspects covered in this book over the years. I would particularly like to thank Deborah Wilson-David, John Cafferkey, Ola Ogunyemi, Hayes Mabweazara, John Cafferkey, Gary Stevens, Rob Brown, and Julia Kennedy, as well as Eleanor Simmons and Felisa Salvago-Keyes at Routledge who helped to develop this book from initial idea through to final publication.

In August 2018, financial reporters around the globe became extremely excited at news that the tech company Apple had passed the $1 trillion mark in terms of its market capitalisation, the value of all its shares at that time. The BBC announced that it was the first public company worth $1 trillion, remarking that its shares had risen by more than 50,000 with some $800 billion or approximately the size of Italys stock market in 2017 being wiped off its shareholder value. Incredible drops in oil prices, combined with plans to move towards alternative sources of power in China and a clampdown on excessive swings in Chinese stocks in the aftermath of the 2007 global financial crisis demonstrated the fragile nature of such high-risk speculation.

It is no accident that a book on tech giants, artificial intelligence and journalism begins not with innovation and ideas but with the effect of share prices. In the business world, the value of the major technology companies is extremely significant news and, in many quarters, reporting about technology is synonymous with financial journalism. In March 2017, Fortune ran a piece that is typical.

Table I.1 Top ten valued companies in 2017

Although Walmart dominated the Fortune 500 in terms of revenue (alongside petrochemical companies, energy conglomerates, and even car manufacturers), it was tech firms that held the top spots in terms of their overall market value. In the first decade of the twenty-first century, the highest valued companies were energy giants such as Exxon Mobil, PetroChina, Gazprom, Royal Dutch Shell, and BP. and medicine, or indeed a resurgence of energy in alternative forms to gas and oil, could see a revolution in the capitalisation of companies, but to all intents and purposes, the 2010s have been the decade of the Big Five.

This brief excursion into the financial status of contemporary technological companies is one means of emphasising the significance of big tech. Nor should it be forgotten).

Table I.2 Value of top tech companies versus top media companies

The message is clear: with the exception of Disney, flush with the success of the Star Wars franchise among other elements, AT&T and Comcast (which both have extensive telecommunications components as part of their business) the larger, more traditional media companies lag behind the main tech companies by a factor of at least ten. The companies on the right of the aforementioned chart are responsible Just over a decade later, it is the Big Five who are the subject of this book that, increasingly, control access to the new ecologies of media distribution in the twenty-first century.

Big tech is a phrase that will recur frequently in this book, and is often associated with the Big Five (Alphabet/Google, Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Microsoft) although it is not entirely synonymous with Dont be evil as a reminder of what not to turn into.