Strategic renewal during technology change: Tracking the digital journey of legacy news companies

ABSTRACT

Digitization represents an incrementally competence-destroying technology change for legacy news companies. This study analyses strategic and operational renewal of six incumbent news publishers in the UK, Finland, and Switzerland based on narratives of their annual reports. Their digital journey is coined by two transformations: digitizing news business operations and lateral diversification into non-news-related digital markets. Thereby, willpower represents a corporate capacity that indicates the willingness for renewal. Lateral diversification renews the companies’ profit formula, which leads to a negative cost-benefit perception regarding future investments in digital journalism by some incumbents. These incumbents communicatively prepare to incrementally abandon their core journalism business. From the communicative constitution of organizations (CCO) perspective, annual report narratives represent instruments for legitimizing corporate restructuring and repositioning.

KEYWORDS:

• Communicative constitution of organizations (CCO)
• digitalization
• inertia
• journalism
• sensemaking
• strategy

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Acknowledgments

The author would like to thank the two anonymous reviewers for their very valuable comments that considerably helped to improve the paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Additional information

Funding

This study was funded by the University of Zurich under grant number [FK-15-076].

Notes on contributors

Juliane A. Lischka

Juliane A. Lischka (PhD 2014, University of Zurich) is a SeniorResearch and Teaching Associate in the division “Media Economicsand Management” at the Department of Communication and MediaResearch at the University of Zurich.