1st Edition
Media Management and Digital Transformation
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 & Arne L. Bygdås
Part I Ethnographing the newsroom
2. Print and digital: Synchronizing discrepant temporal regimes in the newsroom
Gudrun R. Skjælaaen & Ingrid M. Tolstad
3. From deadline to flowline: Managing paradoxical demands in news organizations through metaphor
Arne L. Bygdås, Aina Landsverk Hagen, Ingrid M. Tolstad & Gudrun R. Skjælaaen
4. Local journalism seen through the numbers: Interpreting metrics through quantitative and qualitative methods
Bente Kalsnes
5. Projects as containers of future hopes and dreams: Organizing innovation projects in the newspaper field
Elena Raviola, Maria Norbäck & Rolf Lundin
Part II Interventions: Changing practices in the newsroom
6. Creating the new while producing the news: Managing media innovation in times of uncertainty
Øyvind Pålshaugen & Aina Landsverk Hagen
7. The Idea Propeller: Managing for collective creativity in newsrooms
Aina Landsverk Hagen & Ingrid M. Tolstad
8. Managing for audience engagement: Taking steps towards a ‘glowline’ co-production in the newsroom
Ingrid M. Tolstad, Aina Landsverk Hagen & Gudrun R. Skjælaaen
9. Challenging digital utopianism: Electronic imaginaries and the second century of radio Christina Dunbar-Hester
Part III Openings & collaborations: Renewing the newsroom
10. Managing journalistic innovation and source security in the age of the weaponized internet
Elizabeth Anne Watkins & C.W. Anderson
11. Teaming up with technology: Socio-material managerial approaches for digital transformation
Gudrun R. Skjælaaen & Arne L. Bygdås
12. Education as innovation: Exploring the synergy of student-journalist collaboration
Ivar John Erdal
13. Context and continuities: A plea for media research in medias res
Øyvind Pålshaugen & Stewart Clegg
Biography
Arne L. Bygdås is Senior Researcher at the Work Research Institute at Oslo Metropolitan University, Norway.
Stewart Clegg is Distinguished Professor of Management and Organization Studies at the University of Technology Sydney, Australia.
Aina Landsverk Hagen is Senior Researcher at the Work Research Institute at Oslo Metropolitan University, Norway.