Complexity, Uncertainty and Change in News Organizations

ABSTRACT

Media managers and journalists have responded to digitalization over time by implementing online journalism and by converging and de-converging print and online newsrooms. Drawing on complexity and uncertainty theories, this article develops a cycle model, which furthers the understanding of why and how news organizations change. Qualitative and quantitative findings in two European legacy media companies indicate that managers are constantly striving to minimize their own complexity and uncertainty, which, in turn, drives change in news organizations through different stages that are characterized by economization and integration or investment and specialization. More specifically, under lower external and internal complexity and uncertainty, managers are pushing news organizations toward more economization and integration. However, they invest and specialize if either their external or their internal complexity and uncertainty increase. Moreover, the findings reveal the mechanism through which the internal complexity and uncertainty arise, and they show differences depending on the ownership structure of a news organization.

Acknowledgments

I thank the reviewers for their helpful remarks on an earlier version of this article.

Supplementary material

Supplemental data for the article can be accessed here.

Notes

1. For a systematic overview of nearly 40 international studies on the convergence and de-convergence of newsrooms see Wilczek (2018).

2. In this article, the term economization refers to activities that save costs. However, the term has been also used in a broader sense, namely referring to commercialism (e.g., von Rimscha & Siegert, 2015).

3. The organization and management literature has discussed a variety of ways to measure complexity and uncertainty. In this paper, measures were used that apply to media markets and reflect key changes in the context of the digitalization and disruption (Küng, 2017b; Mierzejewska & Shaver, 2014).

4. Visits were considered because no comparable data were available for unique clients.

5. For instance, in order to increase online traffic, news organizations implement units that produce online articles, apply search engine optimization and share online articles via social network sites (Nielsen & Ganter, 2018).

6. While MC2 has been publicly traded since 2000, the majority of shares have been family-owned.

7. The qualitative findings are presented in detail in Tables I-IV (see supplementary material).

8. The quantitative findings are presented in detail in Table V (see supplementary material).

9. In fact, toward stage 4 lowest level actors also engaged in negotiations (ED1) and a revolt (ED2), which increased their own IC and SU even further.

10. In fact, the higher responsiveness of managers in the publicly traded news organization is also reflected in their “timing” (Sylvie, 2003, p. 296) during stages 1 and 2. During these stages, MM2 initiated actions of complexity and uncertainty reduction earlier than MM1.