Social media platforms have increasingly become an important way for news organizations to distribute content to their audiences. As news organizations relinquish control over distribution, they may feel the need to optimize their content to align with platform logics to ensure economic sustainability. However, the opaque and often proprietary nature of platform algorithms makes it hard for news organizations to truly know what kinds of content are preferred and will perform well. Invoking the concept of algorithmic ‘folk theories,’ this article presents a study of in-depth, semi-structured interviews with 18 U.S.-based news journalists and editors to understand how they make sense of social media algorithms, and to what extent this influences editorial decision making. Our findings suggest that while journalists’ understandings of platform algorithms create new considerations for gatekeeping practices, the extent to which it influences those practices is often negotiated against traditional journalistic conceptions of newsworthiness and journalistic autonomy.

中文翻译：

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协商自主权：社交媒体算法在编辑决策中的作用

社交媒体平台已逐渐成为新闻机构向其受众分发内容的重要方式。随着新闻机构放弃对发行的控制权，他们可能会觉得有必要优化其内容以与平台逻辑保持一致，以确保经济的可持续性。但是，平台算法的不透明性（通常是专有性）使新闻机构很难真正知道哪些内容是首选内容，并且效果很好。本文引用算法“民间理论”的概念，对18位美国新闻记者和编辑进行了深入，半结构化的采访研究，以了解他们如何理解社交媒体算法，以及在何种程度上产生影响编辑决策。