This paper analyzes the infrastructural integration of European news media with digital platforms and third-party service providers between 2015–2025. Reviewing current research, we note increased scholarly attention to the infrastructural relations between news organizations and digital platforms. Yet, despite this heightened interest, we are still missing a systematic empirical examination of how infrastructural integration shapes the spaces of negotiation between news media and tech companies. We provide such an examination through a historical analysis of the top ten news websites in France and the Netherlands, using a custom version of the 4CAT Capture and Analysis Toolkit on 9,456 archived snapshots. The analysis of evolving third-party service (de-)integrations, highlight the rise of audiovisual content and the decline of website analytics, as well as broader industry and regulatory developments (e.g., GDPR). These changes in website architectures point to shifting strategies of news organizations to adapt and preserve their independence in an online environment increasingly dominated by digital platforms. Yet, paradoxically, those strategies are enabled by cloud infrastructures provided by the same platform companies, deepening the dependence of news organizations on these companies. Thus, infrastructural integration is a process of demarcation of spaces and activities between news organizations and tech companies.
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Braun et al. (2026) studied this question.
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