The article about practices in digital journalism in Hungary by Tamas Tofalvy from Budapest University of Technology and Economics used the news portal Telex.hu as a case study to look at the socio-technical web of affordances and dependencies that must be navigated under the circumstances of global platformization.
An unusual event relating to a news portal occurred on July 24th, when more than 50 journalists for Index.hu resigned en masse. The reason they gave was that the paper’s independence from governmental pressures could not be maintained. They later started a crowdfunding campaign and started Telex.hu, which maintains itself with reader contributions.
The author used qualitative content analysis and relied on the framework by Lewis and Westlund (2015), which included actors (humans), actants (nonhumans), audiences (recipients etc.) and activities (stages of work). It also introduced C, content, to account for modalities and genres in the ecosystems.
Facebook was the main distribution infrastructure for the site, joined by Instagram, Youtube and TikTok. Facebook is the most popular social media platform in the country, also for other outlets. Telex had the 50th most popular Facebook page.
The role of the Hungarian state in the ecosystem was complementary and amplified by this platform logic. Media capture logic mainly works by channeling state advertising budgets toward pro-government sites and away from the independent ones. Audience revenue models thus emerged as survival strategies.
From a socio-technical perspective, the entanglement of media and platform captures illustrate how technological and political forces align to reshape professional norms and market structures. Thus, the state worked not through direct control or censorship, but via strategic buying.
In conclusion, the paper analyzed platform capture and media capture using Telex.hu as a case study. Outlets like this one depended on the platforms for visibility and also had to adapt their workflows and content to algorithmic logics. The mutual reinforcement of media and platform capture emerged as the defining structural condition for Hungarian digital journalism.
The article “Between the state and the platforms: A socio-technical analysis of changing practices in Hungarian digital journalism” by Tamas Tofalvy is in European Journal of Communication. (Free abstract).
Picture: Budapest, Hungary by Anna Hunko.
License Unsplash.
