“They’re a little bit squeezed in the middle”: Strategic challenges for innovation in US Metropolitan newspaper organisations

ABSTRACT

This paper focuses on media innovation among publishers of metropolitan newspapers in the United States, in cities such as San Diego, Boston, Miami, Philadelphia and Dallas. The situation for metropolitan newspapers is difficult, as they fall between national newspapers, which can aim for extending their reach both nationally and globally, and local newspapers, which have a smaller cost structure and can cater to a more limited, and often more engaged, audience community. Our paper demonstrates that there seems to be great awareness of what can be done by US metropolitan newspapers, but managers are struggling with constraints, such as lack of financial and human resources and general organisational anaemia.

KEYWORDS:

• Metropolitan newspapers
• innovation
• strategic management
• United States

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. Circulations of the New York Times and Washington Post are primarily metropolitan, but they play national roles for their national and international reporting as reputable newspapers.

2. The study is part of a larger research project aimed at offering insights for news media companies to overcome challenges in their changing business environment. In addition to the United States, the project team has made similar studies in the Nordic countries (Sweden, Norway, Denmark) and Germany. Findings from those studies have been published previously in Lehtisaari et al. (2018) and conference papers.

3. Interviews were conducted at the following organisations: American Press Institute, Bloomberg View, Boston.com, Brigham Young University–Idaho (BYU–Idaho), California Newspaper Publishers Association, Coronado Eagle & Journal, Dallas Morning News, Deseret News, Embarcadero Media, Gatehouse Media, George Washington University, Institute for the Future, Matter.vc, Miami Herald, Monday Note, New England Newspaper and Press Association, the New York Times, New York University, News Media Alliance, Newsonomics, the Nieman Journalism Lab at Harvard University, Philadelphia Inquirer, San Diego Union-Tribune, Spirited Media, the Boston Globe, the Shorenstein Center at Harvard, the Washington Post, University of Texas and Voice of San Diego.

4. Nielsen Scarborough USA, https://www.nielsen.com/us/en/insights/news/2016/newspapers-deliver-across-the-ages.html.

5. WAN-IFRA Report World Press Trends 2017.

Additional information

Funding

The research was funded by the Media Industry Research Foundation of Finland and The Finnish Newspapers Association.

Notes on contributors

Mikko Villi

Mikko Villi, PhD, is Professor of Journalism in the Department of Language and Communication Studies at the University of Jyväskylä, Finland. An emphasis in his work is on the contemporary context for journalism, especially new media platforms and social media. Among his interests is also the study of media organizations and media management, thereby joining the study of organizational communication with journalism and media studies.

Mikko Grönlund

Mikko Grönlund, is Research Manager of the Brahea Centre at the University of Turku. He  has extensive experience in the field of development of media industries and businesses, their structure, operations and markets.

Carl-Gustav Linden

Carl-Gustav Linden (Dr. Soc. Sc.) is Adjunct Professor (Docent) at the University of Helsinki, Finland, a University Lecturer at Södertörn University in Stockholm and researcher at Nordicom, University of Gothenburg, Sweden. His research interests include augmented journalism, especially news automation, media business models, local journalism.

Katja Lehtisaari

Katja Lehtisaari (Dr. Soc. Sc.) is Adjunct Professor (Docent) and University Lecturer in Media and Communication Studies at the University of Helsinki. She has coordinated projects on researching business models of journalism and is specialized in comparative analyses of media business, media policy, and journalism.

Bozena Mierzejewska

Bozena Mierzejewska is an Associate Professor of Communication and Media Management at the Gabelli School of Business, Fordham University, New York, USA. Her research and teaching focuses on media management and media economics, publishing sectors and social media, innovation processes within media organizations and business models. She is the editor of JMM - The International Journal on Media Management.

Robert G. Picard

Professor Robert G. Picard is a senior research fellow at the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism at University of Oxford, a fellow of the Royal Society of Arts and a fellow at the Information Society Project at Yale University Law School. He was founding editor of the Journal of Media Business Studies and The Journal of Media Economics.

Axel Roepnack

Axel Roepnack is an Assistant Clinical Professor of Communication and Media Management at the Gabelli School of Business, Fordham University, New York, USA. His research focuses on business models in media and digital transformation of media companies.