Pricing, Design and Cultivation – Conceptual Tools for the Normative Assessment of Fairness in the Age of Media Platformization

The platformization of digital media is linked to various crises in digital journalism. At stake are values that define journalism as a multi-layered activity with economic as well as democratic functions. The reinvention of digital journalism is therefore also a reformulation of its normative requirements and self-image. The article argues for a threefold interpretation of the concept of fairness to transform this normatively indeterminate situation into a more definite one. We tie the term back to empirical processes of co-valuation, in which the distributed actors who jointly constitute digital journalism attempt to pragmatically clarify questions of their economic balance (pricing), the anchoring of suitable socio-technical infrastructures (design) and the sustainable safeguarding of critical competencies (cultivation). Thus, we provide a substantial set of tools for the analysis and critical assessment of current developments as well as normative proposals in digital journalism.