Digital Journalism

Digital Journalism in the Age of Technogarchy

This special issue introduces the concept of technogarchy to describe a growing concentration of political and economic power among hyper-wealthy individuals, tech companies, and technological infrastructures that increasingly govern public communication.  While concentrations of economic and political power are not per se new, the disruptive moment in the current development lies in the global concentration of information infrastructures in the hands of few, often US-based, companies whose technological and potentially political influence reaches far beyond the borders of the US information space.

These developments now shape journalism on various levels, reaching from professional routines and organisations to news distribution and content. As new alliances form and dependencies deepen, editorial independence, public trust, and journalistic autonomy are at risk. At the same time, the economic precarity of many journalists and journalistic institutions, particularly local and investigative outlets, intensifies, creating downward cycles of dependence, as advertising revenue streams are siphoned off by platform business models and news organizations become reliant on platform visibility, algorithmic favour and, increasingly, the infrastructure and training of large language models.

Drawing from Aristoteles conceptualisation of Oligarchy as the rule of the selected (wealthy) few in contrast to democracy as the rule of the people, the special issue explores whether or in what ways we are witnessing a shift toward a political order, where a small number of private actors exert disproportionate influence over the public sphere and digital communication more generally. Technogarchy thereby not only describes the growing asymmetry of communicative power, but also captures how technological infrastructures are increasingly designed to serve singular economic interests, shaping algorithms, information flows, and civic discourse according to private imperatives rather than public needs. While we do not suggest that technogarchy has supplanted democracy as a system of government, we argue that it increasingly shapes the infrastructures of public communication and shapes journalism and civic discourse to varying degrees depending on one’s position within these systems.

We identify three key dimensions of technogarchy, each describing a form of outsized, cross-national socio-economic influence that affects journalism in distinct yet interconnected ways:

1. Hyper-wealthy private actors whose social and economic status increasingly allows them to act as agenda-setters through their public personas and strategic investments.
2. Ownership and infrastructural control, where the same actors own not just media outlets but also communication platforms and distribution networks.
3. Direct political influence, exercised through lobbying, campaigning, or political appointments that shape policy and regulation (e.g. of media markets, telecommunication industries or media content).

Each of these dimensions of status, ownership, and political power may influence media organizations and journalism in their own specific ways. Yet combined, technogarchy not only forms a three-pronged avenue of influence, but also gives rise to a form of overall system capture: reinforcing spirals of influence and power emerge, wherein powerful individuals and corporations not only shape public discourse and platform governance, but also insulate themselves from accountability and oversight, preventing antitrust measures, undermining media reform initiatives, using their status to attack critical news coverage, and shaping the normative frameworks that guide platform governance discussions.

This marks a break from earlier mass or broadcast media regimes. While wealthy media owners have certainly always attempted to influence politics, their reach was typically limited by regulatory frameworks, public service mandates, and infrastructural separation. Today’s technogarchs occupy multiple layers of the media system simultaneously. This affects media content, communication infrastructure, and tech regulation and allows for deeper and more opaque forms of influence, which, accordingly, is ever-expansive in nature.

Beyond the scope of a single media system, technogarchy also unfolds transnational dynamics. These might consist of ways in which individual media owners evade single-state regulatory oversight or taxation. They may also be interwoven with the state structures that govern international relations, whereby powerful state actors dictate technological standards or de facto govern the communication infrastructures used by both domestic and foreign publics. Such dynamics oftentimes unfold at an extra cost to the Global South, reinforcing land and labor exploitation and inequalities within. They can also include dynamics of “philanthrocapitalism” (Munoriyarwa et al. 2025), by which powerful elites or the corporate entities they own stakes in pursue economic interest under the mantle of foreign philanthropic projects.

Meanwhile, existing digital divides in news production and reception are exacerbated and at times deliberately deepened through technogarchic interventions. This can include the selective expansion of connective infrastructures that favor profitable or politically aligned markets, political actors, or media formats. At the same time, marginalized communities may be systematically excluded from access to quality information environments, entrenching patterns of informational inequality and limiting civic participation in the digital public sphere. This is likely to create and sustain imbalances and asymmetries not only in the direct sense of distribution of hard economic or political capital, but also in the currency of “discursive power” (Jungherr et al. 2019) and within the “attention economy” (Goldhaber 1997), which govern which ideas are spread, discussed, and perceived – and which are systematically disadvantaged within public deliberation processes.

These dimensions and developments create a distinct and escalating set of challenges for journalism and media organizations. Beyond immediate economic and political pressures, a core tension emerges: journalists must investigate and report on the existence and effects of technogarchic power structures, while operating within the very infrastructures, funding arrangements, and visibility logics these structures produce, and partially under increased direct threats against their work.  Operating under these conditions, journalists may see themselves forced to self-censor as a sheer means of professional survival. In parallel, survival strategies of media organizations are likely to include partnerships with tech platforms or reliance on philanthropic funding, which can introduce new forms of influence, further complicating efforts to hold technogarchic power to account.

Yet these new conditions also catalyse a search for democratic counterweights. Emerging efforts include platform cooperatives, open-source civic tech initiatives, public interest algorithms, and policy innovations aimed at reclaiming communication infrastructures for democratic publics. Journalism and civil society, as critical democratic institutions, are uniquely positioned to expose, resist, and reimagine the structures of technogarchic power. How, if at all, has journalism kept up with or critically engaged with metrics and technology-driven tools? What kind of new arrangements have emerged in journalism beyond legacy news organisations?

We invite papers that engage with the concept and the various dimensions of technogarchy and its relation to journalism. Contributions might be focused on one or more of the examples of topics provided below. We encourage theoretical and empirical contributions (using qualitative, quantitative, and/or computational methods), as well as comparative and single-country case studies. We especially invite contributions that employ comparative perspectives elucidating digital journalism in different states, countries, or moments of technogarchy and contributions from traditionally underrepresented contexts.

• How does technogarchy affect editorial independence and journalistic autonomy?
• How does platform & media ownership impact journalistic ethics and accountability?
• Through what mechanisms do technogarchic structures affect press freedom?
• What might regulatory responses to technogarchic dominance of media systems look like?
• How are illiberal media systems & publics linked with technogarchy?
• Counter-models: What innovations in digital journalism might foster more democratic values and journalistic integrity?
• How do the dimensions of technogarchy shape newsroom reactions or journalistic practice?
• What are the transnational dynamics of technogarchy on journalism and media content?
• How do forms of philanthrocapitalism shape local news?
• How do audiences perceive the dimensions of technogarchy?
• Is there a link between technogarchy and epistemic crisis in the public sphere?