Past
Infrastructural Dependencies in the News Industry: Data Capture Under the Hood
Date & Time
03/09/2025 1:15 pm – 2:45 pm
Aske Kammer
Roskilde University
Aske Kammer, PhD, is Associate Professor of Journalism Studies at Roskilde University, Denmark. His research lies at the intersection of editorial matters, digital technology, and business models. He currently leads the Datafied News Industry (DANI) research project.
About the Event
In this session, Aske shared early findings from his study of 222 Nordic news websites, mapping which third-party services are embedded in news infrastructures and what this means for resource dependence. The talk revealed the scale of infrastructural “capture,” showing how external services such as analytics providers and advertising networks reconfigure the news industry’s resource position and limit its autonomy in the digital economy.
5 Key highlights
- Looking under the hood
The team examined embedded third-party services on news websites by logging the outbound requests each page issued on load. Treating each request as a trace of dependency made the infrastructural layer of digital journalism empirically visible across a corpus of 222 Nordic outlets. - Tracing Server Calls
Using a custom Python workflow in Google Colab with Selenium coded by Lisa Merete Kristensen, the team emulated real page loads and captured the resulting third-party calls. This produced a site-level ledger of external integrations that could be aggregated and analyzed at scale. - Data Cleaning as Method
Aske used a manual workflow, with small scripts where they helped, to turn raw calls into source to target pairs. Starting from about six thousand connections, he stripped query strings, removed self-calls and duplicates, collapsed variant subdomains, and resolved aliased targets to their effective hosts. Because data quirks made full automation unreliable, he read samples closely, logged edge cases, and refined the rules. Copilot supported ownership lookups, which he verified against the logs. - Mapping dependencies
The team modeled the cleaned pairs as a bipartite network linking outlets to services and layered in ownership. This made patterns of concentration and control legible, from shared infrastructure that many outlets rely on to the long tail of one-off tools. Centrality and connectivity guided where to look next, suggesting candidates for follow-up interviews and country contrasts, and turning infrastructural capture into something that can be named, traced, and debated. - Bringing sovereignty into view
By turning hidden integrations into observable structures, the study grounds debates on digital sovereignty and freedom of the press in evidence. It shows where infrastructural reliance can narrow editorial agency and accountability, and offers a practical baseline for governance work, from dependency audits to targeted interviews and longitudinal tracking.
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