The Datafied News Industry (DANI) research project is about how the news industry capture, use, and understand data as a strategic resource. It seeks to provide answers to the question of how processes of datafication shape practices across the news industry.
To this end, the project explores how digital data constitutes a strategic resource for the news media. Through five subprojects, the project investigates how, for example, managers, salespersons, software engineers, editors, and journalists understand and use data. In the digital age, data is a resource for business and for management, and if the news industry does not guard and utilize this resource it will lose out to platforms and technology companies. For this reason, knowledge about the use of data is important for both news organizations and for society.
With inspiration from the idea of the value chain, the project distinguishes analytically between five “spaces” for datafication in the news industry (see Kammer, 2023):
- the space that exists between industries (the space where the news industry exchanges resources with other industries; e.g., platforms)
- management (the space where that makes decisions about strategic allocations of resources)
- sales and marketing (the space that captures value upon the delivery of content)
- content distribution (the space that develops and use systems for content distribution; development departments)
- content production (the space that produces content; newsrooms)
The research project started on January 1, 2024, and runs for three and a half years. It has the formal organization of a core research group.
The Datafied News Industry (DANI) research project is generously funded by the VELUX FOUNDATION Core Group Program.