Platform literacies for media students: teaching journalism for WhatsApp, YouTube, and Instagram in India

The platform literacies model proposed in this paper offers a theoretically grounded and practically structured framework for training journalists in India, where WhatsApp, YouTube, and Instagram have restructured the production, distribution, and consumption of news. Drawing on platform studies scholarship, particularly on [Gillespie, T. 2010. “The Politics of ‘platforms.’” New Media & Society, 12(3), 347–364. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444809342738,Gillespie, T. 2018. Custodians of the Internet : Platforms, Content Moderation, and the Hidden Decisions that Shape Soci. New Haven Yale University Press.] analysis of platforms as governance structures, [van Dijck, J. 2013. “The Culture of Connectivity.” The Culture of Connectivity: A Critical History of Social Media. https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199970773.001.0001] account of connective media, and [Srnicek, N. (2017). Platform Capitalism. Polity Press] political economy of platform capitalism, the paper argues that Indian journalism education remains conceptually anchored in legacy media paradigms and lacks the frameworks needed to prepare students for the platform ecology they will actually inhabit. Synthesising these theoretical insights with media praxis pedagogy, the paper proposes a four-dimensional platform literacies framework (architectural, economic, rhetorical, and ethical literacy) and translates it into three classroom-ready exercises on WhatsApp, YouTube, and Instagram, complete with assessment rubrics. The paper is conceptual and design-based; it does not report primary data. Its contribution is a transparent derivation from theory to pedagogy, a framework-to-assessment alignment table, and an argument for platform literacy as critical analytical capacity rather than technical compliance.