Overview

In the past three decades, the battle between big tech and big journalism has reshaped how we consume the news. Jason Whittaker delves into how tech giants outmanoeuvered traditional media companies, siphoning off advertising revenue and audience attention. As journalism struggled to adapt, social media platforms evolved from utopian public spaces into breeding grounds for misinformation and fake news, eroding public trust. The influence of billionaires further complicated the digital ecosystem, swaying public opinion and exercising direct political power, of which previous media moguls could only dream. More recently, AI has begun to revolutionize content creation, distribution, and consumption. Overall, this thirty-year period has witnessed a tangled mix of progress, contention, and disinformation. Incorporating stories aboutThe Washington Post, The New York Times, The Atlantic, The Los Angeles Times, Bloomberg, and many other media outlets from around the world, and discussing key figures and companies in big tech and AI like Facebook/Meta, Cambridge Analytica, Google, Microsoft, Twitter/X and Elon Musk, Edward Snowden, Jakob Uszkoreit, OpenAI, ChatGPT, DeepSeek, and more, Whittaker provides an incisive examination of the frequently combative relations of these two industries and the uncertain future of the news in the digital age.

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9781836391715

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Reviews

Whittaker provides a comprehensive yet sharp history of the uneasy relationship between journalism and technology, from the golden age of print to today’s digital monopolies. He shows how the promises of digital media - pluralism, empowerment, and democratisation - have been undermined by the realities of corporate power, disinformation, and surveillance capitalism. This book combines scholarship with urgency, warning that the future of journalism is inextricably linked with the future of democracy itself. A vital and timely book. * Matt Walsh, Head of Cardiff University School of Journalism, Media and Culture, former journalist and Deputy Editor of the ITV News Channel *

Whittaker provides a comprehensive yet sharp history of the uneasy relationship between journalism and technology, from the golden age of print to today’s digital monopolies. He shows how the promises of digital media - pluralism, empowerment, and democratisation - have been undermined by the realities of corporate power, disinformation, and surveillance capitalism. This book combines scholarship with urgency, warning that the future of journalism is inextricably linked with the future of democracy itself. A vital and timely book. * Matt Walsh, Head of Cardiff University School of Journalism, Media and Culture, former journalist and Deputy Editor of the ITV News Channel * We all know what happened: the dumbing down of broadcast news, the collapse of the local press, the proliferation of fake news – and the ruthless dominance of Big Tech. Jason Whittaker offers something new in this brilliant book: a sober dissection of the “why” and, most importantly as we consider AI, an urgent policy-focused exploration of “what next”. * Dave Lee, U.S. technology columnist, Bloomberg Opinion *

Author Information

Jason Whittaker is professor of communications at the University of Lincoln and previously worked as a journalist for IDG Media. His books include Tech Giants, Artificial Intelligence, and the Future of Journalism; William Blake and the Myths of Britain; Blake 2.0; andDivine Images, the last also published by Reaktion Books.

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