ABSTRACT
This chapter explores a major shift that has taken place within the media ecosystem within which journalism operates, whereby financial rewards have moved from the producer to the distributor. In August 2018, financial reporters around the globe became extremely excited at news that the tech company Apple had passed the $1 trillion mark in terms of its market capitalisation, the value of all its shares at that time. The British Broadcasting Corporation announced that it was “the first public company worth $1 trillion”, remarking that its shares had risen by more than 50,000 per cent since it had first been listed in 1980. In March 2017, Fortune ran a piece that is typical of the speculative opinion pieces familiar to anyone interested in such stories, betting on whether it would be Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Microsoft, or Tesla that would hit the trillion-dollar mark first.
