Journalistic Authorship in News Production for Facebook Users and the News Feed Algorithm

Online news publishers become increasingly dependent on social media platforms such as Facebook in order to distribute journalistic content to their audiences (Newman, 2015). In contrast to visitors of gatekeeped and structured legacy news websites, Facebook users are served with news content based on opaque algorithmic – i.e. automatic – information filtering and ranking processes that govern the Newsfeed (Tufekci, 2015). The general automation trend in news production and distribution, together with a “datafication” of journalism (e.g. through audience metrics), impacts journalistic practices and diminishes the power of legacy news media by incentivizing them to produce content for the audience that performs well on the algorithmically-driven platforms (Napoli, 2014; Petre, 2015; Tandoc, 2015; Van Dalen, 2012). This paper investigates the consequences of that development from the point of view of authorship theory (Burke, 1998; Van der Weel, 2015). Journalistic authority, defined as a construct “by which the media assume the right to present authoritative versions of events” (Zelizer, 1992, p. 189) can be viewed as a precondition “for authorship that provide writers with the mandate to shape society’s collective memory through daily newspapers” (Zandberg, 2010, p. 5). However, in the digital era, Facebook replaces newspapers, calling for a new definition of journalistic authorship. Hence, the research question is: “How do algorithms, that automate steps in the news creation and distribution process, transform the cultural construct of journalistic authorship?” Methodically, the paper will combine an empirical analysis of publicly available Facebook data of publishers (e.g. The New York Times, Washington Post, The Guardian, Buzzfeed, Huffington Post) and apply insights from authorship theory to interpret the findings. The aim is to develop a model of journalistic authorship that captures the algorithms that shape our news ecosystem. This paper is a work in progress and part of a Ph.D. project on authorship in digital journalism.