Capturing Digital News Innovation Research in Organizations, 1990–2018

ABSTRACT

Journalism scholars have acknowledged the importance of innovation in journalism. A common finding is that journalism has difficulty adapting to change and uses multiple coping mechanisms, including making excuses for not innovating by relying on their professional norms and practices. However, such research does not more broadly show how journalism studies research has shaped what scholars have learned about innovation practices. The goal of this study is to provide a systematic literature review of news innovation research since the 1990s. This article deploys a qualitative content analysis of peer-reviewed journal articles about news innovation in media and journalism studies. It shows that journalism and media scholars discuss news innovation as normative, participative, and experimentative. Journalism studies scholarship has also focused on innovation as a process, integrating elements of audience engagement, structure, system, and network. The goal of this study is twofold. First, it discusses the methodological and conceptual/theoretical approaches taken in scholarly journal articles about news innovation. Second, it outlines limitations of such approaches and draws conclusions to conceptualize knowledge in this subfield of research. It argues that it is important to take into account those limitations, as they pose problems for the cumulative nature of news innovation research knowledge.

KEYWORDS:

• Innovation
• journalism
• news
• literature review
• digital journalism
• sociology of news

Acknowledgements

Thanks to the editors and reviewers for their thoughtful advice. We would like to thank Kimberly Clarke at the University of Minnesota Libraries (Twin Cities) who helped with the original sampling. We are also grateful to Drs. Colin Agur, Sid Bedingfield, Elisia Cohen, Avery E. Holton, Rebekah Nagler, Amy O’Connor, Hyejoon Rim, Claire Seijin, Christopher Terry, and Benjamin Toff as well as participants at the Cardiff Future of Journalism Conference for their helpful feedback.

Disclosure Statement

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

Notes

1 The databases selected for this study’s search included Communication and Mass Media Complete, which indexes approximately 430 full-text journals, cover-to-cover indexing and abstracts for 670 journals, selected coverage of nearly 200 journals, with content dating as far back as 1900; Business Source Premier, with more than 1,100 full-text journals and magazines, 660 active full-text peer-reviewed journals, nearly 300 active full-text peer-reviewed journals with no embargo, with content dating as far back as 1911; Scopus, with 21,950 peer-reviewed journals and over 3,600 full open access journals dating back to 1788; Sociological Abstracts, which contains over a thousand core serials, dating back to 1952; Web of Science Core Collection, with more than 20,000 journals and 1.4 billion cited references dating back to 1900; and Google Scholar.

2 The following journals followed those mentioned above: Journal of Media Business Studies; Digital Journalism; Newspaper Research Journal; Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly; International Communication Gazette; JMM: The International Journal on Media Management; Journalism Quarterly; Convergence: The Journal of Research into New Media Technologies; Information, Communication & Society; NORDICOM Review; and Media International Australia incorporating Culture & Policy

3 The results returned little research in countries including Italy, the Netherlands, Argentina, Belgium, Brazil, China, Canada, Switzerland, Israel, South Korea, South Africa, Portugal, Kenya, Denmark, Nigeria, Egypt, Greece, India, Ireland, New Zealand, Afghanistan, Austria, Bangladesh, Bahamas, Cameroon, Chile, Cyprus, France, United Arab Emirates, Ghana, Guatemala, Iran, Macedonia, Malaysia, Poland, Puerto Rico, Qatar, Romania, Sudan, Turkey, Taiwan, and Zimbabwe.