Finding a way to reclaim news distribution from Big Tech

Major technology companies have cast themselves as allies — sometimes even saviors — of journalism for the better part of the last decade. Their actions were convincing: they distributed money grants, created project incubators, supported fact-checking initiatives, provided training for their tools, permeated newsrooms with innovation culture, launched news curation tools and struck ad deals directly with publishers.

From 2013 to 2022, while news organizations were stranded with changing business models imposed by the internet while competing for people’s attention with social media, Big Tech gave them some breathing room to operate and grow. Many successful news companies and non-profits were even born in those days.

Journalism got hooked on Big Tech.

For sure, the money and access to tools were a good part of the appeal. But, mostly, the game newsrooms got hooked on is distribution. Media companies started to invest heavily in search engine optimization, rewrite headlines to appease social media’s reward for absurdity, pollute websites with low-quality banner ads, adopt limiting publishing platforms like Instant Articles and Amp, shred down good content to make it fit on Discover-like recommendation tools and news feeds. This list can get very long, very quickly, and has started to back-fire.

News organizations (especially small and mid-sized ones) got so dependent on this dynamic that when platforms started to change their products, it became a losing game for many. My news organization, Nucleo, which I co-founded in 2020 to cover the impact of technology on society, has tried to play this game, only to face an existential threat: our audience numbers dropped by half in the past 12 months, mostly because Google referrals plunged 64% in that period.

Many news organizations doing really impactful work face the same issues.

Some recent examples might make my point clearer. After a decade investing in SEO, some news organizations are seeing their traffic coming from Google (one of the main sources) going down because of the AI summaries attached to most search queries. Similarly, in July 2025, Meta said it would begin to charge on a per-message basis for its business transmission lists on WhatsApp, disrupting distribution flows for many news organizations that relied on this distribution (the messaging platform is the default communication tool in Latin America and many countries). Also, when Twitter was sold to Elon Musk and became X, external links were significantly demoted on the newsfeed, significantly affecting news organizations that invested years into building huge followings.

All it takes is one single decision for significant investments to become obsolete.

Another avenue for our journalism

I believe there is a way to reduce this effect Big Tech has over us, and it involves bringing news organizations into closer cooperation. In my time as a 2026 John S. Knight Journalism Fellow at Stanford, I am developing a framework that makes business and institutional collaboration among news organizations easier.

This means creating practical foundations for organizations to work with one another, like legal instructions, partnership ideas, business cooperation methods, technical alternatives and even trying to bring independent tech companies into the loop.

Collaboration needs to be low effort and seen as mutually beneficial for newsrooms, but also frictionless for the audience. It also has to be viewed as crucial to survival, helping newsrooms share access to each other’s communities and distribution networks: tap into one another’s expertise, and strengthen the ecosystem as a whole.

This collaborative approach needs to be considered by all news organizations, given how the tech companies are increasingly moving away from journalism.

I remember when a post we published at Nucleo about a random meme hit 70,000 page views overnight, we felt pretty good with ourselves. It was one of the most stupid, zero-impact things we ever published, but it got ranked up by algorithms.

Not long after that, we published a major scoop about how Meta tried to openly discredit university researchers (link in English) in Brazil, which warned about scams in the company’s ad network. Our reporting helped the civil society to come together and demand an answer from Meta and the authorities, generating great impact, but it barely got 3,500 page views, despite being shared by many people in our network.

It felt like we did something wrong, that it was our fault that the story didn’t reach higher numbers. Of course, it wasn’t: their distribution systems just did not like that content, so it was not ranked up. This is only an anecdote, but illustrates my point clearly.

Big tech profits with high volume and low quality, all the rest — safety, moderation, accountability, transparency — seems to be secondary. Take Meta’s own data, which estimated that the company generated about $16 billion from scammy ads in 2024 (10% of their revenue), according to a Reuters report. That represents six times the total revenue of The New York Times that year and five times the revenue of Grupo Globo, one of Latin America’s main media conglomerates.

But that is their business model, not ours.

The reality is that digital journalism (from major publishers to small local news initiatives) has been following the winds of tech companies for too long. One example is when organizations fired text and photo journalists to build longform video teams — video was declared the future of news, afterall. Then came 3D videos. Then short-form clips for feeds. Then back to longform. Each pivot costing jobs, money and focus.

Those weren’t necessarily wrong moves. News organizations played the cards they were dealt, but the heavy players — some of the wealthiest, most powerful corporations in the history of capitalism — wrote the rules, shuffled the cards, controlled the table and hired the dealers.

I know this sounds a bit like activism, but I assure it’s not. I use Big Tech’s products all the time, those tools have value for me and my team. And, in all fairness, my news organization, Nucleo, has received some grants from Big Tech for innovation projects. We had to play the game to survive.

News organizations should keep making deals and using tools and distribution channels that make sense for their businesses survival, if not conflicting with editorial independence and journalistic ethics. But we also need to build other bridges to make sure our survival does not depend on the mood of a few billionaires that control those companies.

While it is impossible for journalism to ignore the influence, the platforms and the might of Big Tech, we as an industry need to (and can) decrease our dependence on those companies and their algorithms. One way is the continuity and expansion of approaches that news organizations have already been doing for a while, like using agnostic protocols (email, RSS feeds, podcasts etc), audience development and revenue diversification. Another is investing in innovation.

But we should also build a new road, one that is challenging and mostly unexplored, but that can be very fruitful: collaborating much, much more closely with each other — not only in distribution, but also in community and business.

It is counterintuitive that publishers can strike really all sorts of agreements with their main disruptors (Big Tech now gets most of the ad money and page views), but hardly make online distribution deals with other publishers. If we can change this, we have one more route towards independence from algorithms.

You can reach out at spagnuolo@stanford.edu or at my Protonmail account sergio@spagnuolo.news.