1st Edition
Transforming Newsrooms Connecting Organizational Culture, Strategy, and Innovation
Transforming Newsrooms offers a practical guide to navigating structural and culture change for news organizations facing economic disruption in today’s rapidly changing media landscape.
Even when the need for change is obvious, the best ideas and intentions are often not followed by successful execution. This book offers a road map for understanding the obstacles to change in news organizations and how to overcome them. Providing a detailed overview of the ways in which news processes and routines are being fundamentally altered to meet new demands for multimedia, interactivity, and immediacy, the book offers tips to help news organizations better serve communities by understanding what information people need and how they want to engage and collaborate. The book also features a variety of case studies and examples from news organizations of all kinds, including a 10-year in-depth investigation of the Christian Science Monitor, the first national news organization to stop its daily presses for a digital report.
Transforming Newsrooms is an invaluable resource for students and media professionals alike, demonstrating how to make research on organizational change actionable and help build a more equitable journalism model that will survive and thrive when we need it most.
Introduction
Acknowledgements
Chapter 1: Uncovering Your Values
Chapter 2: Deciphering Your Culture
The Christian Science Monitor: A Decade of Change. Part I: Making a Radical Shift for Survival
Chapter 3: Developing Your Strategy
Chapter 4 — Developing an Entrepreneurial Mindset
The Christian Science Monitor: A Decade of Change. Part II: Page Views Are Not Enough
Chapter 5 — Engagement: Applying the model
Chapter 6 — Leading Through Change and Resistance
The Christian Science Monitor: A Decade of Change: Part III: Retrenchment
Conclusion — Developing Your Road Map
Biography
Carrie Brown is the founding director of the social journalism master’s program at the Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at City University of New York. This program prepares students for careers in engaged journalism, with an emphasis on learning how to listen, understand community information needs, build relationships, and produce tangible impact. Her research centers on how news organizations can adapt to the changing media landscape.
Jonathan Groves is an associate professor and chair of the Communication Department at Drury University in Springfield, MO. He spent 14 years as a reporter and editor at newspapers in Arkansas and Missouri before becoming the first doctoral fellow at the University of Missouri-Columbia’s Reynolds Journalism Institute. He has consulted with several organizations undergoing change efforts, and his research focuses on newsroom change and engagement.
Groves and Brown use their years-long study of change in news organizations to lay out ways for managers to thoughtfully consider the roles of institutional culture and mission, professional values, and audience engagement to be more effective innovators in the industry.
--Amber Hinsley, Ph.D, Professor of Journalism at Texas State University
