# data[].attributes.attachment_caption
Online Social Networks and Media Journal

# data[].attributes.headline
Fake news agenda in the era of COVID-19: Identifying trends through fact-checking content

# data[].attributes.subject
Fake news agenda in the era of COVID-19: Identifying trends through fact-checking content

# data[].attributes.attachment_caption
Social Network Analysis and Mining Journal

# data[].attributes.headline
COVID-19 fake news diffusion across Latin America

# data[].attributes.subject
COVID-19 fake news diffusion across Latin America

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Introduction

Fact-checking efforts have been touted among the most promising solutions to fight falseness and information with the intent to harm (Tandoc 2019; Tambuscio and Ruffo 2019). In fact, fact-checking became an important endeavor to mitigate the effects of false information after the recognition that misinformation has a high potential to impact society (Tambuscio et al. 2018). This is especially true after 2016, followed by the US presidential election, marked by the heavy fake news rhetoric. Since then, it is recorded an increasingly rising of fact-checking initiatives across the globe. The practice is defined by assessing the validity of claims made by institutions or public people "to identify whether a claim is factual" (Walter et al. 2020). Thus, the idea behind it is to provide information to improve public discourse.

Furthermore, in times of crises, such as the COVID-19 pandemic, fact-checkers are primarily useful in detecting accidental mistakes, rumors, or false narratives. In addition, the novelty of this strain of the coronavirus that spread quickly throughout the world meant that no one has yet been able to understand the etiology of the pandemic, resulting in uncertainty and fear among the public. This mix of facts, fears, rumors, and speculations provided fertile ground for the dissemination of misleading information and cybercrime on the Internet and became an issue to deal with along with the pandemic itself (Pariser 2012; Wagner 2020). The World Health Organization (WHO) went as far as stating that fake news "spreads faster and more easily than" (Cucinotta and Vanelli 2020) a virus and declared a COVID-19 "infodemic"-a period overabundance of the same information, that had to be tackled alongside the pandemic itself. This dire situation that caused an abundance of content being shared online showed the profound necessity of fact-checking initiatives to combat disinformation (Miller and Conover 2015); similarly to a period of elections, when fact-checking traditionally peaks (Coddington et al. 2014).

In this context, our article proposes to study the diffusion of so-called fake news under the lens of fact-checking initiatives' debunks in Latin America. We conducted an in-depth tracing of COVID-related false information across the region, comparing if there is a pattern of behavior in the debunks of six different countries. Though several studies have reported on the development of fake news and fact-checking organizations in Western societies, little attention has been given to the Global South, more specifically Latin America. Our research aims at filling this gap by drawing on a computational method associated with a mixture of quantitative and qualitative methods to study this topic from the perspective of six countries in the region.

In particular, we propose to answer the following research questions:

(RQ1):

How are these topics intertwined between the different countries?;

(RQ2):

What are the topics that fact-checking initiatives in Latin America covered during the pandemic?

(RQ3):

How are these topics impacted by politics during the period considered?

To address this phenomenon, this article relies on the open Twitter application programming interface (API) connection to gather data from public Twitter accounts of the six major fact-checking agencies in Latin America, namely Argentina ( Chequeado), Brazil ( Agência Lupa), Chile ( Mala Espina Check), Colombia ( Colombia Check from Consejo de Redacciín), Mexico ( El Sabueso from Animal Polótico), and Venezuela ( Efecto Cocuyo). In total, these accounts account for 102,379 tweets that were collected from January 2020 until July 2020, the first wave of COVID-19 infections.

In this study, we combined a Markov-based computational method (Vermeer and Trilling 2020; Ceron et al. 2021) to cluster topics found on short text, like tweets, with network analysis to investigate the dissemination of fake news content across these countries. After careful data processing, we built a Markov-chain-inspired network for each of six countries, which was used after to draw a graph that shows the relations between the tweets' contents of these fact-checking organizations. After performing this network analysis, we also conducted a time-series analysis and in-depth close reading to understand the diffusion of false or misleading narratives in these six countries over the time frame considered.

Our study offers relevant new insights into the dynamics of the dissemination of disinformation online beyond the national level, which poses a threat to society as it has the potential to reach people around the world. Also, our results demonstrated how political disinformation is intertwined with the health crisis during this period considering these six Latin American countries. Last, our method is capable of clustering similar topics in a period known as an infodemic, i.e., containing redundant information, which is consistently backed by our analysis. The contributions made in this study have wide applicability, including slow the spread of false information across countries.

Literature review

Works on fake news and social media

The value of information is more than ever in question. The term fake news has gained popularity in the context of Donald Trump's election for the presidency of the USA in 2016 and the departure of the UK from the European Union (commonly referred to as Brexit), although it has always been a central element of communication (McNair 2017a). And now, within a digital society, where there is an overabundance of information, increased speed and immediacy, and everyone has a voice in social media, the spread of rumors and misinformation is growing fast (McNair 2017b). Questioning the status quo and the veracity of events is positive and necessary in a democracy. However, there must be minimal consensus on the facts, especially those of public interest. The large volume of news in the public sphere in the era of fake news often puts into question the way things happened in reality and reduces people's ability to differentiate the real from the invented.

The popularization of fact-checking initiatives is inserted in a context of dissemination of false information at the most different levels and although they have existed since the 1990s, fact-checking has grown in quantity and scope in Latin America (Schwartz 2020). Prior research suggests that fact-checking resurfaces as a 'reform movement' that seeks to rescue principles that guided modern journalism, especially truth (Graves 2016). In this scenario, these initiatives gain notoriety by presenting themselves as an alternative to guarantee the public information whose veracity has been previously checked.

The potential harmfulness of fake news is magnified when we consider how new technologies are being used together. Deep fakes, unethical algorithms, and filter bubbles are some examples that put into question the way one looks at reality today, affecting aspects of life that go beyond elections. The algorithms created by social networks gave users established filter bubbles (Pennacchiotti and Popescu 2011; Pariser 2012; Bruns et al. 2017) in our society to do what they want us to do and, thus, it ended up generating more trust in users' content than in the stories published by conventional media (Vraga et al. 2020). Filter bubbles also matter for media and fact-checking initiatives, because, as these organizations corrected and verified news, they find difficulty in reaching precisely the users who most need to see it.

Once more, history brings us to the verge of a health crisis that cannot be spared from the phenomenon of fake news. The H1N1 epidemic in 2009, the Ebola epidemic in West Africa in 2014, and debates on vaccines were examples of fertile grounds for the spread of erroneous or misleading contents (Tambuscio et al. 2018; Abramowitz et al. 2017; Hornsey et al. 2018). However, disinformation about COVID-19 seems to constitute an emblematic case because of both the number and the diversity of false or inaccurate news conveyed in their scope and impacts. As a result, the neologism "infodemic" was put forward on February 2\(^{nd}\), 2020, by the World Health Organization, to designate this situation and its dangers (WHO 2020). This pandemic has changed the fact-checking landscape, as managing rumors, dispelling misinformation and conspiracy theories have also become essential to combat the spread of the coronavirus (Dobbs 2020). For novel pandemic diseases, with developments happening in real-time, this becomes a challenge. When social media users began to play a role in all stages of knowledge translation, spreading fake news about the disease and its management became the norm. Thus, this situation has naturally become even more problematic, as we are seen with the COVID-19 pandemic.

Although the so-called fake news has become commonplace, the power of misleading or false information should not be underestimated, as they sow confusion and often cause panic. Platforms, such as Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and Twitter, have begun to delete information that goes against health guidelines, even when it has been shared by personalities from the political world, such as videos showing Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro breaking the rule of social distancing, minimizing the epidemic and defending the use of chloroquine (Walter et al. 2020). Another example was messages from Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro regarding a so-called natural remedy for COVID-19 mixing lemongrass, ginger, and water (Lyons 2020). Also, posts from the former New York City mayor and Donald Trump's personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani defending chloroquine were deleted. These examples allow us to outline important points regarding the spread of fake news surrounding the coronavirus pandemic.

First, there is a strong politicization of information exchange (conspiracy theories, accusations between states, among others), and the divisions, political and ideological, that seem to stir up on social media platforms (Monnier 2020). Beyond being a medical condition with "technical" solutions and a health crisis, the pandemic enters the political field, intrinsically linked to how governments and political leaders are handling the crisis.

Second, the biggest web platforms are facing an avalanche of misleading content (Creech 2020), especially linked to the pandemic, from miraculous cures, racist explanations of the origin of the coronavirus, or even conspiracy theories (Bruns et al. 2020; de Matos 2020; Havey 2020; Singh et al. 2020). And in the end, each platform must develop a response strategy (Creech 2020). The coronavirus is gaining ground and with it false information (Nguyen and Nguyen 2020). A few hours after the speech by the World Health Organization, which made the coronavirus outbreak an "international public health emergency" (Cucinotta and Vanelli 2020), Facebook, Google, and Twitter took turns implementing mechanisms to contain the spread of false information on their networks (Hutchinson 2020). Twitter pledged to help the world have access to reliable information about coronavirus, a complex task when in January 2020, the platform already listed more than 15 million tweets on the subject.

However, these examples do show an unprecedented practice by social networks of intervening in cases of fake news, which could mark a turning point in the policy of moderation of platforms, often criticized before for a certain carelessness (Monnier 2020). A commitment from these networks, which are assuming their role and responsibility as content editors-in an embrionary form as it may be-have been attempting to tackle the problem of disinformation head-on by deleting problematic messages, even when these emanated from legitimate public figures (Monnier 2020). As fact-checking agencies are overwhelmed by the sheer number of fake news circulation on the different platforms and have to make the hard choice of what to debunk-considering the possible implications and reach of each misinformation circulating online, platform taking responsibility is another step to help control the infodemic that surged alongside the spread of the coronavirus.

Works on Twitter

Rumors, misinformation, and false information on social media have been a global issue that is exacerbated during and after disasters and emergencies. Several methods are reported in the literature to address this issue. Among Twitter-based studies, a rich body of work has been carried out using sentiment analysis to understand users' perceptions (Zeng et al. 2007; Francia et al. 2019). Other studies have combined social network analysis with sentiment analysis to take a step further on their analysis (Meyer and Reiter 2004; Bruns et al. 2020). However, a new wave of studies has been exploring how to use social networks to classify topics (Himelboim et al. 2017) or even identify users' roles and actions in political conversations (Santos and Maurer 2020; Cossu et al. 2016). Topic models, such as the latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA) method, became the norm to extract the main subject of the texts (de Souza et al. 2020). However, previous studies have identified that some of those methods, like LDA, require more lexicon and more corpus (Zhao et al. 2011; Hong and Davison 2010; Ceron et al. 2021).

Also, the substantial advances in computational power helped to improve algorithm precision to introduce novel methods for the identification of important topics in social networks. An example is trend-detecting algorithms based on hidden Markov models that use trained models to find observations of topics in a dataset (Zhao et al. 2013; Liu and Guo 2011). Similarly, other methods for the identification of topics in social networks emerged from network topology (Budak et al. 2011). Another approach was using a dictionary learning-based framework for topic modeling in social media (Kasiviswanathan et al. 2011). Last, but important, LDA together text mining techniques became two of the most popular, if not the most ones, forms to identify topics nowadays (Blei et al. 2003; de Souza et al. 2020). On the other hand, tweets are compromised to only 280 characters, which limits their corpus, challenging to cluster topics using LDA, as shown in previous studies (Zhao et al. 2011; Hong and Davison 2010).

A new approach is therefore needed for understanding the diffusion of false information on Twitter and in social media in general. Therefore, our work aims to fill this gap as it differs in several key points from the aforementioned studies. The vast majority of methods focus on the classification of topics in large corpora, while our proposed methodology presents a framework for the extraction of similar content using different Twitter accounts and limited corpora. Inspired by the Markov chains, our approach creates clusters of topics that have similar content or keywords. In this way, we can combine different datasets to find these clusters to understand the similarity of these topics. Moreover, we combine this Markov-inspired method with time-series analysis and qualitative approach to have a better understanding of the problem studied. Below, we describe the data and methods used in this study.

Data and methods

Data description

Our study focuses on the tweets published between January and July 2020 from the profiles of six of the major fact-checking agencies from Latin America (see Table 1). Chequeado, from Argentina, has been online since 2010, and it is the first portal in Latin America dedicated to fact-checking. The initiative is a non-partisan and non-profit digital medium, dedicated to verifying public discourse and fighting disinformation. In the same vein, Agência Lupa was founded in 2016 and is the first organization to fully dedicate to fact-checking in Brazil. As a news agency, it sells its debunked reports for publication in other outlets and is also part of Facebook's third-party fact-checking program. Beyond that, the Brazilian initiative developed educational programs that promote training, workshops, and lectures on fact-checking and disinformation.

Another organization that is emerging in the region is Mala Espina Check, an independent project that started in 2019. The initiative proposes to contribute to the Chilean citizenship fight against misinformation and be a tool for the community, clarifying doubts about incorrect information that appears, above all, on social networks. ColombiaCheck, founded in 2016, is a project of Consejo de Redacción, a non-profit, non-partisan organization, that brings together more than 100 associated journalists in Colombia to promote investigative journalism. The project consists of a digital, open and collaborative platform based on fact-checking.

Similarly, El Sabueso is the fact-checking branch of the Mexican news outlet, Animal Político, and it seeks to present the true facts unaffected by agenda or biases. Last, Efecto Cocuyo is a Venezuelan website devoted to independent media. The organization was founded in early 2015 by three experienced journalists, who decided to join after recent issues of censorship in Venezuela. Efecto Cocuyo was first launched on Twitter but its portal went to air after receiving funding from the public and international philanthropic foundations. Since then, it has become an important source of information about Venezuela. Beyond investigative reporting, the outlet has also dedicated itself to debunk mis- and disinformation about Venezuela.

Table 1 Information about the studied fact-checking organizations

The selection of these organizations was motivated by two reasons. First, they are widely recognized in the fact-checking scene and follow the transparency standard of the International Fact-Checking Network (IFCN), an alliance that abides by to promote excellence in fact-checking (IFCN 2012). Second, these outlets are widely present in social media and use their Twitter accounts to disseminate information and debunks. In this way, we could collect a total of 102,379 tweets from these six initiatives. Before we conducted our analysis, we filtered the tweets that were not related to fact-checking. After data cleansing, our dataset was composed of 100,916 tweets. In the case of Efecto Cocuyo, the organization does not have a detached account to disseminate debunks. However, the Venezuelan outlet uses the hashtag #CocuyoChequea when a tweet is related to its fact-checking branch. This was used for further cleaning.

Data preparation

Our dataset was composed of tweets and their metadata in two languages, Spanish and Portuguese. Before assembling the pool of data for our computational method, a pre-processing phase was necessary. In general, Twitter data have a lot of noise among words. In this step, we eliminated stop words and punctuation signs that were not necessary to understand the context and meaning of the tweets. Additionally, the signals of "RT" from the retweets, mentions (@), and hashtags \((\#)\) were also removed. Lastly, we also evaluated the different models of lexicons for Spanish and Portuguese languages to map common words or expressions that were not relevant and could be removed from the data. To illustrate, fact-checking expressions, such as "This is false" and "We verified," were removed.

After a devised pre-processing strategy, these tweets were used to build a network, which was inspired by Markov chains. These are an important mathematical tool in stochastic processes and are commonly applied to a myriad of fields, such as economics and finance. In finance, it can be used to predict macroeconomic situations like cycles between recession and expansion or even market crashes. Also, banks use Markov chains to predict asset and option prices or calculate credit risks. In communications, prior studies used Markov chains to describe the news user journey while navigating in a news portal (Vermeer et al. 2020; Viner 2016). However, the application of Markov chains is yet limited in communications (Vermeer et al. 2020; Vermeer and Trilling 2020).

Data analysis

In our study, a graph \(G = (V, E)\) is generated composed of the vertices \(V = \{v_1,v_2,v_3\ldots v_n\}\), which here represent the words that pertain a tweet after pre-processing, and the edges \(E = \{e_1,e_2,e_3\ldots e_m\}\), which represent a sequence of words, i.e., if two words are followed in a sentence, they are connected by an edge. To illustrate this, we built Fig. 1 based on the sentence below from Efecto Cocuyo:

After the preprocessing, the tweet is presented in this way:

As it can be seen in Fig. 1, each tweet will be presented with \(n=|V|\) vertices and \(m=|E|\) edges, which depicts a sequence of words. In this study, the graph is directed, thus, it respects the text structure. In addition, each edge has a weight \(W = \{w_1,w_2,w_3\ldots w_m\}\) that represents the number of times two words were connected in the dataset. In fact, this graph concretely demonstrates the relation between two words visually and also gives a different weight to the edge of word pairs that repeats in the long run (Cordeiro et al. 2018; Ergüner Özkoç 2020).

For each country, we built a Markov-inspired network that connects words in the sequence that they appear in the tweet (Ceron et al. 2021). Although they were directed graphs, in the network analysis we consider only the most used words in the dataset, i.e., the words with heavier degrees in the graph. The degree refers to the sum of in-degree (number of incoming edges) and out-degree (number of outgoing edges). Furthermore, only the degrees above 10 were retained to highlight only the most frequent words.

After that, each degree was normalized to identify the percentage of occurrences in the country's graph, which was referred to as "weight" in this study. It was necessary to adjust their values to a notionally common scale based on their proportionality in their dataset (i.e., of each fact-checking agency). Importantly, only Agência Lupa (Brazil) has its content in Portuguese. Therefore, we translate it using googletrans, a free and unlimited Python library, that translates texts via requests using Google Translate API. A triple was then created following the pattern: source (country), target (word), and weight. The set of triples of the six countries was used to generate an edge-weighted directed graph to represent the common words among the dataset from different countries.

The graph is composed of ordered pair, including the countries set \(C = \{c_1,c_2,c_3\ldots c_n\}\) connected to the word set \(W = \{w_1,w_2,w_3\ldots w_n\}\), through a weighted and directed edge set \(E = \{e_1,e_2,e_3\ldots e_m\}\), corresponding to the weight of a determined word in the country dataset. To better visualize it, the point size of the font uses the weighted degree value of each node. The weighted degree is the sum of all edge weights connected to one node, as defined by (McPherson 2001). This metric was chosen to better visualize the words that have more mentions in the different countries. In addition, the words were clustered according to the frequency that they appear in the countries. Thus, there are several words that are used in more than one country; however, our study only considered the words that were used in at least three countries. We did not consider common words, such as "year," "month," "days," "number," among others.

Thus, we could design a graph that could unite the different fluxes of information from the various countries, as shown in Fig. 2, that was implemented in the network analysis software Gephi (Bastian et al. 2009). In it, we could identify topics that were majority diffused across countries to evaluate its evolutions temporally and identify the patterns of dissemination of mis- and disinformation. In Sect. 4.1, we present samples of these false narratives. After that, we present, in Sect. 4.2, time-series analyses of six terms that were highly mentioned by these fact-checking organizations to identify the diffusion over time. These trends represent the mostly used by these organizations: CASOS (cases, in English), CORONAVIRUS, CUARENTENA (quarantine), PANDEMIA (pandemic), VACUNA (vaccine), and lastly, some presidents were highly mentioned during this period. To evaluate the latter, we create a category denoted PRESIDENTS, which covers the mention of each head of state in their respective countries (see Sect. 4.3). To better visualize the evolution of these topics (Figs. 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8), we normalized our dataset by calculating the percentage of each term in relation to the total of tweets in a certain period of seven days. Thus, we could achieve consistency in the results that allow us to identify the evolution of these main terms during the pandemic outbreak. In addition, to justify our observations, we crossed our data with links to news articles or fact-checks using googlenews, a Python library to access Google News API. In the following section, we discuss our findings in relation to these questions and in the light of the theoretical framework described earlier.

Analysis and discussion

Our results are presented in three sections, each answering one of our research questions. In the first section, we present the validity of our computational method by demonstrating the use of network analysis on how topics are closely interwoven between the different countries ( RQ1). We then follow up with a discussion of the topics that were mostly covered during the pandemic by fact-checking initiatives in the six Latin America ( RQ2). Lastly, our data show that, in fact, the dissemination of fake news in the pandemic was also impacted by politics during the period ( RQ3).

The intertwined process of dissemination of disinformation

We begin this analysis with an overview of the network structure between the topics in relation to the countries during the time frame. In Fig. 2, it is possible to see the edges intertwined in different countries, which means that these words were also mentioned in the other nations. Our analysis suggests that there are terms that become more evident in certain countries than others. But, on the other hand, it reveals a strong connection between the countries on certain topics.

By analyzing the network, we can say that the graph is structured more similar to power-law networks than to random networks. This similarity is due to the fact that the countries represent hubs in these networks, while words are the final nodes. In this network, however, high degree nodes are less connected to one another, i.e., the countries.

We selected the narratives, for instance, about the dissemination of rumors that the pandemic outbreak was related to the fifth generation technology standard for broadband cellular networks, commonly known as 5G. In Mexico, it was firstly reported 5G rumors in mid-April and it remains to be seen in the dataset until the end of the period examined in this article. But that is not seen in other examined countries. Three days later, the Chilean fact-checking, Mala Espina Check, also verified rumors about 5G and published the same verification in its Twitter account over April and June. In Colombia, the dissemination of false information drawing connections between COVID-19 and 5G only began to be debunked in May, but continues towards the end of July 2020.

Similarly, Venezuela and Argentina have also shared debunks about conspiracy theories linking 5G and the pandemic outbreak from May to July 2020. On the contrary, Brazilian fact-checking agency, Agência Lupa, has only published reports that evaluate distinct claims about 5G in two moments: early-May and end-June. It is notable that in all these countries 5G is not deployed or is in trial phases, conversely of Western countries that have seen a full expansion of this novel broadband cellular networks. This result ties well with previous studies wherein shows that some false information about 5G technology has spread around the world during the pandemic (Bruns et al. 2020) and also uncertainty and fear of the unknown are fertile ground for the dissemination of misleading or false information (Pariser 2012; Wagner 2020).

Table 2 Summary of tweets that were common in different Latin American countries

Other fact-check stories that received great prominence in most of the selected outlets are regarding the origin, diagnosis, treatment, prevention, and spread of the virus. There was a substantial common ground in false claims about interventions and practices to help prevent coronavirus. An example is the false claims that lemon juice could inactivate the virus. It started first in Brazil, where a short text was shared in social media that suggested a 'prevention' against COVID-19 was to drink a daily dose of water with lemon and vitamin C at the beginning of March. A couple of days later, in Argentina, the same false claims were shared. Four days later, a Venezuelan deputy made a video sharing a receipt that includes ginger, lemon juice, honey, and pepper as a 'natural' way to protect against the coronavirus.

A similar pattern of results was obtained in fact-checked content that was published before the pandemic outbreak hit Latin America in March. In January, when Australia was impacted by a bushfire crisis, false stories were disseminated in these countries. First, a satellite image of Australia burning was shared in Argentina, then the same story was also spread in Colombia. With a slightly different approach, rumors were diffused in Brazil and Mexico that claimed, respectively, humans caused the fires and not a climate change phenomenon. Another false claim argued that the rain ended the wildfires. Similarly, another false story that was repeatedly shared in these countries has related to the assassination of Iranian major general Qasem Soleimani by the US forces while he was on his way to meet Iraqi Prime Minister Adil Abdul-Mahdi in Baghdad. In Brazil, Colombia, and Mexico, rumors were linking politicians to Mr. Soleimani.

The results of the computational experiment found clear support that there is a common ground of topics of rumors and false claims that were disseminated between these countries, based on the important similarities that are visible across the network analysis and in our in-depth close reading of these tweets. Under certain assumptions, this can allow some generalizations that are visible across nations and cultures. Despite these similarities, we could identify that there were also some important differences in terms of the fact-check stories that these outlets debunked to curtail the proliferation of fake news that presented the individuality of each country. Thus, by answering RQ1, this article makes a significant contribution to this debate by proposing an experiment that analyzed the terms that emerged in the debunks of fact-checking initiatives and showed that the disinformation is consistently traveling across nations. Also, we explore how some of these topics also traveled over time from one country to another, suffering adaptations but that maintain their essence. In addition, these fact-checks cover different social media platforms, which potentially show that these misinformation narratives are also traveling across social media platforms.

An infodemic that overwhelms us

In order to answer the research question RQ2, we analyzed the nodes of Fig. 2 that have a large number of connections, not considering words that do not aggregate any information, such as PERSONAS (people). This analysis found evidence again for a period of an overabundance of the same information (Yuan et al. 2019). Our results cast a new light on the evolution of the main false and misleading information spread during the 2020 pandemic. Through a time-series analysis, we could identify the evolution of five main topics based on the tweets that these fact-checking organizations shared during the time frame considered.

Namely, these terms were: CASOS (cases), coronavirus, CUARENTENA or QUARENTENA (quarantine), PANDEMIA (pandemic), VACUNA or VACINA (vaccine). In the following paragraphs, we present these results and illustrate how the diffusion of false claims or rumors were linked to the evolution of the pandemic in the region. In Figs. 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 and 8, the values were normalized within each country's dataset, thus, it shows the percentage of tweets in relation to a certain topic in a period of seven days starting on January 1. Of course, the bigger the number, the more debunks can be found in this certain period. We decided to look at a period of seven days, once debunks demand time, and fact-checkers do not always fact-check misleading or false narratives at the exact time they appear. Also, we are looking at topics that are related to fake news, which requires a larger amount of information to identify clusters of topics that exhibit similar behavioral patterns.

The first cases of SARS-CoV2 infection in Latin America were recorded in late February. The confirmation came from Brazil that turned into the first country in the region with the disease (Shawn 2015). In our dataset, we could identify an increasing growth of information debunking that mentioned the term "cases" when the pandemic hit Latin America. From these results, it is clear that countries like Chile, Colombia, Mexico, and Brazil on a smaller scale, suffered from rumors and allegations related to coronavirus cases at the beginning of the pandemic in the region, but it went down after the first weeks, as shown in Fig. 3. In particular, Brazilian debunks about cases lasting throughout the period with a small peak at the end of April led by rumors spreading about asymptomatic cases are not contagious and also a false narrative that there was a reduction in new infection cases around the world (Afonso 2020a, c).

On the other hand, the term "coronavirus" that was merged with similar terms, such as COVID-19 or SARS-CoV2, has shown a consistent pattern in most countries during the time frame considered. In particular, Venezuela showed a tendency that was a bit different from the others. The country had a major growth when the first confirmed case appeared in Latin America (Shawn 2015) and since May 2020, it has reduced the number of debunks with the term "coronavirus," "COVID-19," or "SARS-CoV2."

These results led to a conclusion of an overabundance of false information about the virus, with a fallen tendency towards the end of the period analyzed (see Fig. 4). We speculate that this might be due to the fact that the number of cases reached a plateau only by mid-July after a long period of higher levels of infection, resulting in a loss of interest by either the fake news disseminators or the fact-checking initiatives (Buckeridge 2020).

In our time-series analysis, we could also identify that the dissemination of false claims about "quarantine" is another important topic of debate. Our findings show that there are interests and ideologies underneath the pandemic coronavirus. For example, in Argentina, where quarantine was stricter, the stories and debunks about this topic have been carried out by Chequeado, the Argentine fact-checking organization, during most of the time frame of this study (Di Santi 2020).In the same vein, Venezuela also resented a consistent level of debunks about this topic since late April 2020, when the Venezuelan government announced the alarm status and also established a "mobility card" to restrict the circulation of people and reduce the effects of the pandemic (Di Santi 2020). On the other hand, in the other countries, debunks about "quarantine" have been far more visible at the beginning of the pandemic than at the end of the period analyzed (see Fig. 6).

The fear and uncertainty of vaccination have exacerbated the dissemination of fact-checks about this topic, and consequently, the so-called fake news appeared from the confirmation of the first case in Latin America until the end of the time frame analyzed, with special peaks during the last two months when the vaccines were already in trials worldwide, as seen in Fig. 7. The proportion of disinformation about vaccines is bigger in Brazil, Colombia and Venezuela than in other countries. This can be explained by many reasons. In Venezuela, there was a number of false content related to the use of Bacillus Calmette-Guérin (BCG) vaccine against the COVID-19, which this immunization is primarily used against tuberculosis and there was no proof of the plausibility of efficacy against the novel coronavirus. Also, the country suffered with criminal groups who invaded houses creating false narratives that they were applying vaccines against COVID-19, which, in truth, served to rob those people.

In Colombia, the debunks clarified that there was no vaccine available yet to the population while they were already being developed and tested in other countries. In the case of Brazil, the country took part in several vaccine trials, which generated rumors and fears from the population. The fact-checks clarified that there is no evidence of negative effects during this phase. Another reason might be political, as it will be discussed later, as the country's president is prejudiced against the Chinese vaccine (Soares 2020), resulting in misleading information about this vaccine. Also, false information about the trials of Sinovac's vaccine was common, such as the company tested only in monkeys, which was debunked by Agência Lupa(Afonso 2020b). Lastly, the fear that vaccines might work or not and when they will be available has generated many rumors in the country.

Politics and Pandemic, a perfect storm

As mentioned before, our data have also revealed a significant political influence on the debate of the pandemic ( RQ3). The political instability and polarization in these countries have influenced a range of false or misleading information. In Brazil, the political turmoil took the agenda of the fact-checking agency that had to check more Bolsonaro-related content, from late February to July, as seen in Fig. 8. An example happened when there was fake news related to the former justice minister, Sérgio Moro, who resigned from his position after divergences with the president, which ramped up fake news about the former minister (de Matos 2020). It is by now generally accepted that continued denials of the threat the pandemic poses by Jair Bolsonaro, Brazilian president, who went against his own health ministry's advice and had to change the Minister of Health more than once, have generated considerable dissemination of false information by his supporters.

Figure 8 also shows that there were a great number of mentions in debunks related to heads of states in other countries. In Argentina, they were also suffering from rumors against its president, Alberto Fernández, who decided to adopt a strict lockdown that produced dissatisfaction from his opposition. Similar to Bolsonaro, the Mexican president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, took a skeptical view on social isolation at the beginning of the crisis, which led to a number of fact-checks about the importance of quarantine. These findings show that politics is strongly intertwined with the health crisis and fake news. Furthermore, this also reveals that political decisions can lead to drastic consequences to the quality of information consumed by society.

Conclusion

By looking at 102,379 tweets from six major fact-checking agencies, this study allowed us to conclude that the so-called fake news travels beyond countries' borders and are intertwined with the political situation of each country. Our computational method obtained robust results in identifying the main terms that were being used, and through these words, we could find the common topics that arose in these countries. In addition, this method allowed us to detect the COVID-19 narratives without the need to read every single tweet.

In the world, fact-checkers have been playing an important role in showing the fake news that were being spread in their countries (Tandoc 2019). Our study shows that these fact-checking agencies act primarily on social media, such as Twitter, to disseminate their debunks and act as a stop-gap measure to correct the fake news that is being spread in this same environment. These organizations played an active role during the pandemic, which, in some cases, complements governmental activities in the combat of the pandemic. These debunks showed fundamental to diminish the rumors and false narratives, which is putting lives at risk, as seen in Argentina, where a kid drank bleach to prevent infection by the coronavirus (LA NACION 2020).

Furthermore, in our network analysis, we identified that the words are strongly connected among these different nations, although our network is structured more similar to a free-scale graph, in which the countries represent the hubs. As expected, our results provide evidence for the period of an abundance of the same information, i.e., an infodemic. The fact-checking agencies have had to debunk false or inaccurate information about cases, coronavirus, quarantine, pandemic, and vaccine that were clearly linked to the evolution of the pandemic in all of these six countries studied. By analyzing these most common terms that have a large number of connections, it shows a strong consistency throughout the entire observation period.

Our findings have also shown that a large part of debunks related to the COVID-19 pandemic emerges at a certain time and continues to threaten citizens for a long period of time. In our in-depth close reading, we could see that this is possible because some fake news revamp and adapt their format to stay active for a long period of time. Also, our analysis showed that some relevant findings related to debunks of international topics, such as the Australia bushfires and the assassination of Iranian major general Qasem Soleimani, are associated to local politicians. These two topics were popularly debunked in the fact-checking initiatives of the countries analyzed but Efecto Cocuyo, the Venezuela fact-checking organization. We speculate that this might be due to the escalated political situation in Venezuela after the US sanctions made the country more closed to the outside. Future studies could fruitfully explore this issue further by qualitative study with fact-checkers in Venezuela to understand what they cover and what are the main fake news topics that emerge in the country.

With respect to the influence of politics during the pandemic, it is well-known that the politicization of information has made fake news ramp up across platforms. Broadly translated our findings indicate that politics play an important role in shaping the dissemination of rumors and false information. Misinformation and false information are a profoundly complex issue that involves platforms, governmental institutions, policy reviews, regulatory boards and, as such, these are issues that fact-checking agencies alone will not solve, even though they are an important part of the equation. Looking at the fact-checks, we can say that there are political topics intertwined with the health crisis, which, in some instances, draw the attention of the pandemic. This can lead to drastic consequences, specifically danger to people's lives. Future studies could fully investigate the dynamics between politics and the COVID-19 crisis.

Our original method helped to develop a simple but consistent analysis of the diffusion of "fake news" across Latin American countries. In part, our algorithm worked well due to the similarity between Portuguese and Spanish languages. Future research should certainly test whether debunks of other languages would work as expected. In particular, future studies could examine the dissemination of fake news content in the Americas.

An apparent limitation of the method is that it is based on debunks, which can lead to a selective bias, as these initiatives pick and choose what to scrutinize (Ceci and Williams 2020). Inclusively, scholarly literature has shown that these organizations have been suffering from accusations of political bias due to their selection of content to debunk (Dobbs 2012). Because of these potential limitations, we cannot say that these topics are the only misleading or false narratives disseminated on social media platforms, but these debunks serve to shed light on relevant topics that emerged during the crisis.

Another limitation of this study is that it could be argued that fact-checking initiatives have different forms of dissemination of debunks that can directly influence our results, such as repeated tweets of the same fact-check story or relying on other social media platforms. Therefore, these data are a sample of the fake news narratives disseminated during the period. Further work is certainly required to disentangle these complexities in Latin America, potentially through qualitative research with practitioners to better understand how these organizations interact and relate among them. Also, future research could perform a network analysis over time to have a better understanding of how these topics could be addressed in the future to avoid diffusion beyond where it started.

In fact, we would be remiss if we did not point that there needs to be a joint action by governments, educators, laws, institutions, and platforms, together with fact-checking agencies to circulate proper information content, and also discouraging and stopping disinformation campaigns.

In conclusion, the pandemic has served to consolidate the need for and an awareness of the importance of this branch in the journalistic sector (Monnier 2020), despite its limitations (Bigot 2019). We argue that it is undeniable that fact-checking initiatives, just as journalism itself, are essential to combat the spread of misinformation online. We argue that, despite all shortcomings, these fact-checks represent a strong indicator of the main fake narratives that are disseminated in the countries, which shed light on relevant topics that emerged on social media platforms. Finally, our analysis reveals opportunities to understand the diffusion of these "fake news" in Latin American countries to slow the spread of false information, and avoid people getting affected by these narratives in future events.

Acknowledgements

This project was partially funded by the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Sklodowska Curie grant agreement No 765140.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

1. Federal University of Sao Paulo, Av. Cesare Mansueto Giulio Lattes, 1201, São José dos Campos, Brazil

Wilson Ceron & Marcos G. Quiles

2. University of Toulouse III - Paul Sabatier, 115d Route De Narbonne, 31077, Toulouse Cedex 4, France

Gabriela Gruszynski Sanseverino

3. University of Navarra, Campus Universitario s/n, Pamplona, Spain

Mathias-Felipe de-Lima-Santos

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Wilson Ceron.

Additional information

Publisher's Note

Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.

About this article

Cite this article

Ceron, W., Gruszynski Sanseverino, G., de-Lima-Santos, MF. et al. COVID-19 fake news diffusion across Latin America. Soc. Netw. Anal. Min. 11, 47 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13278-021-00753-z
Download citation
Keywords

Fact-checking

Twitter

Pandemic

Infodemic

Latin America

Fake news

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
COVID-19 fake news diffusion across Latin America - Social Network Analysis and Mining

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Fact-checking verifies a multitude of claims and remains a promising solution to fight fake news. The spread of rumors, hoaxes, and conspiracy theories online is evident in times of crisis, when fake news ramped up across platforms, increasing fear and confusion among the population as seen in the COVID-19 pandemic.

# data[].attributes.headline
 Artificial Intelligence in News Media: Current Perceptions and Future Outlook 

# data[].attributes.subject
 Artificial Intelligence in News Media: Current Perceptions and Future Outlook 

# data[].attributes.body
Journalism and Media Journal

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Previous Article in Journal

Previous Article in Special Issue

All articles published by MDPI are made immediately available worldwide under an open access license. No special permission is required to reuse all or part of the article published by MDPI, including figures and tables. For articles published under an open access Creative Common CC BY license, any part of the article may be reused without permission provided that the original article is clearly cited.

Feature Papers represent the most advanced research with significant potential for high impact in the field. Feature Papers are submitted upon individual invitation or recommendation by the scientific editors and undergo peer review prior to publication.

The Feature Paper can be either an original research article, a substantial novel research study that often involves several techniques or approaches, or a comprehensive review paper with concise and precise updates on the latest progress in the field that systematically reviews the most exciting advances in scientific literature. This type of paper provides an outlook on future directions of research or possible applications.

Editor's Choice articles are based on recommendations by the scientific editors of MDPI journals from around the world. Editors select a small number of articles recently published in the journal that they believe will be particularly interesting to authors, or important in this field. The aim is to provide a snapshot of some of the most exciting work published in the various research areas of the journal.

You seem to have javascript disabled. Please note that many of the page functionalities won't work as expected without javascript enabled.

School of Communication, University of Navarra, 31009 Pamplona, Navarra, Spain

Institute of Science and Technology, Federal University of São Paulo, São Paulo 04021-001, Brazil

Author to whom correspondence should be addressed.

Academic Editor: Andreu Casero-Ripolles

Received: 30 September 2021 / Revised: 17 December 2021 / Accepted: 23 December 2021 / Published: 30 December 2021

In recent years, news media has been greatly disrupted by the potential of technologically driven approaches in the creation, production, and distribution of news products and services. Artificial intelligence (AI) has emerged from the realm of science fiction and has become a very real tool that can aid society in addressing many issues, including the challenges faced by the news industry. The ubiquity of computing has become apparent and has demonstrated the different approaches that can be achieved using AI. We analyzed the news industry's AI adoption based on the seven subfields of AI: (i) machine learning; (ii) computer vision (CV); (iii) speech recognition; (iv) natural language processing (NLP); (v) planning, scheduling, and optimization; (vi) expert systems; and (vii) robotics. Our findings suggest that three subfields are being developed more in the news media: machine learning, computer vision, and planning, scheduling, and optimization. Other areas have not been fully deployed in the journalistic field. Most AI news projects rely on funds from tech companies such as Google. This limits AI's potential to a small number of players in the news industry. We made conclusions by providing examples of how these subfields are being developed in journalism and presented an agenda for future research. View Full-Text

▼ Show Figures

Figure 1

de-Lima-Santos, M.-F.; Ceron, W. Artificial Intelligence in News Media: Current Perceptions and Future Outlook. Journal. Media. 2022, 3, 13-26. https://doi.org/10.3390/journalmedia3010002

AMA Style

de-Lima-Santos M-F, Ceron W. Artificial Intelligence in News Media: Current Perceptions and Future Outlook. Journalism and Media. 2022; 3(1):13-26. https://doi.org/10.3390/journalmedia3010002

Chicago/Turabian Style

de-Lima-Santos, Mathias-Felipe, and Wilson Ceron. 2022. "Artificial Intelligence in News Media: Current Perceptions and Future Outlook" Journalism and Media 3, no. 1: 13-26. https://doi.org/10.3390/journalmedia3010002

Article Access Map by Country/Region

Back to Top Top

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Artificial Intelligence in News Media: Current Perceptions and Future Outlook

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
In recent years, news media has been greatly disrupted by the potential of technologically driven approaches in the creation, production, and distribution of news products and services. Artificial intelligence (AI) has emerged from the realm of science fiction and has become a very real tool that can aid society in addressing many issues, including the challenges faced by the news industry.

# data[].attributes.attachment_caption
Digital Brazilian News Players Find in Technology New Ways to Bring Revenue and Competitive Advantage – Digital Journalism Journal

# data[].attributes.headline
 Digital News Business Models in the Age of Industry 4.0

# data[].attributes.subject
 Digital News Business Models in the Age of Industry 4.0

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Introduction

Thirty years have passed since Tim Berners-Lee developed the World Wide Web, and journalism is being hit by the forces of the Fourth Industrial Revolution. While the first three industrial revolutions were based, respectively, on mechanization, mass production, and information technology (Toffler 1980), the new revolution is about merging physical and digital technologies. Also known as Industry 4.0, it aims to continue delivering digital technology into the workspace (Schwab 2017).

The media is one of the sectors most affected by technology and the rapid speed with which these changes are taking place (Villi and Picard 2019). New protocols associated with innovation in product and process development, and also in people and content management practices, have brought about positive features for understanding this changing activity (Anderson, Bell, and Shirky 2012). Data, automation, and collaboration have become novel forms of profitability for digital news business models (de-Lima-Santos and Mesquita 2021a). Furthermore, social, economic, cultural, and regional differences can interfere with the development of companies’ strategies (Wirtz et al. 2016).

A new ecology has arisen as a result of the Internet; thus, news outlets have to face new competitors, audience fragmentation, and decreasing revenues (Picard 2014). Moreover, the information market has shifted toward the zero-marginal-cost (or nearly free of charge) economy (Rifkin 2014), forcing a reconceptualization of media business models. This article uses the definitions of business models as they are presented in Johnson et al. (2008), which describes them using a four-element framework: customer value proposition (solving customers’ problems and satisfying their needs), profit formula, resources needed, and key processes. Accordingly, the business model perspective for media companies involves “creating new processes, products, and ways of presenting content, and changing the relationships [with audiences]” (Villi and Picard 2019, 121). By incorporating these elements, companies can create new products that disrupt competitors and bring about innovation.

Nevertheless, innovation is hardly encouraged in journalism, and it changes mainly when new players enter the market, which consequently devolves upon “reactive, defensive and pragmatic traits” (Boczkowski 2005, 51). Thus, the crisis that journalism and legacy publishers faced has set the stage for new actors. The so-called digital-native media primarily led this movement. These organizations have been repositioning themselves away from the aggregation of secondhand content to generate quality journalism at a competitive level with the best old-guard media (Tandoc 2018). In Brazil, independent and digital-native media have played a significant role in covering topics not normally covered by legacy media (Ganter and Paulino 2021).

Other studies about innovation in digital-native media have examined the United States and Europe (Westergaard and Schultz Jørgensen 2019). However, no study, to our knowledge, has looked at Brazil, a leading country within the Global South. To fill this gap in the literature, this article identifies cases that demonstrate how digital news organizations are addressing technological innovations in Brazil, which presents a complex national reality due to its continental proportions and high geographic and economic diversity.

Viewing this phenomenon under the lens of technological determinism and following the contrast of analytical frameworks to evaluate journalistic business strategies, this study systematically analyzes qualitative data from 14 in-depth, semi-structured interviews with professionals working at 13 news outlets to present readers with technology-driven, innovative business models that are playing a major role in the news industry’s future. We use this data to address the following key questions:

RQ1: How are the most technology-driven Brazilian news organizations adopting novel technologies to sustain their business, led by the Industry 4.0 approach?

RQ2: In light of Industry 4.0, what are the business strategies being adopted that contribute to the leveraging of their diverse technological innovations?

Our findings reveal that to survive in this new digital ecosystem, companies are moving away from newspapers’ traditional advertising models and seeking new and more promising models for financing quality journalism in Brazil.

Theoretical Grounding

Business Model Innovation: Shaping a Vision Toward the Future

The consecutive transformation of production, circulation, and consumption chains of news content has triggered an intense reconfiguration in the management and financing models of media companies (Wilczek, 2019; Wirtz et al. 2016). Creative destruction characterizes the impact of the current shift in news media business models.

Before the digital era, the competitive advantage of news organizations was derived from their size and possession of assets, whereas today the advantage comes primarily from knowledge and technological skills applied to unprecedented offerings (Tidd and Bessant 2013), and is typified by narrow-interest content serving specific-interest audiences (Cook and Sirkkunen 2013). By seeking strategic, value-added products among their core processes, organizations are slowly appropriating novel technologies and practices. This technological growth has allowed these outlets to take advantage of the accumulation of innovations driven by industry to absorb new routines, norms, and actors.

However, as many hindrances and bureaucratic obstacles as imaginable are encountered during the process of fostering innovation inside the newsroom. Using Tidd and Bessant’s (2013) definition, innovation can be understood through the lens of product, process, position, and paradigm, which are known as the “4Ps” of innovation (Figure 1). “Each of these 4Ps of innovation can take place along an axis running from incremental through to radical change” (Tidd and Bessant 2013, 27). Thus, journalistic innovation can be understood as involving the adoption of useful ideas that are new, or at least unlike the traditional ways, and which directly influence the news value chain (Posetti 2018).

Digital News Business Models in the Age of Industry 4.0: Digital Brazilian News Players Find in Technology New Ways to Bring Revenue and Competitive Advantage

Published online:

15 February 2022

Figure 1. Each of the 4Ps of the innovation axis runs from incremental to radical change and represents the potential innovation space. Source: Authors, as inspired by Tidd and Bessant (2013).

Figure 1. Each of the 4Ps of the innovation axis runs from incremental to radical change and represents the potential innovation space. Source: Authors, as inspired by Tidd and Bessant (2013).

By working with the 4Ps, these transformations can influence business models by bringing about changes that range from incremental to disruptive. This is central to an industry in transformation. As in many other areas, media industry business models do not start with effective value propositions about how to serve the public’s needs over time. Pursuing a sustainable business model requires changes in the organizational structure and culture to achieve the required synergies with the media producer’s public in order to make the model successful (Johnson et al. 2008).

Media companies have invested in a seemingly endless series of technological tools, rather than in a carefully considered innovation strategy informed by a business perspective (Posetti 2018). The news industry usually adopts new technologies with a conservative mindset, slowly appropriating them in an incremental approach to innovation (Kueng 2017; Lischka 2019). Prior research has attributed this to a lack of economic viability, which is characterized by the “Yes, But Syndrome”, limiting novel digital strategies. However, this approach is unlikely to succeed in the long run, because technological innovation can improve competitiveness and profitability (Paulussen 2016).

New content and commercial strategies are being adopted to overcome lock-in mechanisms, which require changes in these business processes (Wilczek et al. 2021). For example, “[t]hinking about this wave of tech into journalism requires thinking past the role of programmers in the newsroom and about the culture of startups more generally—from funding to product” (Usher 2019, 26). This cultural shift in journalism to innovation and business models is perceived to be tied to Silicon Valley’s entrepreneurial culture (Bell and Owen 2017; Usher 2017).

Digital media have explored these strategies by creating companies that are new and different from the legacy ones, which successfully raise venture funding to finance their content. Memorable examples of those that have changed news business cultures around the globe include global players such as BuzzFeed, Vice, and Vox. Based first on revenue from branded content, these companies brought about new trends through innovative strategies that resulted in new ways of engaging with brands and audiences (Rishi et al. 2018). Publishers also worked symbiotically with platforms to produce and get remunerated through their content, such as Facebook Instant articles and YouTube videos. On the one hand, media companies could use these platforms to disseminate their content and, more recently, to fund their expenditures with grants or selected projects that these corporations financed (Rashidian 2020). On the other hand, news outlets lost their advertising budget completely, resulting in unprecedented and unbalanced power relations with these platforms (Doyle 2013; Smith 2020).

To overcome this, news organizations need innovative strategies to generate revenue. Accordingly, the paywall was widely adopted as “a digital mechanism that separates paid content from free content on a website” (Sjøvaag 2016, 306). In this shifting of their business models to a subscription scheme, news outlets implemented paywalls ranging from harder to more flexible (Myllylahti 2014), which limited access to some or all of the content, in an attempt to increase subscription revenue (Pickard and Williams 2014, 198). In order to give the public the opportunity to see desired content, small, per-article payments (the micropayment model) have also been tested in the industry (Geidner and D’Arcy 2015).

Still being focused on the formula of publicly generated profit, news organizations have sought sustainability through an open call to crowdfunding, primarily through the Internet, for donations or in exchange for some type of reward (Belleflamme, Lambert, and Schwienbacher 2014, 588).

Another standard funding scheme within the industry is receiving donations from philanthropic backing, government funding, or corporate responsibility. Historically, this is common in Latin America, since journalism has derived most of its income from international nongovernmental organizations or private foundations (Requejo-Alemán and Lugo-Ocando 2014). Although this model is a solution to the economic crisis, it has revealed long-term limitations, such as indirect influence in the news agenda and constraints on reaching a wider public (Wright, Scott, and Bunce 2019). Additionally, media companies are innovating by adopting various commercial activities for new sources of income (Westergaard and Schultz Jørgensen 2019), such as e-commerce, benefit clubs, education programs, and events to bring together their digital readership base.

So far, the media has used these strategies to tackle the lack of clear business models for news services, while undergoing transformations in each of the 4Ps of the innovation axis (Tidd and Bessant 2013). Therefore, business model innovation is an umbrella expression for the overall tactics adopted for long-term sustainability of the business. In this sense, news organizations also need to plan and deploy scalable solutions to enhance their innovative technological capabilities in order to create strategic value for their audiences, which is ever more necessary in the face of Industry 4.0 challenges.

Toward an Industry 4.0 in the News Media

Proposed by the German government, the term Industry 4.0 describes “the trend for the increasing use of information and automation technology in the manufacturing environment” (Oesterreich and Teuteberg 2016, 122). Schwab (2017) argued that Industry 4.0 has a much wider scope than the manufacturing industry. Currently, the widely known concept is used as a synonym for the Fourth Industrial Revolution, emphasizing the technological and innovative potentials to be achieved.

Despite disputes over a common definition, Schwab (2017) conceived the term based on evidence from previous Industrial Revolutions. From the First (triggered by the construction of railroads and the invention of the steam engine) to the Third Industrial Revolution (coincident with the development of semiconductors, mainframe computing, personal computing, and the Internet), much attention has been given to the evolution of technologies. According to the author, the current revolution, the Fourth, is no different, but the emerging technologies and broad-based innovations are diffusing much faster and more widely than during previous ones. The nature and character of information and communications technology (ICT) in the development of society are unfolding toward a future in which a range of novel technologies is fusing the physical, digital, and biological worlds as well as affecting all disciplines, economies, and industries (Schwab 2017; Perez 2015), which is a step beyond what had been projected for the Fourth Industrial Revolution.

The technology surrounding Industry 4.0 is mainly focused on certain fields, such as the Internet of Things (IoT), big data, automation, cybersecurity, and intelligent robotics. Many authors explicitly identify augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR) as being among the leading technologies of Industry 4.0 (Posada et al. 2018). Previous studies have suggested that immersive technologies be implemented in news reporting (Hassan 2020). However, other technological advances are easily breaking the barriers to entry to the news industry, such as the “use of drones, wearables and smart speakers in journalism, the interactive and visual storytelling formats, the slow journalism, real-time data stories, the news bots, and so on” (Salaverría and de-Lima-Santos 2020, 5). In the near future, further changes are expected with the emergence of the IoT, which is predicted to be the main catalyst for profound changes in all industries. However, the next few years will be essential to understanding how this will evolve in distinct countries, particularly in the news media.

As a result, not all of these aspects can be applied to every industry. The main qualifications for a smarter production are digitally networked and data-intense models. In addition, there is a crucial factor enabling the adoption of Industry 4.0: the increased interconnectedness of areas and companies through vertical and horizontal integrations. This requires a combination of customer-specific needs and technically sophisticated products (Bauer et al. 2015).

These changes have led media companies to completely rethink the artisanal production of news reporting, which has resulted in a transitional phase in the digital transformation, where technology plays a central role in the process. Nevertheless, investments are necessary to ensure that companies can fully deploy technologies and innovations to their newsrooms (Wilczek et al. 2021). Usually, technological innovation in newsrooms is neither a strategy nor a goal but a series of changes, dynamics, and mechanisms instituted to reach a particular end (Tidd and Bessant 2013). The challenge in the news industry is finding the right balance between optimum quality and the ability to deploy new products and services, with limited financial resources and staff, as well as the influence of culture, politics, and economic arrangements (Murphie and Potts 2003).

Brazilian News Ecosystem: An Ever-Evolving Scenario

Global South nations represent a vast reservoir of new opportunities for business, but these opportunities are also accompanied by historical inequalities, represented by centuries of neglect and intentional extractive and exploitative policies. Brazil is no different, especially in terms of the country’s physical structure (Furtado 1984), as it is composed of 26 states and the Federal District, grouped for administrative purposes into five greater regions: Northern, Northeast, Central-West, Southeast, and Southern. A simple comparison of two regions shows significant differences: the household income per capita in the two major cities of São Paulo (Southern) is double that of Amazonas (Northern) (IBGE n.d.).

These characteristics are reflected in the Brazilian media ecosystem, which is marked by extreme differences. Media concentration is a major concern, as the market is in the hands of big commercial conglomerates. Brazil also has one of the most commercialized media systems, bringing risks to pluralism and the representation of different national realities (Guerrero and Márquez-Ramírez 2014). These conditions are a result of the country’s historical view of commercial and private media as democratic (Ganter and Paulino 2021).

On top of this, about 80% of the country’s media companies are concentrated in the Southern and Southeast regions (Intervozes 2017). A recent study found that about 62% of Brazilian municipalities do not have access to locally based news (Spagnuolo 2020). This means around 18% of the population lives in news deserts towns and regions with very little to no local news coverage (Abernathy 2018). This population without media access is highly concentrated in the Northern and Northeastern regions, where the most accessed media are still radio and TV, limiting recent technological developments.

Digital media companies represent 18% of national initiatives (Spagnuolo 2020). This growth of digital news media has taken place in recent years in response to the media crisis fueled by insecure and precarious working conditions, which set off a sense of urgency for change in news outlets. But, online media generally have reproduced the offline structures of the country: four conglomerates two media groups (Globopar and Folhapar) and two telecom industries (Telefónia and Telemar) control 70% of digital initiatives (Ganter and Paulino 2021).

However, many independent digital media companies have also emerged in the country (see Ganter and Paulino 2021). Agência Pública, a Brazilian independent journalism agency, has listed about 80 independent news organizations operating in the last two decades, and these are composed solely of organizations that are not linked to large media groups, politicians, organizations, or companies. The vast majority seek their strategic value in specific formats, such as news curation and data journalism, or segmentation into niche audiences, such as legal coverage, feminism, and human rights (Agência Pública, n.d.).

These digital media companies have noticeably stimulated and oxygenated the Brazilian ecosystem, forcing legacy news organizations to test new formats and embrace new technologies in their newsrooms (Bittencourt 2018; Barbosa 2015). Myriad innovative formats have also been observed in recent years, such as data journalism, interactive storytelling, and artificial intelligence (AI) (de-Lima-Santos and Mesquita 2021b; Cook et al. 2021). However, these innovations are directly affected by economic and regional differences (Brinkman and Brinkman 1997). To illustrate this, a study found that data stories are predominantly produced by digital media outlets, and of the 52 organizations mapped, the majority were located in the Southeast region São Paulo (23) and Rio de Janeiro (13), the two wealthiest cities in the country (de-Lima-Santos 2019). This can be partly explained by political and historical factors, and also by the lower level of internet access in the Northern and Northeast regions.

In their striving for economic sustainability, these digital media outlets have deployed new business models that have reconfigured, and brought in new, sources of income in journalism (Carpes Da Silva and Sanseverino 2020). In spite of this, no clear sustainable business models exist for the Brazilian news industry. The country, therefore, faces unique challenges arising from its diversified environment, which requires the design and deployment of news products that meet the different audiences’ demands, as discussed in this study.

Methodology

There is a conceptual lack of original studies illustrating how the business of journalism is being reconfigured outside of Western and liberal democracies. The challenges these countries face are not universal. Therefore, this study steps away from this narrow perspective to focus on Brazil. By examining how digital media organizations are adopting new technologically innovative approaches to sustain their business, with a view toward Industry 4.0, this study presents the emerging use of technologies, such as data, automation, and AI, that are used to bring strategic value to their business models and are expected to improve audience engagement.

To examine this phenomenon, an initial list of potential media organizations was developed using two different data sets. This data consisted of the independent news media organizations in Agência Pública’s data set (Agência Pública, n.d.), combined with the digital media organizations mapped by Atlas da Notícia’s survey (Spagnuolo, 2020). This initial list of potential media organizations constituted the most promising digital news organizations. With this list, we incorporated the five geographical regions of Brazil, which is reflective of the nation's complexity stemming from its continental proportions and economic diversity. After the analysis, we strategically penned an initial list consisting of five media organizations that the authors considered to be technologically innovative.

To make this study more representative, we asked our interviewees to mention other organizations that they believe are using digital technology to transform their business models. By following a snowball sampling approach, i.e. reaching one participant through the recommendations of other actors in the field (Bryman 2016), we were able to reach another eight organizations that accepted an invitation to take part in this study. These new participants' contact information email, WhatsApp, and Twitter were provided by the previous participants. By doing this, we were able to locate hidden populations that would have been otherwise difficult to identify. After careful analysis of these two steps, we strategically determined the 13 news organizations that could take part in this project based on three variables: technology investment, high audience engagement, and an identifiable income stream.

In total, 14 in-depth, semi-structured interviews with senior professionals or management actors working in 13 digital media organizations were conducted over a period of eight months (October 2019 to May 2020), as shows. These interviews covered a range of topics (see Figure 2) and included representatives of organizations from the five regions of Brazil, allowing us to reach a multitude of voices that are part of the narrative of this media industry transformation, which is developing at different paces and characterized by different goals.

Digital News Business Models in the Age of Industry 4.0: Digital Brazilian News Players Find in Technology New Ways to Bring Revenue and Competitive Advantage

Published online:

15 February 2022

Figure 2. Interview structure. Source: the authors.

Figure 2. Interview structure. Source: the authors.

Digital News Business Models in the Age of Industry 4.0: Digital Brazilian News Players Find in Technology New Ways to Bring Revenue and Competitive Advantage

Published online:

15 February 2022

Table 1. News organizations and positions of the respondents.

All interviews were conducted in Portuguese by phone or videoconference and averaged 45 min. Conversations were taped, transcribed, and aggregated into a database for the coding, which used the most salient themes emerging across the set of interviews, such as foundation, audience, revenue streams, technologies, competitive advantage, and innovation (Gioia, Corley, and Hamilton 2013; Charmaz and Belgrave 2015). We captured the informants’ experience in theoretical terms and combined them with the linking data from prior studies to create the framework presented here. Thus, this research resulted in responsive knowledge sharing about the business models being implemented for the next revolution in digital journalism.

Findings

From Niche to Novel Formats: Delivering a Value Proposition

Our study presents how digital media companies stimulated and oxygenated the Brazilian ecosystem. Building on the momentum started by technological innovation and political unrest, these outlets developed novel formats, businesses, and products in order to continually offer new experiences to their audience (see ).

Digital News Business Models in the Age of Industry 4.0: Digital Brazilian News Players Find in Technology New Ways to Bring Revenue and Competitive Advantage

Published online:

15 February 2022

Table 2. Description of media organizations and their competitive advantage.

About a third of the organizations explore a niche-market strategy, in line with Cook and Sirkkunen’s (2013) findings of content interests being narrowed to serve specific audiences. For example, banker João Moreira Salles, who founded Piauí, realized that there was no analog publisher producing literary journalism in Brazil. “Piauí’s idea is to always tell a story through a person, a character, or a scene to humanize and have a story arc because the person begins in one place and ends in another. And this person’s story summarizes a bigger story. […] Piauí’s literary tradition, which is its strong point, is known internationally as something of excellence” (R4).

Seeking to fill a different niche, Farol Jornalismo is a newsletter specializing in curation and analysis of journalism. By touching on a specific topic, it has a captive audience that understands the importance of the press, mainly journalists and academics. And other outlets, such as InfoAmazonia, Amazônia Real, and Marco Zero (see ), have likewise managed to identify niche markets and find products that appeal to a local audience.

There are also organizations that are part of a movement focused on evidence-based reporting. Lupa and Aos Fatos are focused on debunking rumors and misinformation. Aos Fatos has the ambitious mission of becoming one of the most innovative news websites by combining verification with data-driven approaches. “Aos Fatos always had a technological approach. We are even known for that, which sets us apart from other Brazilian fact-checking agencies that are more traditionally focused on debunking. We are always trying to find other types of solutions” (R9). In line with the vision of Industry 4.0, Aos Fatos has adopted a strategy that allows for better integration of technology across its business (Bauer et al. 2015).

Since its foundation, Nexo Jornal has explored new and innovative ways to produce content, such as data and graphics, in order to avoid “competing with what already exists” (R7). Hence, the organization decided to focus on exploratory journalism with news reporting characterized by close attention to detail and a more in-depth approach that does not prioritize breaking news; with this approach, it aims to be “a pioneer in this kind of journalism in the country” (R7).

As a media-tech company, BuzzFeed uses data to understand its audience better and has also deployed new revenue sources in the country, by implementing a variety of different forms of income that the industry later adopted, such as branded content, the pivot-to-video movement, and trademark license. Silicon Valley’s entrepreneurial culture, which has been a part of BuzzFeed's culture since its inception (Bell and Owen 2017; Usher 2017), drives this technological knowledge and usage.

Based on the descriptions of these organizations (), it is evident that they do not cover breaking news topics but are on a quest for something that is distinct from other content producers. Their strategies reside at the intersection of novel formats, thereby bringing technology to newsrooms, producing content that differs from others, and inhabiting the proper niche. It is worth noting that most of these organizations are based in the Southeast region, which is characterized by high socioeconomic-level, developed metropolises, such as São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro (Intervozes 2017).

Keeping up with Technology Trends and Innovation

To keep up with the latest technology trends, organizations monitor international and national competitors. “We can see new tools that are used and what we can do differently. We have seen many innovations in the interfaces, design, and user experience that inspire us” (R14). Respondents, however, pointed out the difficulty of following the latest trends. Almost half of them think that technological advances are not always easy to deploy in newsrooms, and not everything applies to the news industry. This is consistent with previous studies that found difficulties are encountered when deploying technological innovations to newsrooms (Cook et al. 2021; Wilczek et al. 2021).

Most respondents still rely heavily on third-party platforms to capture audience feedback and understand its needs. Publishers have also made efforts to work symbiotically with social media platforms to position their brands and attract audiences by promoting their stories on these channels (Rashidian 2020). BuzzFeed Brazil, for instance, uses social media to boost its audience and get feedback, allowing the outlet to experiment with novel formats and continuously innovate. To carry out innovations, “we work with the MVP model (Minimum Viable Product) to test our hypothesis […]. We test [a product], and if it doesn’t work, next week we will do something else and learn from this experience” (R6). By exploring prototypes to construct innovative forms, news organizations are adopting values commonly espoused in the startup scene (Usher 2017). This is possible because these organizations are “smaller and have small infrastructure” (R7) compared to legacy media organizations, allowing them to “have a very quick decision-making chain” (R7).

In the case of JOTA, in addition to listening to its audience on social media channels, the organization also has a team, JOTA Labs, that is focused on introducing innovations to news production. And, content producers are constantly in touch with the tech team, which “is always keeping pace with technological advance” (R8). The same can be said of Aos Fatos, which “has had this technological footprint since the beginning” (R9) and has invested in its own content management system (CMS): “from its inception, in general, independent media organizations use WordPress, for instance. Like the CMS, we developed several technology projects, and we are known for that” (R9).

Technology is also falsely perceived as innovation, because people tend to look at just the surface, below which much of the innovation is hidden. For R12’s organization, innovation is pursued through continuous “new ways of presenting the content,” and also through exploring this in a transverse manner, “from journalistic language to company management” (R10). As TIB stated, “if you take our headlines and stories, it is not difficult to see that they’re quite different from what the Brazilian press usually does” (R10). In the case of Marco Zero, their innovation comes in the way they are organized, as they attempted to balance “between a newsroom (our main activity) and an NGO (our legal constitution)” (R2). Some respondents suggested that sometimes there is no need to reinvent the wheel. For R1, R12, R13, and R14, who have their business built on an email newsletter, the use of “outdated technology” ended up becoming the best way to work with their journalism products.

Automatization, AI, and Data on the Rise in Newsrooms

Our respondents also indicated that their organizations are increasingly relying on technological innovations, as touted by Industry 4.0 hype, to conceive new business models, since such innovations are also a key differentiation factor, and thus a competitive advantage for their products (Tidd and Bessant 2013). However, these technological innovations are not common to every organization that took part in this study. While news outlets based outside the Southern region are having a hard time learning, or even deploying, basic technology in their newsrooms, organizations based in São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, and Brasilia are able to adopt major technological breakthroughs.

Although Poder360 relies heavily on the use of “outdated technology” email newsletters curated by humans the “assembling, it is all by script; it is automated and developed internally” (R1). The outlet has a division that produces opinion polls for political issues and for marketing purposes. And, this division also has a “fully automated system,” which does not require human and/or manual intervention to call any Brazilian citizen.

JOTA relies on AI and data. The organization developed several products for different types of audiences, which have different verticals and packages to please everyone. The Índice (Index, in English) is a tool to measure legislative predictability based on a complex statistical model that mixes data on the past behavior of politicians with their positioning in social networks, journalistic verification with parliamentarians, and poll results. This machine learning model has proved satisfactory, as JOTA was able to anticipate the outcome “of the pension reform in March, four months before the vote” (R8). The organization undertook this project after receiving financing in the form of a Google grant (Rashidian 2020).

The JOTA Labs team is working to increasingly leverage AI in the newsroom and change the way news is generated, produced, and shared. This is also important for R8 because “calculating the chances that all projects in Congress will pass, our reports cannot look at 60,000 things. Machine learning can help our journalists […] to optimize [their knowledge] in the field.” The team also uses AI to scrape data from different web sources, which is important because it helps the team gather data that will help their editor find “patterns, trends in what is happening within the public power at moments of crisis” (R8).

Other media companies view data-driven approaches as potentially redefining all levels of news work from production to distribution. JOTA, which created JOTA Labs, a “data science team” (R8), has an approach to data that is not commonly found in other newsrooms. “We do data science. We attempt to answer hypotheses and questions. For us, data is used as a source that we interview on the record; therefore, I wouldn’t say that we do data journalism, because it’s not the case that an editor had an idea and we make charts to corroborate. We create tools that are used to respond to our readers’ questions. Thus, we apply data science methods to help our audience” (R8).

Nexo Jornal also delves into the interplay between data and journalism to produce stories that make use of databases and visualization to inform, educate, and entertain. The media company focuses on content that is distinguishable from its competitors and has reduced costs. “You can have people in the office; you don’t need to have someone in Brasília, for instance. It costs less to produce something that is different from what is already everywhere. It is a differentiated product within what we have proposed for ourselves” (R7). Metrópoles also has a data team, MDados, dedicated to producing data-driven stories and experimenting with new formats. There is an intention to develop an “AI and data intelligence area in the newsrooms” (R14), in order to strengthen the business.

The key is grabbing the attention of today’s consumers and driving real engagement through content that creates awareness without bothering the audience (Myllylahti 2020). To understand what is relevant for different audiences, BuzzFeed uses data to perform audience analytics. “The fact that we invest in technology and use the data to understand our public is an advantage. We can produce more relevant content. We joke that we are a feedback machine. We are always listening to people; that’s why we have eight proprietary [data-driven] tools” (R6). For example, “[w]e are not talking about a partner, such as a beverage, the same way as a TV ad. We are going to make a recipe at Tasty [food network], where the brand is part of, or it is used as the concept to create a quiz, for instance” (R6). In addition, “we launched a line of ice creams with Bacio di Latte, a Brazilian brand. Ice cream flavors were created based on social listening. In our Tasty inventory, we looked for the most popular recipes with more than 30 million views, and we transformed them into ice cream flavors. We use technology for the benefit of people. It’s never technology as simply data” (R6).

Aos Fatos has expanded its coverage to tackle misinformation by utilizing conversational bots (Fátima for Facebook), monitoring bots (Fátima for Twitter), and cartoons. Fátima, which comes from “FactMa” (an abbreviation of “FactMachine”), is the face of Aos Fatos’s AI and fact-checking automation projects.

Today we have two large projects underway: one is Fátima for WhatsApp, and the other is Radar Aos Fatos. The latter is an information panel based on public APIs from Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, and Google Trends. Because in addition to the debunks, the fact-checking itself, we have an effort to investigate the disinformation ecosystem in Brazil. In that endeavor, it is pure data journalism. We have already published two articles linked to Radar, a basic survey of a ton of tweets, and from there, the story comes out (R9).

These experiments are crucial to the modernization and revolution of journalistic structures that are taking place which aims to develop legitimate online services. This is expected to increase revenue streams while creating additional ones.

Building a Competitive Advantage in Multi-Revenue Business Models

All of our respondents agreed that the news ecosystem today needs revenue diversification, as shows. Contrary to the findings of Wilczek et al. (2021), our informants indicated there is reliance on a multi-revenue stream model. “We have in mind the importance of having different options, because today it is important to diversify” (R7). Though some organizations depend on advertising income, for most it was not the primary source.

Digital News Business Models in the Age of Industry 4.0: Digital Brazilian News Players Find in Technology New Ways to Bring Revenue and Competitive Advantage

Published online:

15 February 2022

Table 3. Revenue streams of media companies.

Diversification comes in several forms. Poder360 still uses ads as part of revenue streams, but its main income is corporate subscriptions to its premium newsletters. Drive Premium, as it is called, consists of three daily newsletters that provide behind-the-scenes information on policy news and analysis as well as projections about related topics. Furthermore, there is investment in event production (Poder360-ideias), such as debates, seminars, and dinners with influential politicians, and a division devoted to public opinion polls (DataPoder360). To supplement its income, Poder360 partnered with a TV channel to produce a talk show (Poder em Foco, which ended during the COVID-19 pandemic), licensed content for MSN, and lastly, produced sponsored content (Poder360 Mercado). “We also studied a model of monetizing our content [on YouTube]. Strictly with special programs and series and not with programmatic ads” (R1).

Philanthropic foundations are also an essential source of funding for many news outlets in Latin America (Requejo-Alemán and Lugo-Ocando 2014). In our sample, InfoAmazonia, Amazonia Real, and Marco Zero are being supported largely by philantropic funding. In Marco Zero’s case, “about 80% comes from OAK Foundation’s institutional support” (R2). Amazônia Real also depends on philanthropic funding, for example from the “Ford Foundation since 2014” (R3). Since receiving the money is contingent on project-based funding, and there is risk involved, Amazônia Real also appeals to readers for support via crowdfunded initiatives or donations.

To avoid that type of reliance on funding, in its early phase InfoAmazonia counted on consulting services to support other organizations that wanted to implement InfoAmazonia’s in-house developed software solution, JEO. Currently, the outlet counts on foundation funding and private donations. “The ONA award opened many doors. We even funded the second phase of the Mining Arc project, Smuggler’s Paradise. Additionally, the $4,000 prize itself was also providential for us to continue paying some costs that we had at the time” (R5). The organization is inspired by successful Western journalistic models, such as ProPublica (de-Lima-Santos, 2022), which Sparviero (2020) defined as a social news enterprise (SNE), because it has “a strong commitment to social goals and the need to justify their work in terms of impact” (796).

TIB is a publication of First Look Media, a philanthropic organization, launched in 2013 by eBay founder Pierre Omidyar dedicated to supporting independent voices in investigative journalism and media. Besides the support of this foundation, TIB is seen as one of the few examples of successful crowdfunding in the country. Although the public is now willing to pay for news subscriptions in the country (Luminate 2020), the organization was very successful, as seen prior to the 2018 Brazilian election, when it had “raised 55,000 BRL, a record in the country” (R10). This was spurred by a direct message to its supporters: “we need help to make fearless journalism, a journalism that is not afraid [to cover anything]” (R10).

In regards to Farol, in addition to the support of its specific audience, there are occasionally funded programs, “which include an editorial partnership with a life-cycle. The most recurrent project is financed by Abraji [Brazilian Association of Investigative Journalism]” (R13).

On the other hand, Aos Fatos is investing in a membership program (Konieczna 2020) after being selected to be part of the Membership Puzzle Project developed by the Dutch news organization De Correspondent and New York University. Most of the revenue is generated by the partnership or grants provided by tech companies, such as Facebook and Google. “But, it’s money with a beginning, middle, and end” (R9). With these grants, tech platforms claim to ‘empower’ news organizations toward sustainability, but they have the “power to determine which newsrooms receive support, how, and for how long” (Rashidian 2020).

Lupa is a third-party fact-checking project being done for Facebook. In addition to this revenue, the fact-checking agency is “supporting itself with training programs for citizens and journalists” (R11). Similarly, Nexo Jornal generates income from education programs. “At the moment, the majority [of funding] is the subscription. In addition to revenue from courses of our ‘school N’, we hold events, and also sell content to publishers [licensing of stories]. The latter is a great revenue line because it is something we have already produced. Then, it is always good to monetize again. We also have advertising revenue in podcasts, which we want to increase this year.” The outlet now also offers a subscription bundle with The New York Times.

JOTA also relies on a hard paywall (Myllylahti 2014) to protect its content. with its subscription model focusing on two different audiences: individuals and companies. “At JOTA, the reader has access to, for example, a range of tools, newsletter and alerts that are sent via WhatsApp [of specific topics]; we call them packages. We have tools that are scalable, which are all done automatically [adding new topics, so-called verticals]. The price varies according to the service layers to be included and [calls with] our experts. […] Considerable part of the revenue comes from these products” (R8). With its main niche being advocacy and politics, many of its subscribers are law firms. To highlight companies with special subscriptions, the outlet created a section called “club” to display their logos.

Certainly, BuzzFeed is aware of public interest in its content, so it has remained anti-paywall. The organization is recognized for its branded content, which has served as its key source of income for years (Rishi et al. 2018). However, in recent years, BuzzFeed has quietly been making changes to its strategy with the adoption of new revenue sources, such as programmatic ads, a pivot to video, affiliate marketing (by selling products on Amazon), trademark licensing, and selling of products on the company website, as a move to boost profitability. But, our interview happened before the COVID-19 pandemic, which struck the media industry on a global level with massive cuts and layoffs. BuzzFeed has ceased operations in Australia and the UK, and a business partner took over its Brazilian brands and news operations (Owen and Scire 2020).

On the other hand, Piauí presents a very different situation. Although the outlet has a subscription model and holds a journalism festival for income, it is either incurring losses or returning low profits. To overcome these operational difficulties, the organization receives donor funding, such as from João Moreira Sales, a banker. In the near future, the plan is to form a foundation, which will, in turn, receive an endowment fund that will support the business. “Piauí will become a nonprofit, and whoever manages the endowment funds will not access its capital, but rather spend only the earnings from investments. We will have two boards, one that is in charge of the money and another editorial, which will make decisions about publishing choice and define what are the editorial objectives of the publication” (R4). However, it is uncertain when this will occur.

Another donor-funding case is Metrópoles, which is maintained by the family of the Brazilian politician Luís Estevão, who was sentenced to 31 years in prison for corruption. Though family members do not hold any editorial positions, the family contributes a major part of the revenue. To meet its financial needs, Metrópoles also relies on branded content and advertisements.

In summary, these organizations are building scalable business models by diversifying their revenue streams to make them less dependent on a single source, which is corroborated by interviewees’ responses that none of these organizations rely on a unique source of income. Our informants mentioned 14 different sustainable models of funding: subscriptions, ads, native advertising, crowdfunding/membership, benefits clubs, events, video monetization, donor funding, foundation support, grants from private companies, sales of products, trademark/content licensing, educational projects, and bundle strategies. By deploying technological assets to the news business, these organizations are capable of meeting the needs of audiences and better identifying customer segments. Emphasizing a niche subject and employing specialized skills give these outlets a competitive advantage (Tidd and Bessant 2013).

Discussion and Conclusion

Overall, our study has shown that Brazilian digital news outlets are seeking sustainability by looking beyond traditional strategies. Answering RQ1, the present findings about Brazilian digital media confirm that the industry shows signs of growth toward Industry 4.0 in industry-level indicators, such as the use of big data, automation, and AI (Schwab 2017). On the other hand, some news outlets from our sample have decided to build their business strategy by focusing on niches or specialized skills that the industry forgot (Cook and Sirkkunen 2013), such as advocacy and scholarship. In order to ensure the audience’s engagement and awareness, some companies, through data analysis, have found a way to optimize operations in a variety of ways and create effective value propositions. This demonstrates that the potential innovation space can influence business models along the axis of the 4Ps, ranging from incremental to radical change (Tidd and Bessant 2013).

News organizations are discovering new ways of deploying technology to their newsrooms, some of them inspired by Industry 4.0 concepts. As scholarly works have argued in the past, the journalism industry has been proven to innovate gradually through continuous improvements in existing concepts, products, or services (Boczkowski 2005; Paulussen 2016). Contrary to the findings of Kueng (2017) and Lischka (2019), the Brazilian news industry is currently disrupting traditional methodologies and deploying innovations at a faster pace than previously through a combination of better uses of data, automation, news bots, and AI, following other industries’ adoption of novel methods and technologies. Our study has shown examples of organizations that are deploying technological and design innovations to overcome industry challenges at the local level. However, the media ecosystem still has a long way to go in terms of facilitating interaction between humans and technology by providing integration at all levels (Bauer et al. 2015). This will result in rethinking current value propositions as well as strategies to create better relationships with the audience using technologies.

It has been noted that technological innovation requires more technical staff in newsrooms, in line with the ideas of Usher (2017), who concluded that technical expertise is essential for media survival in this new age. This is because technology changes human behavior through a process of transforming social institutions; however, not all classes are equally exposed to this process of institutional transformation. Organizations that are less exposed to changing technology adapt more slowly than those subjected to highly technological changes (Brinkman and Brinkman 1997). In another vein, researchers have emphasized more nuanced views of technological adoption that resist easy to causal formulations. Society itself strongly shapes the path of innovation through the influence of culture, politics, and economic arrangements (Murphie and Potts 2003).

Within the context of Brazil, its continental proportions with high geographic and economic diversity present a challenge for these news organizations; but, it is also an opportunity to find different niches (RQ2). Conversely, the level of regional development influences publishers’ decisions in which business models to pursue. Whereas most developed states, such as São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro, are leading in innovation-driven strategies, other regions are faced with different developments in their revenue models, and in these places, companies are still working on expanding to other core verticals.

The interviewees said little about the use of immersive technologies, drones, or wearable technologies. Although immersive technologies are already being implemented in news reporting in Western (Hassan 2020) countries, they are not the technologies that are driving innovation and the next disruption in Brazilian newsrooms. This may raise concerns about the slow pace of technological development in non-Western countries, which can be explained by the lack of technological infrastructure in such countries and the high cost of the necessary technology. The challenge for the news industry is finding the right balance among three factors: optimum quality standards; the ability to deploy new products and services; and limited financial resources, which may portend an uncertain future.

Our findings also suggest that the majority of successful Brazilian business model innovations in the profit formula (Johnson et al. 2008) are actually combinations of existing elements that have been implemented in the industry in recent decades (RQ2). Our framework sheds light on these diversified models that combine strategies based on multiple revenue sources, such as obtaining numerous types of advertising income, pivoting to video, educational projects, events, and integration of content with e-commerce. In this regard, this study adds to the existing literature by demonstrating how digital media is combining these business models with technological advances.

Conversely, some of these companies’ business models rely on short-term grants provided by tech companies (Rashidian 2020), which are playing a significant role in the overall long-term growth and prosperity of these companies (RQ2). These temporary grants follow a common pattern that provides financial support for developing technological projects that are becoming a rich legacy for these organizations. However, they have a defined beginning, middle, and end, which puts their continuity at risk, and the same applies to philanthropic funding. These two main revenue streams partially mitigate the downward trend in revenue from traditional business models, but they have also raised awareness about influence and the limitations of supporting the system in the long term. This is consistent with what has been found previously about Latin America (Requejo-Alemán and Lugo-Ocando 2014).

In contrast, other media organizations are using technology to conceive of new business models that can potentially increase their income (RQ2). Our findings show that companies are using their websites to sell products, implement monetization via third-party platforms, offer educational programs, and launch benefit clubs. To our knowledge, no study yet has yielded similar evidence about these new business strategies and the importance of these new models for the industry.

Although our study does not represent the entire variety of models, we combined methods to achieve a representative model that depicts the important common revenue streams both proposed and in actual use by Brazilian news organizations. Our aim is not to discuss whether these business models succeed, but to show the ways in which Brazilian news organizations are embracing technological innovations, and to shed light on the future development of the industry. One limitation of the findings was determining whether these new business models are bringing long-overdue sustainability to news organizations. As some interviewees did not want to mention whether they had reached the break-even point, or whether they need grants to help with the majority of their financial costs, this is an issue to be explored in future research. Future studies could also investigate the association between journalism and IoT, which is gaining traction in an environment of emerging smart assistants, live sensor networks, and connected objects that will enhance standard data collection and analytics (Salaverría and de-Lima-Santos 2020) but has not yet been seen in these cases from Brazil.

Finally, there is a need for more studies about the Global South with regards to media organizations deploying innovative business models across the entire value chain. The next few years will see tremendous change in the way technology is used in newsrooms. In Brazil, the changes and the expansion of the news industry in recent decades indicate a promising future, and they align with the findings of this study, which revealed that technological advances, innovation, and value propositions are intertwined in the practices of the organizations.

Arguably, there is a tendency to assume that Western models are applied globally, which this study shows is not always the case; it is important that future research expand to other areas to illuminate these differences between industrialized and emerging economies.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Digital News Business Models in the Age of Industry 4.0: Digital Brazilian News Players Find in Technology New Ways to Bring Revenue and Competitive Advantage

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The news media industry is a sector that is greatly affected by technology and the rapid speed with which changes are taking place. Industry 4.0 is upon us and promising a smarter production that i...