Digital Platforms and Journalism as a Profession: The Rise of the Influencer Journalist

Digital platforms are entities that operate through digital spaces and mainly occur as social media companies that have positioned themselves in various markets. Digital platforms began their journey as social media sites that enable users to create social network connections with the help of profiles. The programmability of social media sites has evolved them into platforms, and this notion of programmability changed the overall structure of the web. Digital platforms generate revenue through user interactions; in return, content producers also help them generate revenue. Journalism has been deeply affected by the platformization of news, and digital spaces have also changed traditional journalistic practices. Under the platform capitalism, digital spaces curate individuals’ life styles and how they perceive, react, and see things. In return, journalism as an ethical practice transformed itself due to the new odes of communication and commercialization. The rise of digital journalism has paved the way for new modes of sharing and producing news, and this can easily be termed as producing content. The production of news became highly dominated by the mechanisms that govern platform logic. Platform logic can be detected in the datafication, commodification, commercialization, and consumption that have affected the role of journalists in society. The rise of digital platforms, especially social media platforms such as Instagram, has transformed not just journalism itself but also journalism as a profession. The ethical and professional principles of journalism have been eroded, with journalists having begun to be seen as influencing people and their starting to act with the logic of digital platforms. The corporate umbrella that protected journalists has been replaced by the principles of platform capitalism. The aim of this paper is to examine the precarization of journalism as a profession under the dominant power of digital platforms.