Do News Media Want to Disentangle from Platforms?

Publishers have both principled and practical reasons to want to disentangle themselves from platforms and the companies behind them, but in most cases do not prioritize this, because there are other things they want more, in particular audience reach and incremental revenue. That is the hypothesis I offer here, where I briefly outline why the fraught entanglements that publishers and journalists often express their frustration with are often in practice reproduced, reinforced, and replicated. I Illustrate how publishers exercise the agency they have (despite the pronounced structural asymmetry between most publishers and many platforms) with the example of the BBC and the New York Times, both unusually privileged publishers who despite the agency their strong position enables continue to engage. I suggest such continued engagement is not hypocrisy, but an example of how publishers navigate complex tradeoffs, choosing “freedom to” leverage platform opportunities for audience reach and revenue over “freedom from” platform dependencies and the accompanying contingency. My hypothesis is that most publishers, their principled objections notwithstanding, in practice continue to work with platforms because they have other priorities they value more than disentanglement, and suggest the balance between entanglement and disentanglement is an important area for further empirical work.