The making of political news on YouTube

While the effects of business models on media formats are well documented with regard to traditional journalism, their role in shaping political news content on audiovisual platforms remains an emerging research question. Among these platforms, YouTube is often seen as a space for media innovation, but it also extends and reconfigures more traditional spaces of political information. Based on a topic-modelling analysis of a corpus of video transcripts and a qualitative study of 31 political content creators, this article analyses how they make their editorial choices at the intersection of socio-technical and economic constraints, between platform rules, audience expectations, and the imperatives arising from the chosen economic models. I show that sensitivity to these constraints varies according to creators’ degree of professionalization and their political positioning.