News Organizations’ Use of Native Videos on Facebook: Tweaking the Journalistic Field One Algorithm Change at a Time

Guided by field theory, this paper explores the influence of the technological field on the journalistic field by examining how news organizations responded to Facebook’s algorithm tweak, announced in June 2014, that prioritized videos directly uploaded on the social media platform. In announcing the tweak, Facebook did not just change its own internal rules, but also imposed them on users, including news organizations traditionally governed by journalism’s own set of rules. Based on large scale data collected from 232 Facebook Pages operated by major news organizations in the United States, this study found that most news organizations complied with Facebook’s updated rules on Native Videos by significantly increasing their social video production, opening up the journalistic field to the influence of an agent external to journalism.