Reimagining Journalism: Production, Distribution, and Consumption in the Age of Platforms, AI, and Immersive Media

Journalism is being reshaped from production to consumption. The way news is made, distributed, and encountered is no longer determined only by news organizations, journalists, and audiences. Platforms, algorithms, artificial intelligence, synthetic media, immersive technologies, and changing audience habits now play an equal role in shaping what journalism is and how it works. These are not simply technical changes. They affect the economic, professional, ethical, and democratic foundations of journalism.This Research Topic proceeds from the premise that journalism must be studied as an interconnected system. Changes in production affect distribution. Changes in distribution affect consumption. Changes in consumption then feed back into newsroom routines, editorial priorities, and business models. For these reasons, journalism cannot be understood only by looking at newsrooms, platforms, or audiences separately. It must be examined across the full process through which news is made, circulated, encountered, trusted, and valued.News production is changing rapidly. Generative AI, automated journalism, audience analytics, data-driven workflows, and synthetic media are creating new possibilities, but also new risks. These tools may support journalists in research, translation, summarization, production, and verification. At the same time, they raise questions about authorship, accuracy, transparency, professional judgement, bias, labor, and accountability (Cools & Diakopoulos, 2024; Diakopoulos, 2019; Lewis et al., 2025). The rise of AI in journalism therefore requires more than practical newsroom guidelines. It requires critical analysis of how journalistic authority and professional practice are being reorganized.News distribution has been equally transformed by platform dependency. A small number of technology companies now exercise distinctive forms of power over the infrastructure through which news reaches publics, shaping what is visible, what circulates, what is monetized, and what remains hidden (van Dijck et al., 2018; Nielsen & Ganter, 2022). Through search engines, social media platforms, aggregators, recommender systems, messaging apps, and AI interfaces, platforms have become the primary gateways to news (Poell et al., 2019). Recent work has shown that news organisations' dependency on these infrastructures varies across media systems, but consistently affects editorial, economic, and strategic decision-making (Nicoli et al., 2025). This raises important questions about autonomy, media pluralism, public-interest journalism, and the governance of news infrastructures.These questions are central to the future of public-interest journalism. If journalism is to continue serving public knowledge, civic accountability, and democratic communication, it must be examined not only as a professional practice but also as a public good operating within platformized and AI-mediated environments. The Research Topic is therefore interested in how public-interest journalism can be sustained, protected, and reimagined when visibility, distribution, monetization, and audience access are increasingly shaped by infrastructures controlled by technology companies.News consumption is undergoing a parallel transformation. Audiences increasingly encounter news through personalized feeds, short-form video, influencers, creators, messaging platforms, AI-generated summaries, synthetic media, and conversational search (Böhm et al., 2026). Trust, credibility, and authority are no longer attached only to traditional journalistic institutions; they are negotiated across platforms, formats, and intermediaries. Research shows that publics remain largely sceptical of news produced or summarised by AI, even as their everyday engagement with AI tools continues to grow (Simon et al., 2025). More broadly, AI-based media disruption is reshaping not only how news is produced, but also how it is distributed, encountered, interpreted, and trusted by audiences. As AI systems become more involved in summarising, recommending, and presenting news, the relationship between journalism and audiences may become even more indirect.This Research Topic invites contributions that examine how journalism is being reimagined across production, distribution, and consumption, with particular attention to the future of public-interest journalism in increasingly platformized and AI-mediated media environments. We welcome theoretical, empirical, methodological, and policy-oriented manuscripts from journalism studies, media and communication studies, platform studies, political communication, media policy, audience studies, and related fields.Topics may include, but are not limited to:Production• generative AI in journalism and newsroom workflows• automated journalism and AI-assisted news production• ethics and accountability in AI journalism• synthetic media, deepfakes, and verification practices• immersive journalism, VR, AR, XR, and mixed reality storytelling• journalism, copyright, and AI training dataDistribution• platform dependency and news distribution• search, social media, and AI systems as news gateways• public-interest alternatives to platformized journalism• public-interest journalism in platformized and AI-mediated media environments• policy, regulation, and governance of AI-mediated journalismConsumption• audience trust in AI-generated or AI-assisted news• news avoidance, news fatigue, and changing consumption habits• influencers, creators, and the blurring of journalism and content production• media literacy, synthetic media literacy, and verification literacy.Broader themes• the future of public-interest journalism in digital media environments.This Research Topic will bring together work that does not treat journalism’s future as a matter of technological adoption alone, but asks how journalism is being reorganized, governed, and reimagined in ways that affect public knowledge, democratic communication, and the public interest (Flew et al., 2026).ReferencesBöhm, S., Collins, S., Godulla, A., Keith, S. and Savery, R., eds. (2026) Handbook of AI-based media disruption: Emerging technologies and multidisciplinary perspectives across sectors. Cham: Springer. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-032-07605-2Cools, H. and Diakopoulos, N. (2024) Uses of generative AI in the newsroom: Mapping journalists’ perceptions of perils and possibilities. Journalism Practice. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1080/17512786.2024.2394558Diakopoulos, N. (2019) Automating the news: How algorithms are rewriting the media. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Flew, T., Stepnik, A. and Koskie, T., eds. (2026) Valuing news: Digital platforms and journalism futures. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-95-2341-2Lewis, S. C., Guzman, A. L., Schmidt, T. R. and Lin, B. (2025) Generative AI and its disruptive challenge to journalism: An institutional analysis. Communication and Change, 1, article 9. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1007/s44382-025-00008-xNicoli, N., Maniou, T. A. and Giomelakis, D. (2025) Platform dependency of news media across different media systems: An institutional comparative study of the United Kingdom and Greece. Journal of Digital Media & Policy. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1386/jdmp_00183_1Nielsen, R. K. and Ganter, S. A. (2022) The power of platforms: Shaping media and society. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Poell, T., Nieborg, D. and van Dijck, J. (2019) Platformisation. Internet Policy Review, 8(4). Available at: https://doi.org/10.14763/2019.4.1425Simon, F. M., Nielsen, R. K. and Fletcher, R. (2025) Generative AI and news report 2025: How people think about AI’s role in journalism and society. Oxford: Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism.van Dijck, J., Poell, T. and de Waal, M. (2018) The platform society: Public values in a connective world. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Topic editors: Nicholas Nicoli, Petros Iosifidis Source: https://www.frontiersin.org/research-topics/82525/reimagining-journalism-production-distribution-and-consumption-in-the-age-of-platforms-ai-and-immersive-media