Q&A: Nushin Rashidian, Research Fellow at Tow Center’s Publishers and Platforms

We caught up with the creator of Tow Center’s publisher development timeline, Nushin Rashidian, to glean her learnings from studying platforms and publishers for Tow, and what’s next for the publisher development timeline.

The Idea: Can you give us a brief overview of the Platforms and Publishers project at Tow, and your role in it?
NR: I’m a research fellow on Platforms and Publishers, which is the flagship project of the Tow Center, and it’s a multiyear, multipart examination of this transformational relationship. My role involves a tremendous amount of research and reading, but, most importantly, interviews. I’ve done dozens of interviews to understand, for example, how platform distribution affects a subscription supported publisher (Wall Street Journal, for example) compared with a platform-native publisher (NowThis, for example). How do their strategies differ? How do their interactions with platforms differ? How are they rethinking their technologies, their workflows, their editorial priorities? How do those strategies change from platform to platform? These interviews go hand in hand with our Content Analysis Hub that collects data on the frequency and type of content different publishers are posting across platforms, which is a great way to identify trends like Instagram Stories’ rising competition with Snapchat.

We also host policy exchange forums that bring together academics, practitioners, and other stakeholders to talk about issues like free speech and ethics on platforms, and, on the other end of things, we hold focus groups across the country to understand how news consumption is changing in parallel to this platform-publisher merge. These are just a few things we have going on, and we have to stay on our toes with new research questions and projects because the landscape is shifting so quickly. For example, we just brought on Jonathan Albright as our research director, and his work around targeted propaganda online and the election is particularly relevant right now.

Any interesting takeaways or point of views developed from your work on this project?
I didn’t understand the extent of the power of platforms over publishing and the world of information, in part because that power has increased tremendously in the two years I’ve been on the project. Back then it was, OK, Instant Articles means that publishers who want to participate will give away control over distribution in exchange for potential reach and revenue, let’s explore what that means. Now it’s much more urgent and global and dire: the future of publishers, especially ad-supported publishers, is wholly in the hands of these platform companies and their bottom line. The future of news depends on the future of the News Feed, which might be in wearables, it might be in hardware, it might be in whatever direction Facebook decides is most profitable and competitive in terms of reaching users, collecting their data, and serving them ads. (And that doesn’t even take into account the ways in which trust in news is eroding because of how these platforms are handling their power over information and misinformation.)

What is a cool project you’ve been working on lately (either at Tow or in any media projects outside of Tow)?
I’m thinking of ways to expand the platform timeline because the pace and types of developments are so rapidly increasing. I mean, in just the past week, there is so much to share on Russia and Facebook, but the timeline as is gives limited space to each development. So, I’m wondering, could we allow some way for someone who is really interested in the policy side of things to dive deeper. Or, ad tech. I’m fascinated by all the little tweaks around ad types and formats allowed in Instant Articles or AMP, and in the ever-expanding targeting capabilities, and in general how these platform companies are competing for dominance in the ad space, because that totally and directly affects a publishers’ bottom line. So it would be great for the timeline to accommodate more on each of those topics. I’m excited to be working on the timeline with Jon Keegan, who is a Senior Research Fellow, with his expertise in design and development.

(Also, unrelated to my work at Tow, I’m the founder of a news site called Cannabis Wire, which I created after covering cannabis since 2010 and publishing a book about legalization. We are currently undergoing a transformation to become a paid newsletter. I think there is tremendous a opportunity in subscriber-supported news, in particular for those of us focused on specific issues with a very targeted readership.)

What is the most interesting thing that you’ve seen recently from a media outlet other than your own?
I tend to be most interested in the business aspect of this relationship because to me that’s the core. I think newsrooms are doing plenty of innovative projects in terms of story presentation, but the future of journalism depends on the sustainability of journalism, so I’m focused on innovation around how to think about that. In that way, I’ve been paying attention to the increased prioritization of subscribers and also this move toward philanthropic funding (like the The New York Times). Other than that, the Tow Center has been looking into algorithmic accountability for years, and so we’re paying a lot of attention to the work that Julia Angwin is doing right now on ad-targeting at ProPublica, which is excellent. Also, on the platform side of things, one unexpectedly intriguing product is Snap Map, now that we’ve seen how it can be used for news dissemination and gathering, particularly during a natural disaster.

This Spotlight was originally published in the September 18th issue of The Idea. For more Q&As with inside intel like this, subscribe to The Idea, Atlantic Media’s weekly newsletter covering the latest trends and innovations in media.