Journalism as Usual? Managing Disruption in Virtual Newsrooms during the COVID-19 Crisis

Abstract

This study focuses on managerial responses to disruption and, specifically, how news executives implemented journalistic practices and processes during the COVID-19 pandemic. Through the lens of Harvey’s (2006) theorization of space, the concept of Collaborative Virtual Environments, and the model of communities of practice, I explore management’s roles in virtual newsrooms. The method is based on semi-structured interviews with a purposive sample of 17 news managers in Spain. The findings presented here underline managerial performance in virtual newsrooms considered as communities of practice. Virtual spaces reconfigured relationships among colleagues and increased collaboration, shaping news practices and communication protocols. Management implemented strategies to control the negotiation of meaning, the building of trust and cooperation, and the power dynamics within their professional communities. Journalistic production during the COVID-19 pandemic also raised problematic issues such as work overload, psychological distress, and job insecurity.

Keywords:

• Media disruption
• digital journalism
• virtual newsroom
• community of practice
• news practices
• collaborative virtual environment
• COVID-19

Introduction

COVID-19 can be described as the first global issue to cause massive disruption in news practices because it forced professionals worldwide to abruptly abandon their physical newsrooms and change their working procedures. As 204 countries were affected by the pandemic (WHO 2020) and many experienced periods of confinement and restrictions to social activity, media employees implemented teleworking and virtual communication systems and adapted to the circumstances. Although confinement usually lasted several weeks, many news outlets plan to continue teleworking.

In this scenario of uncertainty, journalism has become more essential than ever to keep societies informed and to translate the impact of public policies on people’s lives. COVID-19 and its economic effects are accelerating changes in news production, distribution, consumption, and business models (Olsen, Pickard, and Westlund 2020). Such remodelling of organizational processes and resources reflects the strategic responses to disruption that firms must undergo to remain competitive (Bughin and van Zeebroeck 2017). Different kinds of disruption in media work help reformulate existing procedures through a complex structure made up of people, artefacts, actions, and negotiations (Rintala and Suolanen 2005).

Journalists operated outside physical newsrooms during confinement and produced content for their organizations remotely from their homes. Telework is increasingly common for professionals in virtual environments (Kanawattanachai and Yoo 2007). Indeed, journalists had been working for decades in bureaus away from newsrooms or freelancing with flexible labour conditions (Baines 1999; Edstrom and Ladendorf 2012). The emergence of virtual newsrooms during the pandemic revealed that professionals quickly adapted procedures to produce news content, collaborating via video conferencing and messaging platforms. However, journalism is increasingly subject to precariousness, insecurity, freelancing and other non-permanent contractual arrangements (Edstrom and Ladendorf 2012; Örnebring 2010), which might have been aggravated by this crisis (Waizenegger et al. 2020).

Strategic management is important to job satisfaction during periods of abrupt alteration in media companies (Ekdale et al. 2015). Publishers tend to facilitate cooperation among professionals (Gade 2004), as well as with other news organizations (Konow-Lund and Olsson 2016). The working conditions of journalists in digital newsrooms include issues of control, speed, intensification, and commodification (Cohen 2019) and cooperation in multimedia production (Kartveit 2020). Collaboration has been criticized for being used to reduce costs, but also credited with enabling an innovative journalism that would otherwise not be possible (Westlund and Krumsvik 2014).

Scholars have explored how technologies facilitate internal newsroom organizational processes (Kosterich and Weber 2019) and editorial collaborative practices (Lischka 2015), such as the global story of tax evasion with the Panama Papers, produced by the International Consortium for Investigative Journalism (Carson and Farhall 2018). Working environments are expected to guarantee journalistic coordination, foster communication, and increase cooperation (Robinson 2011; Westlund and Krumsvik 2014). According to Koivula, Villi, and Sivunen (2020), technology shapes innovation in dispersed journalistic teams and provides more avenues for sharing information and informal communication. Organizational integration in the form of coordination and cooperation among departments is found to be critical for innovation (Gade and Raviola 2009; García-Avilés et al. 2018), yet little attention has been paid to management strategies during disruptive crises (Olsson 2009).

This study focuses on managerial responses to disruption and, specifically, how executives implemented journalistic practices during the COVID-19 pandemic. Through the lens of Harvey’s (2006) theorization of space, and the concepts of Collaborative Virtual Environments (CVEs) (Churchill, Snowdon, and Munro 2012) and Communities of Practice (CoP) (Wenger 1998), I explore managers’ roles in virtual newsrooms. The method is based on semi-structured interviews with a purposive sample of 17 news executives in Spain. I posed two research questions:

1. What were the main changes in journalistic practices in the virtual newsrooms?

2. How did managers cope with disruption in these virtual communities of practice?

In the next section, I present the theoretical framework regarding the implications of disruption for the media and the characterization of virtual newsrooms as CVEs and CoP.

Theoretical Background

Disruption in News Organizations

Disruptions can be characterized as deviations from the normal workflow that are tied to underlying developmental contradictions of an organization’s activity, as they are considered the driving force behind change (Bughin and van Zeebroeck 2017). Media disruption is usually related to a huge technological shift (digitalization, the Internet, artificial intelligence, etc.) or to the consequences derived from an event that shake up existing structures. For news companies, facing disruption often meant incorporating changes in technology, products, practices, or business models (Eldridge and Broersma 2018). In business theory, “disruptive innovation” creates a new market and value network that eventually displaces the established leading firms, so that newcomers can even overthrow the incumbent leaders (Christensen, Raynor, and McDonald 2015).

Crises are sudden and unpredictable events that may pose a danger to society, create high levels of uncertainty and time pressure (Fleischer 2013). They normally refer to a situation of emergency due to a real or perceived disturbance of social order in which prompt responses are called for to mitigate or eliminate an existing or imminent disaster (Konow-Lund and Olsson 2016). Crises generate a specific kind of disruption in media organizations. Scholars have concluded that during a crisis, news outlets need to reshape their structures, modifying hierarchies and organizational processes (Quarantelli 1989; Van der Meer et al. 2017).

Research shows that a crisis might alter journalists’ predispositions towards certain sources (Van der Meer et al. 2017), challenge journalistic practices (Sorribes and Rovira 2011), and contribute to innovation in terms of processes, products, and genres (Konow-Lund, Hågvar, and Olsson 2019). One effect of news companies’ restructuring is often a restructuring of power relations which tends to make some parts of the organization more important than others (Sood, Stockdale, and Rogers 1987). Organizational decentralization usually occurs, as the demands for flexibility and speed increase because of the uncertainty of the situation (Quarantelli 1989).

The September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks forced news organizations in the United States to disrupt their coverage and adapt to the extraordinary circumstances (Izard and Perkins 2011). Management also played a critical role in running news operations following the July 2011 Norwegian terror attack (Konow-Lund and Olsson 2016) and during the 2015 South Indian floods (Paul and Sosale 2020). Olsson (2009) examined newsrooms’ ability to cope with the disruptions of everyday deadlines caused by “disaster marathon modes” of reporting based on diverse organizational structures. She concluded that a digital newsroom designed to handle 24-hour reporting did not necessarily have a suitable structure to deal with a crisis; management failures were attributed to the lack of experience in similar situations (Olsson 2009).

Although research on news coverage of global health crises has primarily focussed on media representations of such events, scholars have also explored disruptions in news production (Kim 2020). Journalistic practice in this context is influenced by tensions and contradictions (Kim 2020), as well as challenges and constraints in reporting (Leask, Hooker, and King 2010). Studies have examined journalists’ changing role perceptions when covering public health crises (Klemm, Das, and Hartmann 2019) and the complexity of health news production (Briggs and Hallin 2016). However, more attention should be given to journalistic practices in global health crises which involve complex decision-making, challenges for work procedures and conflict of interests (Ma 2005).

The world faced an unprecedented social, economic and health emergency during the COVID-19 outbreak. This global pandemic affected not only the daily activities of media companies, but also their business structure and their employees’ personal lives. Home-based telework in the worst pandemic scenarios was an exceptional situation to limit the effects of the reduced production activity resulting from the measures imposed by health authorities in each country (Belzunegui-Eraso and Erro-Garcés 2020). The COVID-19 crisis demonstrated that media companies reacted in record time to ensure their employees’ safety and to provide continuity in their essential activity as providers of information.

Although previous research on media crises and disruption acknowledges the importance of company restructuring, there is still limited scientific knowledge about it (Olsson 2009). The lack of visibility of journalists as agents of organizational change has further resulted in a scarcity of research on how executives influence decision-making during crises (Berkowitz 1992). This study seeks to shed light on how management ran the newly created virtual newsrooms and faced the turmoil generated by COVID-19.

Virtual Newsrooms as Collaborative Environments and Communities of Practice

Virtual newsrooms can be conceptualized as a social construction that is continuously produced and reproduced by users who share a professional activity. A “virtual team” is defined as a group of people “who work interdependently with shared purpose across space, time, and organization boundaries using technology to communicate and collaborate” (Lipnack and Stamps 2000, 18).

Collaborative Virtual Environments (CVEs) are online digital places where individuals can work together and share experiences despite being geographically apart (Churchill, Snowdon, and Munro 2012). CVEs are the perfect arena for gaining insights into human-human communication and cooperation, interaction with virtual and real objects, and the nature of place and space (Ibid. 2012). Collaboration takes place because the multi-user and immersive properties of such environments facilitate synchronous communication and simultaneous modification to the different discipline designs (Prasolova-Førland and Divitini 2003). Organizations are part of a learning community where the main incentive for successful knowledge production is a common interest as their members work towards sharing understandings, skills, and knowledge for shared purposes (Kane, Argote, and Levine 2005).

Internet-based CVEs have been proposed as a tool for supporting learning in different contexts (Prasolova-Førland and Divitini 2003), as they provide a social arena where participants can meet, overcoming the barriers of the physical world, facilitating chance encounters and informal communication. Organizational learning is a change in the organization that occurs as its members acquire experience (Argote and Miron-Spektor 2011). Knowledge can manifest itself in changes in cognitions or behaviour and include both explicit and tacit or difficult-to-articulate components (Ibid, 1125). The elements of members, tools, tasks and their networks are the primary mechanisms through which organizational learning occurs and knowledge is created, retained, and transferred (Kane, Argote, and Levine 2005).

Researchers have offered extensive analysis about the transformation implications on COVID-19 from a cultural and technological perspective. Many Information System-related themes have emerged within the COVID-19 literature about the implications related to communication, privacy, automation, societal disruption, and digital learning (Adedoyin and Soykan 2020; Carroll and Conboy 2020). Adopting appropriate strategies to handle COVID-19 helped organizations respond to crisis situations and minimize its adverse impact (Dirani et al. 2020).

Journalists working remotely communicate in virtual spaces through Online Collaborative Software (OCS) that supports many of the functions of a physical newsroom (Bunce, Wright, and Scott 2018). OCS’s role in teams’ work is not one-dimensional but full of tensions and insights (Koivula, Villi, and Sivunen 2020). Those involved in a virtual team should exercise self-discipline, flexibility, accountability, and trust team-mates (Hendrickson 2009). Because virtual interpersonal communication tools lack conventional face-to-face methods such as informal openings and closings, turn-taking, and head nodding, mediated communication may at times be problematic (Nardi 2005).

Online spaces operate as extensions to the traditional newsroom and relationships developed there tend to translate into the physical workspace (Robinson 2011). Correspondents operating remotely from traditional newsrooms felt estranged from their colleagues’ ties and were less able to share information and collaborate (Baines 1999). However, Bunce, Wright, and Scott (2018) found that a virtual newsroom connected through Slack deepened relationships among professionals and enabled creative practices across geographical areas, although it contributed to erasing the line between journalists’ professional and private spheres. The use of Slack has increased transparency in news-making and relational trust among co-workers (Moran 2020), although it also raises security and privacy concerns for journalists (McGregor, Watkins, and Caine 2017).

Within these spaces, new roles and relationships emerge, which are negotiated, contested, or accepted, and so an idea of place is constructed: “Understanding the logic and function of these production spaces… cannot be meaningfully done without understanding as well the conventionalized social interactions and professional rituals that define these spaces” (Caldwell 2004, 166). Harvey (2006), one of the most influential theorists of space, draws a relevant distinction. Absolute space relates to the physical, material existence of something that can be measured and observed. Relative space is based on the perspective from which it is considered: a specific space means different things to users depending on their personal viewpoint and circumstances (distance, size, resources…). And relational space refers to the relationships that are created in and through it and how these relationships, in turn, shape what a space means to users.

Media scholars have relied on Harvey’s conceptualization to explore the interplay between journalistic practices, work, and technology (Bunce, Wright, and Scott 2018; Robinson 2011; Usher 2015). Harvey’s theory is useful for analysing the configuration of space in virtual newsrooms “because it shifts the focus beyond the physical to consider the properties of space more generally, including how digital platforms may facilitate some experiences, relationships and power dynamics” (Bunce, Wright, and Scott 2018, 3383).

Another relevant theoretical distinction for this research is the notion of Communities of Practice (CoP) (MacIntyre 1984), where people engage in a process of collective learning in a shared domain of human endeavour (Wenger 1998). Practitioners develop a common repertoire of resources (experiences, stories, tools, ways of addressing recurring problems, etc.) throughout sustained interaction. According to MacIntyre (1984), excellence is the primary goal for the members of CoP, where learning takes place through actions, negotiation, and relationships.

CoP had been found to influence the relational dimensions in newsrooms, providing a framework to handle unstructured problems, set standards, and exchange knowledge (García-Avilés 2014; Schmitz Weiss and Domingo 2010). The social capital generated within CoP leads to behavioural changes, which in turn might positively influence business performance (Lesser and Storck 2001). Managers of CoP usually engage in the negotiation of shared meaning, the development of collaboration and trust, and the dynamics of power and authority (Garavan, Carbery, and Murphy 2007).

Method

Technique

Interviews are used to examine institutional change and professional strategy, providing examples, and contributing to the further understanding of strategic processes (Charmaz and Belgrave 2012). The goal of the interviews carried out in this study was to obtain a broad sense of the sector’s strategic response to variations in work practices and organization generated by COVID-19. The interviews, carried out by phone throughout May and July 2020, were recorded, transcribed, and translated into English. They ranged from 38 to 70 min and averaged at 52 min. Subjects were granted anonymity and were assured that no information provided would be published that could be traced back to them, thus ensuring confidentiality.

The interview guide covered the following issues, among others: processes implemented during telework, internal coordination, adaptation to the virtual newsroom, evolution of journalistic practices, the role of management, changes in the processes of gathering, production, distribution, etc., launching of new products or services, relationships with colleagues, user engagement, evaluation of the experience in virtual newsrooms, and the consequences of COVID-19 for their company.

Sample Selection

The interviewees were selected in a purposive sample of 17 managers (11 male, six female) representing two types of news outlets: 10 newspapers with digital editions (labelled as digital/print) and seven digital-only outlets (including two factchecking organizations), both at national (10) and regional (7) level (Table 1). The selected outlets were among those with the highest number of unique users in May 2020, according to ComScore.

Table 1. Information about the news outlets selected for the study.

News outlet	Type	Mill. u. users May 2020	News Staff	Founded	Focus	City	Owner
El Mundo	Digital/print	25.2	190	1989	National	Madrid	Unedisa
La Vanguardia	Digital/print	25.1	170	1881	Regional	Barcelona	Godó
ABC	Digital/print	23.7	130	1906	National	Madrid	Vocento
El País	Digital/print	23.1	400	1976	National	Madrid	Prisa
El Confidencial	Digital-only	21.6	150	2001	National	Madrid	Titania
20 Minutos	Print/online	20.9	35	2000	National	Madrid	Henneo
El Español	Digital-only	20.3	100	2015	National	Madrid	El León Español
El Diario	Digital-only	17.1	95	2012	National	Madrid	Diario Prensa Digital
El Periódico	Digital/print	11.4	70	1978	Regional	Barcelona	Prensa Ibérica
Las Provincias	Digital/print	11	100	1866	Regional	Valencia	Vocento
La Voz de Galicia	Digital/print	7.6	260	1882	Regional	Coruña	Corporación Voz
Lainformacion.com	Digital-only	7.46	20	2009	National	Madrid	Henneo
Heraldo de Aragón	Digital/print	7	50	1895	Regional	Zaragoza	Henneo
El Nacional.cat	Digital-only	4.2	40	2016	Regional	Barcelona	Notícies Catalunya
Maldita.es	Digital-only	3.38	25	2014	Factchecking	Madrid	Non-profit
Información	Digital/print	2.78	70	1941	Regional	Alicante	Prensa Ibérica
Newtral	Digital-only	1.13	70	2018	Factchecking	Madrid	Ana Pastor

Source: author with data provided by the companies.

Ten of 17 interviewees can be regarded as part of the top-level management that held the most responsibility in the news organizations: two assistant editors, editorial editor, managing editor, two directors of digital strategy, director of digital business, head of audience development, and two heads of product. Seven other interviewees occupied middle management positions at the intermediate level that is subordinate to the executive management and were responsible for team-leading: social media editor, coordinator of data team, community editor, assistant editor of design, and three section editors.

I used a purposive sample of interviewees. Purposive sampling is a non-random technique based on the deliberate choice of participants due to the qualities they possess, which allows information-rich cases to be identified and selected for the most proper utilization of available resources. In addition to knowledge and experience, other selection criteria include availability and willingness to participate, and the ability to communicate experiences and opinions in an articulate and reflective manner (Etikan, Musa, and Alkassim 2016).

Data Processing

Interview transcripts were analysed using Tracy’s (2013) iterative approach in which the analysis alternates between emergent readings of the data and the use of existing models, explanations, and theories. The initial protocol was to read through until I felt I had a good-enough grasp of its content to start working with the text. Then, I divided it into meaning units and marked up areas that depicted different meanings, such as a shift in subject or tone, so that the underlying meaning of the text was revealed. The interpretative analysis allowed the emergence of common themes across the interviews to be identified.

The transformed meaning units were again reshaped or omitted depending on their perceived relevance, although care was taken to ensure that no data was misrepresented. These units were then condensed together, forming emergent themes for each interview. In the next steps, the descriptive codes were fractured and combined further, and more analytical, second-level categories emerged (Tracy 2013). To find the essence of the subject, namely managers’ practices in virtual newsrooms, one must view it through the lens of people’s experiences and then look for commonalities in the underlying meanings of those experiences (Charmaz and Belgrave 2012).

Spanish Media Context during the COVID-19 Crisis

For media outlets in Spain, covering the pandemic during confinement posed a huge organizational challenge. With the State of Emergency enforced from March 14^th until June 22^nd, 2020, newsrooms adopted widespread teleworking and adapted their organizational systems. However, the personal impact on the professionals was high. News workers were infected by COVID-19 at several outlets, including 20 Minutos, El País, El Diario, and Las Provincias. Also, many journalists’ relatives suffered COVID-19, and some of them even died. As the pandemic progressed, media outlets shifted their focus to covering social consequences, giving advice on how to live under confinement and featuring expert analysis.

The economic consequences of this crisis for the Spanish media were harsh. According to industry sources, advertising investment plummeted by 50% during April-May 2020, drawing an increasingly pessimistic economic scenario. Several media companies (Prisa, Henneo, Unidad Editorial, Prensa Ibérica, Vocento…) processed Temporary Employment Regulation Files which affected over 24,500 communication professionals by April according to Employment Office statistics (Dircomfidencial 2020). In this case, the obligation to pay salaries was removed and workers could access unemployment benefits during the period of the suspension.

According to ComScore, Spanish online news outlets registered an average in unique user growth of 59% in March 2020, compared to February, with sharp rises in website traffic. Most outlets launched new products in response to audience demands, such as newsletters, podcasts, data visualizations, documentaries, initiatives for audience engagement and sections highlighting positive stories. Many companies moved their events —an important revenue source— online to attract companies and advertisers.

The number of subscribers also increased by September 2020. El País delayed the launch of its paywall by two months to June 2020 and reached 64,200 subscribers. El Mundo achieved 50,000 subscribers and completed its target for the whole year. El Confidencial launched its subscription service five months ahead to maximize the peak in online traffic, reaching 20,000 subscribers. El Diario’s membership model reached 56,000 members, a 40% growth. Vocento’s and Prensa Iberica’s regional titles, with a metered paywall, offered a free-subscription month, a move that helped expand their subscriber base.

The pandemic was accompanied by the spread of hoaxes and misinformation on social media and WhatsApp. Fact-checking organizations Maldita.es and Newtral, which specialize in fighting hoaxes, experienced an almost 500% increase in their activity during March and April 2020, according to management. Maldita.es’ professionals worked around the clock to answer up to 5,000 verification requests per hour and hired two science journalists and a designer. Newtral’s fact-checking team was also reinforced. Both organizations exercised a valuable public service in debunking misinformation.

Some teams from four digital-only outlets in the sample (El Confidencial, El Diario, Maldita.es and Newtral) and different departments of Henneo media group had experienced teleworking practices before the COVID-19 outbreak. Obviously, these companies were in a better position to manage a massive implementation of telework during the crisis. Nevertheless, all news organizations had to address important challenges for their employees to work remotely.

Results

Adapting Practices in Virtual Newsrooms

The urgency of confinement implied setting up teleworking for entire newsrooms within 24 h. Overnight, organizations launched virtual newsrooms in which the professionals used OCS tools such as Slack, Teams, Telegram and WhatsApp, video conferenced via Meet, Zoom or Skype, and shared documents through Google Drive or Dropbox. Editors communicated with each other and with section-editors, reporters, and teams, managing the workflow and overseeing the output that was produced from journalists’ homes.

Managers in virtual settings updated the Web, coordinated meetings, oversaw sections’ and teams’ work, published on social media, recorded podcasts, edited newsletters, designed data visualizations etc. In the case of newspapers, editors produced a daily print edition. The main objectives managers mentioned about implementing the virtual space were ensuring coordination, process flexibility and monitoring journalists’ feedback about their labour conditions. According to the interviewees, one of the great difficulties was coping with information peaks concerning the spread of COVID-19 and its impact on society. Most professionals worked in continuous shifts, reinforced at weekends, because there was too much information for them to take on. Journalists quickly adapted to teleworking and within the first week of confinement, communication protocols were created. Sections were connected in a unified dialogue system on the virtual platform to coordinate the stories that individuals or teams prepared from their homes.

As reflected in the interviews, a series of good practices emerged in these virtual newsrooms:

• Establish communication protocols. Centralize the access, consult before interrupting others’ tasks, follow working schedules, reduce noise, and provide feedback. Create a separate channel to solve doubts and problems. The aim was to avoid saturation as requests multiplied: “The first weeks I had to keep an eye on WhatsApp, Slack, Twitter and e-mail in real time; it was very stressful” (Digital/print).

• Decide which is the best channel for each subject and team. Minimize the number of tools that help to carry out the in-depth work and that do not require much attention.

• Set limits. Professionals should make clear their availability while teleworking: “Being at home, you were available all the time, even if you did not want to be. Sometimes we overworked as the enormous amount of information required our constant attention” (Digital-only). Working schedules were revised when the demands of news coverage intensified during the first weeks of lockdown.

• Revise the indicators to measure productivity and increase task flexibility. Measuring impact was complicated because the usual parameters were not enough: “Taking an idea and passing it through the organization are key metrics that take longer to measure. Am I answering as many emails as before? Yes. Am I writing as many stories as before? Probably yes. But am I being as productive? It takes a lot longer to answer that” (Digital-only).

• Build team spirit. Unify the tools and processes to give everyone the best access to the workflow and to avoid knowledge loss. Managers were in permanent contact with their teams, planned their work and shared information about ongoing projects. As one executive highlighted, “this situation brings out the best and the worst in teams.”

• Provide spaces for relaxation and use emotional language when necessary: “We introduced animation language and emoticons in our online conversations to give it a more pleasing mood and reduce stress” (Digital/print). “We set up a coffee chat in Slack so that people could tell us how they were doing. It was a relaxing time in the afternoon and people liked disconnecting and getting out of the work routine” (Digital/print). These examples reveal that the stressful work conditions had a psychological impact on the staff that had to be mitigated and highlight the importance of a psychologically safe communication climate (see Koivula, Villi, and Sivunen 2020).

Some executives perceived that little had changed in the production routines at the virtual newsroom compared to the physical one: “We ensured that nothing we were already doing would be altered by teleworking unless it made sense. We maintained 99% of the things we were doing before because when you have a doubt, if you do not have an answer, chaos starts. If you follow the same routines, everything goes smoothly” (Digital-only).

Therefore, management tended to adopt a conservative approach to professional practices to ensure adequate functioning in the virtual setting. An interesting aspect is that – opposite to previous findings about new structures created in virtual environments (Prasolova-Førland and Divitini 2003) – the previous practices and workflows prevailing in the physical newsroom were replicated in the virtual newsroom, to maintain the status quo as much as possible.

Reconfiguring Space, Time, and Communication in Collaborative Virtual Environments

Workers developed new relationships in physical, virtual, and symbolic spaces turned into CVEs. According to several interviewees, the reconfiguration of space during confinement has altered the concept of the newsroom forever, incorporating a more flexible environment. The physical space of the newsroom was abandoned. Thus, the image of empty newsrooms became an icon: “The newsroom is empty but, at the same time, is full. It is quiet, but it is buzzing with a seamless multilateral connection because virtual conversations do not stop” (Digital-only). Physical newsrooms have been “mortally wounded” because they are expensive and unsustainable. “The classic newsroom model is going to disappear; we realized the operational costs we save by teleworking,” emphasized an editor of a digital/print outlet.

In the collective virtual space, most former transactions, relationships, and work procedures were reconfigured. Through OCS tools, the whole newsroom was replicated with processes of digital news gathering, production and distribution. It is not that the hierarchy of power or controls were diluted; rather, the emotional approach often blurred many of those hierarchical barriers. A more horizontal, less hierarchical decision-making developed: “While teleworking I have been able to get to know other professionals better than by quickly dispatching with them in the newsroom, whether it be a boss, a colleague or a subordinate. That has caused the barriers of the managerial position to be blurred, allowing us to get to know our colleagues differently” (Digital/print). “We have become closer by calling each other often and having more time to talk in detail about each other’s angles, ideas and shortcomings” (Digital-only). The interviews show that a positive work relationship required trust, respect, self-awareness, and open communication. Professionals leveraged the social affordances of their collaboration much more, which allowed them to get to know each other better on a personal basis and improved their team bonding.

Physical space became relevant at journalists’ homes, where they set their own areas for work and leisure. It was both a practical and conceptual decision: “A difficult thing was defining the geographical and conceptual limits at home, drawing an area of concentration, understanding that I could go to work without going anywhere” (Digital-only). Working at home combined the profession with private life, drawing a fuzzy line that often does not know where one begins and another ends, as some studies suggest (Belzunegui-Eraso and Erro-Garcés 2020). Differing from the previous literature where remote workers have the autonomy to flexibly schedule their professional and domestic tasks (Baines 1999; Kanawattanachai and Yoo 2007), the enforced teleworking raised new challenges for journalists as they often shared their work-home environment with other members of their household. The hybridity of technological resources and domestic environmental circumstances thus triggered issues of productivity, mental health, and work-life balance.

Space facilitates relationships which, in turn, shape what a space means to users (Harvey 2006). In the virtual newsroom, internal bonds among colleagues flourished. The interviewees highlighted that online networking made reporters feel closer to their colleagues, enabling them to connect with each other’s homes and develop strong emotional ties developed: “We saw each other’s faces in real time, sometimes with partners or children in the background. The common joke is that now we see each other much more than when we did it personally. The common lament, that we miss those face-to-face contacts” (Digital/Print).

Several executives acknowledge that, as result of this crisis, the relationship with the audience has changed for the better. As readers demanded information about how the pandemic was affecting their lives, journalists were aware of their needs and tried to provide solutions to their problems. “More than ever, we have put ourselves at the service of the reader,” emphasized an editor. “We listened to audiences much more closely and produced contents designed to respond to what people really needed. Before, we concentrated on what we thought was important; we did not take our readers into account that much” (Digital/print).

During confinement, the professionals experienced time differently as they worked diachronically with others in diverse time settings, as well as synchronically to carry out coordinated activities simultaneously. Some interviewees felt that their working capacity expanded: “I worked much better because we had far fewer interruptions, fewer useless meetings, and honestly, I missed practically nothing from previous newsroom life” (Digital/print).

CVEs contributed to the relationship between managers and journalists to become more fluid because it enabled simultaneous exchange and exposed them in the public domain, increasing transparency. The emotional component was relevant to avoid misunderstandings. For example, one manager noticed she used distinct protocols when addressing engineers or journalists: “When I talk to the engineers, I tend to eliminate the preliminaries because it seems to be noise to them, it bothers them, because I don’t get to the point. When I talk to journalists instead and I do not make that introduction, they feel bad, they think I am annoyed. Both have a different sensitivity” (Digital-only).

An issue that kept surfacing in the interviews related to what was lacking in virtual communication as opposed to face-to-face conversations, as discussed by Nardi (2005). Some professionals missed verbal and non-verbal face-to-face communication in the decisions that make up daily work in a physical office: “We miss the exchange in the newsroom. The 30-second joke or a comment that some boss makes in public and is a lesson for everyone. There, everybody sees what everybody else is doing” (Digital-only). Some editors argued that working with OCS allowed journalists to think differently, find new perspectives, and approach stories from original angles. As previous research has noted, OCS increases knowledge sharing and reduces communication gaps (Bunce, Wright, and Scott 2018).

Managing Communities of Practice

CoP appear to be an effective way for organizations to handle unstructured problems and to share knowledge outside of the traditional settings (Garavan, Carbery, and Murphy 2007). Each virtual newsroom developed its own practices with a common purpose: to harness a collective effort to design, produce and distribute the best possible journalistic product. With this goal in mind, executives implemented strategies related to three kind of processes: the negotiation of meaning, the building of trust and collaboration, and managing power dynamics.

Facilitating the Negotiation of Meaning

Managers ran the virtual newsroom within a framework of shared meaning, asserted through a series of formal processes and informal interaction. I identified several strategies:

• Interpreting the situation

Editors sought input from their staff, solicited feedback and made it easier for journalists to understand their new roles in the virtual space, adapting processes and creating expectations.

“We are taking the same decisions as before, but instead of sitting at the same desks, we all sat around the same videoconference, which lasts for 18 h each day” (Digital/print). “We have a Slack chat for sharing ideas: articles, best practices, readers’ suggestions… It helps us thinking outside the box” (Digital-only).

As mentioned before, the emphasis was on “maintaining” the established practices and routines while, at the same time, incorporating the mechanisms to adapt to a radically different workplace.

• Articulating vision and goals

Managers kept track of the situation in the daily activities and organized work structures and processes. They redefined the company’s objectives and their approach to meet those objectives: “Our editor-in-chief sent us messages in the organizational sense: ‘we are going to do this; we are thinking about that’. She kept us informed and announced what actions were to be taken. If something was not communicated, she reacted right away: ‘we made this mistake, but we are telling you now’” (Digital-only).

However, some newspaper editors lacked preparation and a clear vision. Communication problems, work overload and assignment failures emerged: “If you do things right as the situation gets complicated, it’s not so bad, but if you do not communicate or you do it chaotically, you have a problem” (Digital/print). “This ‘tsunami’ overwhelmed us. There was no real plan about going remote, so we had to improvise and there was some chaos during the first two weeks of confinement” (Digital/print).

• Challenging resistance to change

Some managers tried to stay ahead of events, encouraged reluctant people and provided the tools to work remotely in the best possible way. They found little reluctance from staff to integrate into the virtual environment: “About 10% of the staff had a little trouble adapting to remote work. It is a people issue, not because they are older or have a print background. I have a young person on my team who misses the physical meetings; he doesn’t manage very well with the system, he feels saturated with messages, and gets overwhelmed” (Digital/print).

• Organizational learning

A learning culture was fostered in some newsrooms, as executives faced new situations: “The pandemic caused many top and middle managers to abandon their offices and roll up their sleeves. It is quite positive that bosses are involved in the day-to-day” (Digital/print). “Some of our routines changed to make them more efficient, and it shows that we can work creatively. We learned something new every day” (Digital/print). Other editors expressed similar views about the need to acquire the skills to master technologies and coordinate staff. Fostering knowledge transfer among co-workers through meetings and sharing internal documents was also essential. Thus, organizational learning was one of the most prominent results in these CoP (Argote and Miron-Spektor 2011).

Building Trust and Collaboration

The development of confidence and cooperation demanded management’s proactive action, combining individual talent, and linking resources to staff. Although editors lacked role models and previous experiences due to the disruptive nature of the crisis, they used three main strategies:

• Focussing on intrinsic motivation

Executives developed cohesiveness and a good team atmosphere. A symbolic motivation was embodied in the idea of a common goal that united the professionals beyond physical and virtual settings. This symbolic identity brought together professional aspirations, goals, and ideals in the sense of belonging to a community under the same news brand, reinforcing the journalists’ mission: “We all feel we are wearing La Voz’s T-shirt and have La Voz’s logo tattooed; we reacted as a united team,” argued a La Voz de Galicia’s manager.

• Creating synergies

Synergy refers to cooperation between different sections, departments, and other areas of the company. Collaboration ranged from information-sharing between journalists and desks, reporters producing or repackaging stories for diverse platforms, content cross-promotion, team alliances for project development, technical support, data visualizations, online events production, marketing coordination and sharing data about online traffic and SEO. Moving members from one organizational unit or section to another was also a mechanism for transferring knowledge within the CoP (Kane, Argote, and Levine 2005). Journalists from sections that had little or no work due to the pandemic, such as sports or culture, supported other sections on COVID-19-related coverage and helped social media departments to generate content. The interviews provided indications of efforts towards journalists, technologists and business managers increasingly working together and sharing knowledge, supporting previous findings (Dirani et al. 2020).

• Providing emotional support

The emotional toll during the pandemic was high. As journalists spent a lot of time locked up at home, they faced a strong psychological impact: “When you are covering COVID-19 the whole day, you don’t stop to think about how it affects you. When I published that we could go for a walk, a week passed before my brain processed that I could go for a walk. It is psychologically hard because you live in a parallel reality. To alleviate this problem, the editorial staff set up a round of comments in which we shared how we felt” (Digital-only). Management focussed on the human factor: accompanying staff and being interested in their daily concerns. A wide range of activities for collaboration such as virtual team stand-ups, formal meetings, and after-work virtual chats in various communication platforms afforded opportunities for managers and peers to regularly check on team members’ wellbeing and facilitate team bonding.

Managing Power Dynamics

According to Wenger (1998) three dimensions shape CoP: Mutual engagement among members as the practice develops, joint enterprise in the process of negotiating, and a shared repertoire of the items that make up the practice through conversations, routines, and ways of how things are done. My findings reveal that managers dealt with issues of power to gather resource capabilities and expert knowledge, and to make decisions about key issues in the virtual newsroom. I detected four strategies:

• Setting the rules

Agreement of rules focussed on aspects such as commitment to teamwork, verification ethics or workflow procedures. Compliance with guidelines ensured that the community of practice was efficient: “The work ethic of the entire newsroom is essential. If you think some members are slacking, it will affect everyone’s productivity” (Digital/print). The interviews show in varying levels how managers made decisions and negotiated what content to produce during lockdown, creating new levels of understanding with other members of the newsroom in terms of how to adapt the news process in the best manner possible.

• Addressing problems

The most difficult factors to overcome were technological and communication failures, handling mental health or personal problems, financial concerns, anxiety about the future of the company, job security and the impact of COVID-19. A major challenge was exhaustion, as journalists abandoned previous routines, reduced sleep, and family time was truncated. Although executives did not assume direct responsibility for managing stress, I sensed a real concern for their staff’s wellbeing in several interviewees.

• Managing conflicts

According to management, most conflicts related to opposing views about product development, work performance, and professional practices. Demands about improving working conditions were also relevant. As the confinement progressed, individualism was exacerbated at some outlets: “Some work was more individualistic, and contents overlapped. You work on a topic at home and sometimes you do not realize that the topic is bordering on another section or perhaps a colleague in your same section feels challenged to do the same story” (Digital/print).

Teams held informal meetings that became conflict-resolution tools: “We held weekly follow-up meetings to see each other, to see how things were going, to see if someone had a conflict with an editor or team-mate. We solved problems that in everyday life you could talk over coffee, but through a screen they get more complicated” (Digital-only).

• Driving innovation

Innovation was mainly related to process and organization. Organizational innovation involved multidisciplinary teams integrated in the design of products, implementing agile project development methodologies, and using software to track what colleagues were doing. “Multidisciplinary contact was very positive. You talked every day to everyone, from the intern to the CEO, to get things done. In the usual dynamic, there are more meetings and physical barriers, offices or geographical distance; all that was broken” (Digital/print).

Process innovation concentrated on improving the organization’s performance through variations in strategy and workflow and was mainly developed at digital-only outlets. El Confidencial and El Diario introduced experimental processes to help bridge top-down and bottom-up projects. Maldita.es implemented a bot to increase its verification response rate and Newtral automatized its Content Management System to manage thousands of verification requests, although journalists supervised the whole process. Henneo launched an alliance with several media outlets to share a technological and commercial platform; the project was streamlined during confinement.

Discussion

The focus of the study was management’s perception of the attitudes, strategies, knowledge exchanges, and negotiations that shaped the process of implementing working collaborative spaces in virtual newsrooms. Adapting an organization’s culture is not easily accomplished during a crisis and understanding the need for change is often not enough to convince employees to transform their routines. The findings presented here show that, in adapting journalistic practices to the virtual newsroom (RQ1), management tried to ensure a smooth functioning in the new setting while maintaining the status quo as much as possible. Rather than developing an entirely different approach to work in virtual newsrooms, managers built around well‐rooted practices, as previous studies found (Berkowitz 1992; Gade and Raviola 2009). At the same time, internal bonds among colleagues were reinforced and staff experienced more internal cohesion. Journalists developed a closer relationship with their readers by attempting to solve their information needs and producing a public service-oriented journalism. A more direct relationship with readers as members or subscribers seems to be increasingly relevant for news organizations’ sustainability.

In these virtual CoP, management used several strategies to cope with disruption (RQ2), such as articulating visions and goals, harnessing resistance to change and learning by doing. For developing collaboration, management created synergies among teams, focussed on intrinsic motivation and provided emotional support to co-workers. And for managing power dynamics, executives set the rules, solved problems, addressed conflicts, and implemented some innovations.

Managers’ perceptions support the argument that the adaptation to the new situation was the outcome of synergistic strategies and learning processes in CoP, as suggested by Schmitz Weiss and Domingo (2010). The data from the interviews suggest that CoP play a significant role in shaping the relational dimension within organizations, as evidenced by Garavan, Carbery, and Murphy (2007). Executives who ran a virtual CoP lacked previous experience; they acquired skills by experimenting and by adapting their vision to the new reality as part of each organization’s culture. Conflict negotiation and knowledge transfer became essential to ensure quality standards in news production. These findings are in line with previous research about management’s role in newsroom change processes, communication protocols and internal conflicts (Cohen 2019).

Many of the face-to-face activities from the physical newsroom translated to the virtual space and enabled professionals to develop a sense of empathy around shared tribulations and collaborative learning. My results support claims by Bunce, Wright, and Scott (2018), McGregor, Watkins, and Caine (2017) and Moran (2020), who suggest that virtual newsrooms increase collaboration, teamwork, and transparency; I also detected a human approach, sharing concerns and emotional distress with their staff.

In these CoP, transitioning from a physical newsroom to a remote one became easier because managers assumed a proactive role in the processes of knowledge-sharing, cooperation, and routinization (Hendrickson 2009; Moran 2020). Nevertheless, production in virtual newsrooms raises problematic issues such as work overload, strong psychological distress, and job insecurity, which are becoming increasingly associated with the precariousness of journalistic labour (Örnebring 2010). The acceleration of teleworking might hide a more precarious, stressful productive system with deficient employment conditions (Edstrom and Ladendorf 2012).

I found no significant differences between the strategies developed by editors from digital/print outlets and digital-only ones, although the latter appeared to be better prepared for remote work because of previous experiences. Arguably, news organizations with a print background had already developed a solid digital focus because most of their staff were accustomed to using online technologies. A small number of innovations, mostly at digital-only outlets, related to automating processes, such as fact-checking and the handling of reader verification requests, and organizational improvements, such as multidisciplinary teams integrated in the design of new products and the implementation of agile project development methodologies. In line with recent research (Westlund, Krumsvik, and Lewis 2021), news work routines demanded coordination among a diverse set of journalists and technologists to accomplish organizational goals; multidisciplinary teams worked together to respond to the demands during a crisis (Konow-Lund, Hågvar, and Olsson 2019).

COVID-19 has accelerated the process of media transformation, disrupting income sources, and alerting publishers to abandon traditional mindsets (Olsen, Pickard, and Westlund 2020). The creative environment of the traditional newsroom seems irreplaceable, but professionals now know how far they can go in adverse conditions, increasing the agility of internal processes and online meetings, as well as knowledge transfer. It will be crucial how each news organization incorporates these reflections, learnings, and practices in the short-term and define new models. One of the challenges in the post-COVID-19 newsroom will be how managers treat their staff. The evidence suggests that Coronavirus-related distress affected employees’ psychological and physical well-being and that many executives cared about their employees and committed to their welfare. Thus, paying close attention to human factors is essential, considering personal, economic, and professional dimensions; it highlights the importance of employee-focussed cultures that implement training and career paths and improve professional and salary conditions.

While this study articulates the perceptions of managers about the work in virtual newsrooms as CoP during the pandemic, the unit of analysis is not a virtual community, but single executives across different news outlets, providing insight into 17 virtual newsrooms from just one perspective each. Further research could delve into perceptions from other members of those CoP (reporters, technicians, etc.) and investigate these issues from diverse perspectives, using a wider variety of methodological approaches, including questionnaires with professionals and ethnographic observation, to gain a deeper understanding of how distinct groups of actors have adapted to virtual newsrooms. Within the scope of this study, it is difficult to assess the extent to which significant shifts in newsroom culture have taken place in the outlets analysed here in terms of consistent practices and strategies. This could be a valuable line of enquiry for future investigations, with broader samples in diverse national settings and work environments. Longitudinal studies will be able to show how journalistic practices in virtual newsrooms evolve as the pandemic progresses, paying attention to other issues that surfaced, such as productivity, job precariousness and the quality of news output.

Conclusion

This study shows that when facing the disruption generated by the pandemic, news managers usually followed a conservative approach of “doing journalism as usual.” In short, management’s strategies in virtual newsrooms focussed on the reorganization of journalistic work while maintaining standard practices from the physical newsroom and overseeing power relationships. Journalists quickly incorporated teleworking, new communication protocols were created, and practices were adapted, such as setting work limits, increasing task flexibility, building team spirit, and providing channels to alleviate stress. To cope with disruption in these virtual COPs, editors used several strategies related to three kinds of processes: the negotiation of meaning, the building of employee cooperation and confidence, and the control of the dynamics of power.

The CoP perspective highlights that managers learned during the implementation of new practices and processes through mutual engagement, as they developed organizational learning about the negotiation of meaning and the building of trust and cooperation. Teleworking in virtual newsrooms increased collaboration and promoted a more flexible interaction between management and their employees. At the same time, the consolidation of remote working has brought unprecedented organizational change to newsrooms, accelerating digital transformation. These changes may become permanent in most news organizations: teleworking will be maintained as a standard practice, strengthening horizontal collaboration, and incorporating professional profiles that reinforce the areas of product, business, data, audience, and design. Management must guide the media company’s strategy with a leadership based on communication, collaboration, and transparency.

Funding Details

This work has received a grant from the Vice-Rectorate for Research of Miguel Hernández University.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.