Senior Capstone- Journalism in the Digital Era

Abstract

In the contemporary media landscape, creative labor in the public information ecosystem is being fundamentally restructured, reorganizing journalistic work around the logics and incentives of the digital economy. The emergence of “born-digital” firms such as Google, Netflix, and YouTube, built on digital infrastructures during the dot-com boom of the late 1990s and early 2000s, renegotiated the power held by legacy media companies. This had immediate and lasting effects on practices in the cultural and creative industries (CCIs) such as film, music, and journalism. While early digital disruption reshaped distribution and access, the widespread adoption of social media further intensified this upheaval by redistributing power from institutional gatekeepers to platform-driven networks of users, creators, and algorithms.