How to Reach Nirvana: Yandex, News Personalisation, and the Future of Russian Journalistic Media

Dovbysh, Olga; Wijermars, Mariëlle; Makhortykh, Mykola (2022). How to Reach Nirvana: Yandex, News Personalisation, and the Future of Russian Journalistic Media. Digital Journalism, 10(10), pp. 1855-1874. Taylor & Francis 10.1080/21670811.2021.2024080

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Technological corporations and the digital services they provide play an increasingly important role in the production and dissemination of news, e.g., through media’s growing reliance on algorithmic recommender systems that perform gatekeeping functions. Bringing together three areas of interest – the relationships between large technological corporations and the professional news media, the deployment of recommender systems in non-democracies, and their perceived effects – this article investigates the relationship between Russian media outlets and Yandex. It focuses on personalised content recommendation platform Yandex.Zen and its content prioritisation program “Nirvana.” Combining a review of available procedural documents with interviews and auditing of the redistribution of journalistic content via Yandex.Zen, we examine how the power relations within the recommender system’s multi-stakeholder environment condition journalistic practices. Among other findings, we demonstrate that the platform disincentivizes regional and negative content, which may result in depoliticisation of the news agenda.

Item Type:

Journal Article (Original Article)

Division/Institute:

03 Faculty of Business, Economics and Social Sciences > Social Sciences > Institute of Communication and Media Studies (ICMB)

UniBE Contributor:

Makhortykh, Mykola

Subjects:

000 Computer science, knowledge & systems
000 Computer science, knowledge & systems > 070 News media, journalism & publishing
300 Social sciences, sociology & anthropology

ISSN:

2167-082X

Publisher:

Taylor & Francis

Language:

English

Submitter:

Mykola Makhortykh

Date Deposited:

08 Feb 2022 14:54

Last Modified:

25 Dec 2022 01:57

Publisher DOI:

10.1080/21670811.2021.2024080

Uncontrolled Keywords:

digital journalism, online news, journalism, Russia, recommender systems, news personalization, interviews, algorithm audit, Yandex

BORIS DOI:

10.48350/164736

URI:

https://boris.unibe.ch/id/eprint/164736

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