Competition, Change, and Coordination and Collaboration: Tracing News Executives’ Perceptions About Participation in Media Innovation

ABSTRACT

Technological disruptions and increasing competition in the digital mediascape have fundamentally altered the market conditions for news media companies, raising corresponding concerns about the future of journalism. News media firms can adapt their business models by more purposefully focusing on media innovation, or the development and implementation of new processes, products or services. Specifically, this article focuses on innovation-centric coordination and collaboration—namely, coordination of knowledge and innovation activities among social actors in news media organizations. In doing so, this article builds on the knowledge-based view (KBV) of the firm and its core argument that coordination of knowledge is essential for organizational innovation. It presents findings from a series of cross-sectional surveys with newspaper executives carried out bi-annually from 2011 to 2017, examining executives’ perceptions of collaborative potential for digital media innovation at the intersection of editorial, business, and information technology (IT) departments. The findings suggest that there has been a significant increase in perceived collaboration more recently, and that the IT department is perceived to have become more important to innovation over time.

KEYWORDS:

• Collaboration
• coordination
• innovation
• knowledge-based view
• technologists
• business

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Most social actors working within news organizations can be classified into one of these three primary groups—journalists, businesspeople, and technologists—though inevitably there will be some exceptions, such as employees operating printing presses. Nevertheless, even where departments such as Circulation have been rebranded as “Audience Development,” the people in such groups have a business imperative that positions them within the businesspeople category.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Volda University College: [Grant Number Professor II research support to Oscar Westlund].