You can’t write this book without pissing someone off, you know that, right?’ is how authors Rasmus Kleis Nielsen and Sarah Anne Ganter start their acknowledgement in The Power of Platforms. They speak to experts and analyse data to understand the ‘platform power’ that leading technology companies have come to exercise in public life.
The book has navigated the relationship between publishers and platforms in the context of news. There is no doubt that more people today get news via Facebook and Google than from any news organization, while social media platforms like Twitter provide news to a wider audience across the globe.
Rasmus Kleis Nielsen, Director at the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism at the University of Oxford, and Sarah Anne Ganter, Assistant Professor in the School of Communication at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, Canada, have discussed as to how platforms like Facebook, Twitter and Google have changed the way people consume news and how publishers are a big part of that.