The impact of the platformization of Arab news websites on quality journalism

Abstract

As elsewhere in the world, Arab news websites depend on revenue streams built on the commercialization of social media platforms. Reliance on these platforms has created a major structural shift in news production, distribution and monetization, which has triggered serious concerns about fake news, misinformation and quality journalism. This paper investigates the extent to which four online-only news websites abide by quality journalism in the context of increasing platformization of digital news production. We use qualitative document analysis to systematically analyse the contents of a representative sample from four news websites from Egypt, Jordan, Morocco and Tunisia.