Media operations: a reorientation of newsworker categorisation

ABSTRACT

The advent and popularity of digital and social media have forever transformed the news media industry, specifically impacting the overall production and distribution of hard-copy newspapers. Much of the scholarship on the transformation of the news media industry tends to focus on the phenomenon from the perspective of the journalist and how the process of journalism itself is changing. Often, however, this work overlooks how the process and labourers of newswork are more wholly affected. Thus, this paper argues for a reorientation of the categories of workers involved in the news media industry to account for those involved in media operations – those that play an active role in maintaining the infrastructure that physically creates and disseminates newspapers on a text by text basis. In order to achieve this goal, the paper seeks to uncover the newswork that occurs in the concealed world of media operations and then illustrates how changes to the industry are impacting this area of focus. We conclude by offering several potential avenues of future research that would benefit from utilising a media operations perspective. In doing so, the paper furthers a more robust comprehension of the labour needed to perform newswork as the industry continues to undergo digital transformation.

KEYWORDS:

• journalism
• Media operations
• media management
• media workers
• newsworkers
• news industry
• professionals

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. Previous analyses of this dataset focused on career histories of modern newsworkers with a particular focus on the evolution of journalist jobs (see Kosterich and Weber, 2019; Kosterich and Weber, 2019). This study explicitly analyzes media operations jobs.

Additional information

Funding

This research was conducted with the support of the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia University.

Notes on contributors

Allie Kosterich

Allie Kosterich, PhD, is an assistant professor of communications and media management in the Gabelli School of Business at Fordham University. Her research and teaching focus on media management and industry change. In particular, she is interested in understanding the transformation of media industries as connected to technological and social change.

Paul Ziek

Paul Ziek, PhD, is an associate professor in the Department of Media, Communications, and Visual Arts at Pace University, where he teaches strategic and organizational communication in both the undergraduate and graduate programs. His research interest is how the communication–information–media matrix shapes communication and interaction.