ABSTRACT
This chapter examines paradigm shift in how news organizations are increasingly designing and creating their own tools, products, and even entire platforms through the lens of computational journalism (CJ). It explores how CJ and thinking factors into this shift, expound on examples of platforms that are emerging in the industry, and discusses the implications of platforms for media competition, scale, and independence. The chapter suggests that certain conceptual antecedents in CJ are undergirding shifts in the news industry towards the development of platforms. Creating platforms out of reusable code is the key economic benefit to CJ in the long term. In addition to a general tool-orientation and an inclination toward computational thinking, other cultural distinctions in CJ also factor in to the emergence of news platforms. Platforms can be considered either internal product platforms or external industry platforms. Open application programming interfaces and plugin architectures are typical methods for creating industry platforms.
