The (Non-)Adoption of Participatory Newsroom Innovations under Authoritarian Rule: How Comment Sections Diffused in Belarus and Azerbaijan (1998–2017)

Abstract

Extant research on how innovations diffuse among news organizations over time has largely focussed on democratic contexts. By contrast, this is the first longitudinal study to investigate the spread of a participatory newsroom innovation under authoritarian rule. Adopting a multiple case study design, the article reconstructs the histories of comment sections on the opinion-leading online media in two authoritarian contexts, which varied maximally with regard to the outcome of the diffusion process. In Belarus, the diffusion process followed a classic S-shaped curve of adoption, whereas in Azerbaijan adoption rates remained low during the studied period. The study identified primarily three factors that obstructed the diffusion process in Azerbaijan: (1) the restrictive policy of the authoritarian leadership specifically towards audience participation on news websites (social system), (2) the low intensity of communicative exchange between local and foreign news organizations (communication channels), (3) the advent of the successor technology in 2010 (time).

Keywords:

• Diffusion of innovations
• participatory journalism
• authoritarian media
• comment sections
• post-Soviet media
• media history
• journalism

Disclosure Statement

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

Notes

1 In all references, dates after links of websites indicate the dates for which screenshots in the Internet Archive are saved.

2 The figure is based on data from internetlivestats.com because other sources do not provide information on Internet penetration in Belarus and Azerbaijan for all years. The data from internetlivestats.com represent an “elaboration of data by International Telecommunication Union (ITU), World Bank, and United Nations Population Division” (internetlivestats.com 2018). For each year, it seeks to estimate the proportion of a country’s population who had access to the Internet at home.