Media Management and Digital Transformation

Arne L. Bygdås, Stewart Clegg, Aina Hagen, Arne L. Bygdås, Stewart Clegg, Aina Landsverk Hagen

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780429954139
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Media & Communications Industry
• Index: Business

Media Management and Digital Transformation provides novel and empirically rich insights into the tensions, struggles and innovations of news making and managing in media organizations.

From an empirically grounded perspective this book investigates how the 'buzz' of new technology tends to prevent management from seeing which changes are needed and indeed possible to make in the newsroom. It presents ground-breaking research showing that fostering ingenious, innovative solutions can be created from within organizations by engaging and allowing employees to recognize problems, reflect and experiment with new ways of working, using technology as support for change. The research presented arises from a four-year action research project in collaboration with three small and medium-sized Norwegian newspapers, in addition to ethnographic research in newsrooms and on media organizations and phenomena in the USA and Europe. It includes among other empirical examples of newsrooms transitioning from a deadline-controlled workflow to an open-ended flowline production, and provides new tools and methods for fostering collaborative creativity and co-creative innovation practices. It also looks into newsrooms' attempts to strengthen their audience engagement, metrics performance and external collaborations with technology providers, journalism education and action researchers.

With theoretical chapters, methodological insights and qualitative case studies of contemporary practices, this book is essential reading for students and practitioners involved with media management globally.

1 Introduction

Why is innovation needed in organizational media managing?

Stewart Clegg, Aina Landsverk Hagen and Arne L. Bygdås

Introducing OMEN

The action research project OMEN (Organizing for Media Innovation, 2015–2019), responsible for many of the research results presented in this anthology, indicates that the challenge print media organizations face is not only associated with the ability to come up with new (digital) technological solutions in the face of the challenges presented by some of the most successful companies worldwide today (such as Google, Facebook, Amazon and Apple) that emerged in the digital era. A main challenge for a majority of industries established pre-digital continues to be how to make a successful transition into the new digital reality (Anderson, Bell & Shirky, 2012). Technology seems to be foremost in considerations (Posetti, 2018). The development and implementation of a technology fix seems almost to be a fetish. We suggest that there is much more to successful strategies for transition and change than merely technology alone.

Our insights suggest that the extent to which these new technologies are integrated into the translation, transition and transformation of everyday work practices in synch with the new digital landscapes is critical. How technology changes practices is socially constructed rather than given by the nature of the material artefacts in use. To a large extent, organizations end up doing digital – focusing on the newest technological fad – rather than being digital – focusing on, for example, integration of the socially constructed affordances of digital technology and their uses for audience engagement.

The OMEN project’s empirical approach builds upon longitudinal field studies engaging field participants in joint collaboration inspired by appreciative inquiry (Ludema et al., 2006), as a positive mode of action research (Reason & Bradbury, 2006) designed to liberate the creative and constructive potential of organizations and human communities (Cooperrider & Srivastva, 1987; Ludema et al., 2001). Appreciative inquiry recognizes that inquiry and change are not truly separate moments but are simultaneous; that is, inquiry is intervention (Pålshaugen, 2001; see also Chapter 13). The empirical material collected covers a time span of five years, 2013 to 2018, and consisted of interviews, documentary studies, participant observation and facilitation of workshops (see Table 1.1 for overview of the empirical material).¹

Table 1.1 Overview of empirical material in the OMEN project in each media organization: Moss Avis (MA), Nationen (N) and Sunnmørsposten (SMP)

Overview of empirical material	Number	Participants
		Editors	Employees
Interviews	30 semi-structured interviews of 1 hour (MA)	4	26
	70 semi-structured interviews of 1 hour (N)	12*	58*
	32 semi-structured interviews of 1 hour (SMP)	4	28
Workshops and meetings with editors	8 workshops and meetings of 2 hours (MA)	3
	22 workshops and meetings of 1–2 hours (N)	5
	15 meetings of 1–2 hours (SMP)	1
Workshops with development group (editors or editors and union representatives)	5 workshops of 2–3 hours (MA)	3	4
	16 workshops of 2 hours (N)	3	19
	3 workshops (SMP)	3
Workshops with newsroom	5 full-day workshops (MA)	3	15–20
	10 half days and 1 full day (N)	6	21
	22 workshops of 2–3 hours (SMP)	2–3	10–15
Participant observations and sit-alongs	5 days (MA)	3	15–20
	10 months full time (N)
	2 days (SMP)	2	5–10
Corporate meetings	2 meetings of 1 hour (MA)	2
	2 meetings of 1 hour (N)	4
	2 meetings of 1 hour (SMP)	6
Workshops with editors (other newspapers in same corporation)	2 workshops of 3 hours (MA)	38
Informal talks and observations	> 30 hours (MA)	3	15–20
	> 80 hours (N)	10	> 50
	> 30 hours (SMP)	4	> 15
Internal documents (reports and analyses)	> 150 pages (MA)
	> 100 pages (N)
	> 200 pages (SMP)

*Some persons are interviewed more than once.

OMEN: Organizing for Media Innovation, supported by the Norwegian Research Council² was a four-year action research project (2015–2019) led by the Work Research Institute at Oslo Metropolitan University and accomplished in cooperation with the Department of Journalism and Media Studies (OsloMet), University of Technology Sydney, Volda University College and University of Gothenburg. The project had three media organizations as partners in which the research has been conducted: Sunnmørsposten, Nationen and Moss Avis. All three publish six paper editions a week in addition to publishing regularly on their websites and social media accounts, and are among the 40 largest out of a total of 226 newspapers in Norway. ³

Sunnmørsposten is part of Polaris Media, the owner of 30 small and medium-sized newspapers in Norway. Sunnmørsposten is the largest among them with 38 editorial employees and in 2017 had a net circulation of 24,000 and by the second quarter of 2018 a total of 79,000 daily readers combined for all platforms.⁴ Nationen is a national niche newspaper for the agricultural and rural districts in Norway. It is part of Tun Media, which also owns three other publications targeting the same market segment. Nationen employs 27 editorial staffers and in 2017 had a circulation of 13,400 and by the second quarter of 2018, 58,000 daily readers in total. Norway’s largest publisher of local media titles, Amedia, owns Moss Avis. Amedia controls 72 local and regional newspapers. Moss Avis employs 30 staffers and in 2017 had a circulation of 12,200 and by the second quarter of 2018, 59,000 daily readers.

Collaborating with these three media organizations in their efforts to adjust to the current digital media landscape, OMEN’s input has mainly been related to the development of new and innovative practices and models of organizing, which are reported in nine out of the 12 chapters (2, 3, 4, 6, 7, 8, 11, 12 and 13). These innovations, in particular, are related to the exploration of new possibilities and practices in the intersection between how news content is produced and presented, and how this work is organized and structured within the media organization. In close interaction with the newspapers’ employees and management themselves, OMEN researchers have probed into and challenged existing structures and practices, engaging and encouraging ways of rethinking and reimagining various taken-for-granted aspects of their everyday work situations.

In this anthology, we relate these issues to the need for organizations and industries to embrace and perform the digital from within rather than acting in regard to the digital as if it were an external, unpredictable force driven by necessity and fear of being left behind. Of course, there are many in the technology-consulting sector that, in the past, have been prepared to stress the magic of technology, promoting its awe-inspiring or wondrous qualities, the shock of which can transform organizational livelihoods. Having overcome the initial stage of the ‘shock of the new’ in terms of digital technologies, it is time for media organizations to understand “media evolution as a process whereby past technologies that had been presumed obsolete or ‘dead’ are reintegrated into new media practices and tools” (Taffel, 2016, p. 335) as interactions and combinations where previously anticipated ideas are brought to life. Doing digital changes organizations and the livelihoods they sustain but not in any pre-defined or given way.

Most media research, especially on innovation practices, focuses on big national media. For instance, in the USA 97 per cent of all newspapers have circulation figures of under 50,000 (Ali & Radcliffe, 2017). The OMEN researchers’ innovative contribution is to bring new perspectives based on findings from small and medium-sized media businesses that, after all, constitute the majority of the industry. Doing so, and working closely in ethnographical, anthropologically inclined action research, OMEN have developed and implemented tools and practices for innovation and creativity in the participating news organizations as well as charting the challenges and obstacles faced in efforts to make innovation an integrated part of everyday work practices in these organizations.

The need for innovation in organizations is promoted every day, nearly everywhere. We are now fully immersed in ongoing, rapid digital transitions, experienced by many as an age of uncertainty and speed (Wajcman & Dodd, 2017). Traditional media organizations are particularly pressed to explore, develop and adapt to this new reality, as people consume news in different ways. The screen is replacing the newspaper for many readers and offering a very different experience. Consumer culture has shifted irrevocably. As Gillian Tett (2018) noted, customization is now the dominant trend in consumption. The individualism associated with the rise of neoliberalism, combined with digital technology, means that each individual can customize what he or she consumes according to individual tastes, and this goes for news as well. We no longer buy newspapers with preselected news but create personalized news hubs, stream our own choice of media, whenever we want to and can download any podcasts we find interesting.

Politically, this has had wide repercussions. Powerful political actors can deride what they do not wish to hear as so-called ‘fake news’; they can manage their press conferences and media appearances so as to only appear before those outlets deemed friendly. Followers can likewise stream media only from those Facebook feeds that reflect what they ‘like’. They can slim down the variety of sources that they consult so their news is contained in a ‘bubble’ (Merleau-Ponty, 2013). Inside various bubbles distinct and alternate realities are constructed as interpretive universes (Bauman, 2013). Newspapers whose editors might once have legislated on what was newsworthy and how it should be interpreted in their print-based bastions of opinion could function as a Fourth Estate. There are significant implications for re-establishing media as the Fourth Estate, repositioning it so that it can make a difference by being a different kind of interpreter rather than one that seeks to assert domain authority. Media organizations’ old role of being authorities, proclaiming from a privileged position, is no longer viable but this opens opportunities for more democratic and egalitarian forms of engagement between publics and news frames. First, there is the role of the media as a dialogical partner in the processes of political, cultural, intellectual and current affairs. In the old print-based economy, even in the most rabidly partisan newspaper, there was a semblance of balance achieved by the spread of opinion, editorial, news, features and correspondence. Customized news loses that.

Second, the practices of the newsroom change dramatically as old routines embedded in a pre-digital world continue to haunt emerging ways of coping with changes that are uncertain, for which much sensemaking is deficient, throwing up new states of uncertainty. In many ways the best thing that has happened to the diversity of news production, consumption and distribution has been digitization albeit, that paradoxically, it has been fatal for many news organizations.

Third, advertising revenue which in the pre-digital era was earned from classifieds and other advertising for which newspapers and magazines were the main channels of communication, has been redistributed as advertising has moved into the digital age of Google, Facebook and Amazon as major channels. The shifts in revenue have been the major drivers of the emergence of new business models such as paywalls, digital subscriptions, organizing events that can be marketed both as events and as stories about the events that are staged, and content marketing where stories are ‘sponsored’. The shift in business models to digital subscription and digital advertising revenues has been successful for many news organizations. However, taking a snapshot of the significant decline in advertising revenues for print products in Norway, from 6 per cent (local and niche newspapers) to 20 per cent (tabloids and national newspapers) per annum, it is evident that the viability of many newspapers, particularly regional ones (numbers from 2016, in Norwegian Media Authority, 2017), is precarious. Norway is not atypical. The same trends are replicated in other advanced societies elsewhere. For democratic societies a free, independent and robust press is an essential ingredient, as the many critiques of the concentration of print and other ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of illustrations
• List of contributors
• 1.Introduction: Why is innovation needed in organizational media managing?
• PART I: Ethnographing the newsroom
• 2. Print and digital: Synchronizing discrepant temporal regimes in the newsroom
• 3. From deadline to flowline: Managing paradoxical demands in news organizations through metaphor
• 4. Local journalism seen through the numbers: Interpreting metrics through quantitative and qualitative methods
• 5. Projects as containers of future hopes and dreams: Organizing innovation projects in the newspaper field
• PART II: Interventions: changing practices in the newsroom
• 6. Creating the new while producing the news: Managing media innovation in times of uncertainty
• 7. The Idea Propeller: Managing for collective creativity in newsrooms
• 8. Managing for audience engagement: Taking steps towards a ‘glowline’ co-production in the newsroom
• 9. Challenging digital utopianism: Electronic imaginaries and the second century of radio
• PART III: Openings and collaborations: renewing the newsroom
• 10. Managing journalistic innovation and source security in the age of the weaponized Internet
• 11. Teaming up with technology: Socio-material managerial approaches for digital transformation
• 12. Education as innovation: Exploring the synergy of student-journalist collaboration
• 13. Context and continuities: A plea for media research in medias res
• Index