Agile Content Management: Strategic Communication in Corporate Newsrooms

ABSTRACT

Corporate communication increasingly evolves into newsroom-like forms. In such structures, traditional approaches of functional differentiation (i.e., internal coms, media relations, public affairs, etc.) give way to topic- and content-centered approaches to corporate communication. Megatrends like globalization, digitalization, mediatization, and the decline of journalism have facilitated these developments. This study provides insights on agile content management gathered from 32 semi-structured expert interviews with communication professionals working in 13 business organizations in Germany and Austria. Results indicate that on the strategic level, communication management reacts to rising communicative demands in organizational environments by implementing agile-like concepts in communication departments, which are content-driven and not based on departmentalized specialization. Accordingly, the importance of competent and largely autonomous content managers increases, with these experts subsequently serving as conductors of inclusive, collective storytelling that reaches far beyond the communication department, into every relevant stakeholder group. Thereby, business organizations cope with the challenges of increasing complexity in the information society of the 21^st century.

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

¹ The sample included companies from the following sectors: one from postal and telecommunication services (PT1_GER), one from public service (PS1_GER), one from financial services (FS1_AUT), one from hotels and tourism (HT1_GER), one from chemical industries (CI1_GER), one from consumer goods (CG1_GER), two from technology (TE1_GER, TE2_GER), two conglomerate companies (CC1_GER, CC_AUT), and three from the transportation sector (TP1_GER, TP2_GER, TP3_AUT).

Additional information

Funding

This research has been funded by the Academic Society for Management & Communication, a joint initiative of four universities and almost 40 companies in the German-speaking part of Europe. The non-profit has been active since 2010 with the aim of actively shaping the future of corporate communications through joint research and knowledge sharing (www.academic-society.net).