Post-industrial fog: Reconsidering innovation in visions of journalism’s future

Abstract

As US news organizations have faced twin crises in funding and authority in recent years, innovation has become a key concept and ideal driving many interventions aimed at saving journalism. Often, ahistorically and uncritically deployed notions of innovation elide questions of digital journalism’s democratic aspirations in favor of market-oriented solutions. To critically examine the discourse around innovation, this article interrogates documents produced by think tanks and non-profit institutes researching the future of journalism: the Knight Foundation, the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia University, Harvard’s Nieman Foundation, and the Shorenstein Center at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, among others. A post-industrial vision for journalism emerges with an overriding and celebratory focus on innovation. We argue that this discourse marginalizes normative concerns about journalism’s democratic purpose and rests on an entrepreneurial logic that seeks to dictate digital journalism’s broader public virtues.

Keywords

Critical discourse analysis critical journalism studies future of news innovation journalism think tanks political economy of news

Introduction

The financial crisis in the US news industry has destabilized familiar models of journalism, opening afresh once-settled questions about what journalistic forms, practices, institutions, and infrastructure will support democratic life (Curran, 2010b; Franklin, 2014; McChesney and Nichols, 2010). As a vacuum of knowledge has opened around questions of what the future of news will hold, a number of potential thought leaders have emerged with their own visions for reconstructing journalism in a digital era. Among such discussions and debates, a prominent chorus has arisen, pointing to ‘innovation’ as the one route out of the current crisis.

This article interrogates ‘innovation’ as a prevailing and under-theorized concept among knowledge actors in and around journalism. Our intention is not to shun innovation’s prospects for journalism, but to apply critical scrutiny to a value that has not been adequately challenged. As opposed to connoting the uptake of specific technical inventions in journalism, innovation has come to operate as an ambiguous signifier in much of the discourse surrounding the future of journalism, open for interpretation and often used to forward visions of journalism that adhere to the market dynamics defined by Internet and technology companies. Take, for instance, the recent words of the Tow Center’s Emily Bell (2016), diagnosing a particular shortcoming of contemporary journalistic culture: ‘Journalistic innovation now often means keeping pace with the largest and most agile of the social media companies’ (para. 15).

Hope in innovation drives visions of journalism’s future, as seen by institutions that have the financial and intellectual capital to help shape that future. Yet, the concept of innovation itself has received little critical scrutiny. Slippery in its usage, innovation predominantly connotes either technical changes in news production and distribution or changes in funding models for journalism. A pervasive discourse of innovation advocacy, which works to elide this distinction and posits innovation as valuable for its own sake, has emerged in the research reports, white papers, case studies, and best practices guides published by think tanks, institutes, and foundations that avow a public interest mission, such as the Knight Foundation and the Tow Center for Digital Journalism. This research fashions itself as a kind of civic policymaking, speaking to and drawing insights from business leaders, policymakers, news workers, and concerned citizens. Such institutions claim to produce knowledge that is practical – offering tactical advice on building digital news media – and normative – preserving the values that underscore a democratically vital news media in the midst of digital disruption.

This think tank research forms the corpus for our study as we interrogate the ways innovation has become discursively linked with journalism’s future. After laying out a rationale for studying the discourses of innovation that emanate from knowledge actors outside the industry, we analyze the ways innovation has come to imply a market-oriented vision of journalism’s future that obscures relevant, publicly oriented alternatives, such as the one forwarded in Free Press’ Saving the News report (Pickard et al., 2009). Although this report, and others like it, was heralded upon publication, the policy solutions the authors called for soon fell from consideration as focus shifted to market-based solutions. We argue this focus on innovation continues to elide alternative visions of the press by failing to attend to questions of engaging diverse publics, framing newsroom cultures as the key barriers to innovation, and relying on a flawed and selective logic to legitimate the success of innovation as a market-oriented solution to procuring news and information necessary for democratic life. The celebration of innovation frames the contemporary crisis of journalism as a problem to be solved by the entrepreneurial ingenuity of firms, managers, and individual journalists, rather than broader public engagement. The assumption that innovation can save journalism avoids reckoning with the increasingly evident failure of both commercial and philanthropic markets to secure a media system commensurate with democratic life.

The documents gathered for this study come from several of the most prominent think tanks and institutes producing research on the future of news. Housed under the auspices of academic institutions or private foundations and often funded by philanthropy or industry dollars, these organizations possess both the financial and discursive capital to set influential agendas for the future of journalism. We analyzed more than 50 substantive reports, white papers, case studies, and best practices guides concerning the future of journalism, the crisis of journalism, and/or journalistic innovation published by the following between 2009 and March 2016: The Knight Foundation; The Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia University; The Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University; The Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government; The American Press Institute; the Dewitt Wallace Center for Media and Democracy at Duke University; and the Tow-Knight Center for Entrepreneurial Journalism at the City University of New York. Through the use of grants, fellowships, and professional education programs, these organizations seek to shape the field of journalism, often stating their activities are ‘investments in leadership’, strategically centered on prominent and promising individuals and organizations (Knight Foundation, 2012: 13). We performed a critical discourse analysis of these reports to understand the ideological and epistemological assumptions that allow innovation to circulate as an ideal, looking at the logical formulations and common strategies that rendered innovation desirable in the discourse (Fairclough, 1995). As Dahlberg and Phelan (2011) note, critical discourse analysis can be useful in identifying the confluence of ideological and conceptual techniques that render certain responses to changing political and economic conditions as natural.

Such an analysis was driven by the following questions: What diagnoses and historical contexts for the crisis of journalism are offered? What solutions to the crisis are sanctioned and proscribed? What stories are told about innovation, its purposes, and its benefits? What kinds of evidence are presented for favored solutions? According to each report, what are the barriers that have stunted the flourishing of innovation in the journalism industry?

Knowledge actors, innovation, and the shape of journalism

Stories of intellectuals acting as observers of the press to articulate normative visions during moments of perceived crisis fill US journalism history (Sinclair, 1920; Solomon and McChesney, 1993). In the early 20th century, debates about journalism in magazines such as Harpers, The Atlantic, and The New Republic, among others, gave voice to concerns about a floundering press amid declining civic trust, anxieties about popular democracy, the power of propaganda and public relations, and the increasing consolidation of news media (Marzolf, 1991; Schudson, 1978). Professionalization became US news producers’ primary response to such concerns, and knowledge actors played a pivotal role in mapping out journalism’s institutional norms and ideals. The first schools of journalism, opened in the early 20th century and often founded by money from leading media magnates, advanced a form of professionalism that aligned with the interests of media owners, positioning professional self-regulation as an alternative to radical solutions like the creation of non-profit press or stronger government regulation (McChesney, 2004; Marzolf, 1991).

As US news organizations unevenly adopted professional ideals, a media reform movement led by unions, church groups, African American groups, and others arose in the 1930s and 1940s, calling for a structural overhaul of the news industry (Pickard, 2015b). The Hutchins Commission, another organized group of intellectuals, convened to diagnosis the problem and prescribe a solution. Members of the Commission privately expressed doubts about whether a commercial media could truly support a democratic citizenry, yet their final report largely affirmed a commercial press held in check only through professional self-regulation (Pickard, 2015a). Yet, the moment of professionalism was fragile. By the late 1960s and 1970s, political groups on the left and right vigorously questioned the foundation of professional objectivity, and news industry leaders started to worry that professional norms had led to declining audiences and revenues (Bogart, 1991; Hallin, 1994). A new cadre of researchers turned to the methods of market research and business consulting to help news organizations reinvent their approach to defining and presenting news (Bogart, 1991; Nadler, 2016; Underwood, 1995). Such moments revealed journalism practices and institutional ideals as amenable to the normative articulations of new knowledge actors.

Contemporary research on innovation emerges from an intellectual genealogy that begins in the early 20th century philosophical critiques about the quality of news and continues through the embrace of market research. The Knight Commission’s 2009 report, Informing Communities: Sustaining Democracy in a Digital Age, cites the Hutchins Commission as a moral and intellectual forbearer, at one point arguing, ‘Information is as vital to the healthy functioning of communities as clean air, safe streets, good schools, and public health’ (p. xiii). But it also bends toward an overt market imperative, citing the disruption in journalism business models as the primary existential threat. The Informing Communities report is the starting point for our analysis because its uniquely entrepreneurial optimism sets the agenda for much think tank research to come:

It is a moment of technological opportunity … The potential for using technology to create a more transparent and connected democracy has never seemed brighter. At this juncture, muddled strategies and bad choices will result in missed opportunities for society. (p. xii)

The report often conflates technological change with ‘cultural innovation in the use of new tools for civic and social purposes’, revealing a perspective that links journalism’s economic viability with its democratic character (p. 40). In this landmark report of the post-crisis era, we see the emergence of an ideal that animates much of the research corpus: ‘innovation, competition, and marketplace incentives will be critical to the growth of both for-profit and not-for-profit [journalism] models’ (p. 34). Such a conception of innovation obscures its overt meaning in favor of an ideal that compels both for-profit and non-profit news organizations to compete for either commercial or philanthropic dollars through ‘whatever works’ (Shirky, 2011: 43).

Theoretically situating innovation advocacy

Think tank and foundation research works as an epistemic practice built upon assumptions about the nature of the journalism industry and the conditions that surround it. It produces a metajournalistic discourse (Carlson, 2015b), synthesizing debates about the future of journalism and articulating the boundaries around what constitutes the kinds of innovation news organizations should aspire to. As disruptions to journalistic practices and business models have proliferated, the field has been opened to new knowledge actors (Vos, 2016). Notions of journalism as a civically oriented practice, beholden to the public good, leave the field open to myriad actors advocating their own visions for the future of journalism on the grounds that their interventions may serve the public better than what currently exists (Hess, 2016). As Faber and McCarthy (2005) note, foundations, think tanks, and philanthropic organizations occupy an ex officio space in the US public life, operating in neither a completely public nor private capacity. Research is one discursive tool that offers various actors a seemingly dispassionate means for bringing their visions of the future into being.

Interrogating research documents as discursive objects reveals the techniques that render the world in an ordered, yet abstracted, form so that certain actors may gain insights that guide investments in time, money, and human activity (Latour, 1999). A critical approach lays bare the conceptual, ideological, and epistemic tools that allow institutions to ‘take into account’ a particular phenomenon and explain its significance (Latour, 2004: 53). Epistemological assumptions have a productive potential, in that particular phenomena, forces, and actors are perceived more clearly and invested with more causality than others. As Blume (1974) has argued, the power of research-based knowledge ‘is highly dependent upon the social, economic, and political organization of society’ and, as such, is a means for shaping the world in accordance with these strictures (p. 274).

By circulating in discourse, the ideas and findings that constitute think tank and foundation research are vetted, deemed in line with certain actors’ interests, gain broader uptake, and reveal philosophies and epistemologies that drive the conceptual and normative work of various democratic institutions (Schmidt, 2008). Scott and Jabbar (2014) show how, in educational policy, think tanks have been crucial knowledge actors in reshaping public education, a field facing many of the same technological and financial strains disrupting journalism. By developing credibility through publishing research, think tanks gain the legitimacy to connect new actors, ideas, and practices with existing institutions and resources, often under the aegis of introducing meaningful innovations. Research constitutes think tanks’ ideational capacity as knowledge actors, and it is through the proliferation of influence that ideas gain the power to reorganize institutions in the face of change (Levi-Faur, 2005).

In the case of US journalism, changing industrial conditions represented a series of phenomena that needed to be understood before they could be adequately responded to, usually as a ‘crisis’ (Anderson, 2016; Zelizer, 2015). It is our assertion that the tools used to understand this crisis led to the uptake of innovation as an ideal. As Giddens (1990) has argued, notions of crisis undermine the stability and authority of institutions, like the news industry, but applied research works to reorient institutions toward understanding and confronting these crises. In the case of journalism, these discourses are always connected to the relations of power and influence over the industry, acting as ‘symbolic contests in which different actors vie for definitional control’, whereby ‘gains in symbolic resources translate into material rewards’ (Carlson, 2015a: 6).

The discursive power of innovation

The term ‘innovation’ remains under-theorized in journalism and media studies, but scholars studying innovation in business and government have shown that an intermingling of values and practices from one industry or institution to another acts as a precondition for allowing innovation to emerge (Padgett and Powell, 2012.) As Lewis (2012) has shown, the notion of innovation offered the Knight Foundation a justification for moving resources away from professional training to projects centered on technological change in journalism. Innovation also offers many news startups a strategy to position themselves as fundamentally different than the broader industry, thus attracting audience share, investors, and possible revenue (Carlson and Usher, 2016). Newsroom innovations are complex, requiring a shift in not just individual knowledge but also social relationships and power dynamics that are unique to the culture of each newsroom (Weiss and Domingo, 2010).

Journalism has faced industrial and technological shifts that threatened both traditional business models and professional norms before. For instance, the rise of radio technologies instigated conflicts between newspapers and nascent broadcasters over who had the authority and institutional capacity to cover the news, with many broadcasters successfully arguing radio’s technological potential could be harnessed to better serve a far-flung US public (Jackaway, 1995; Lott, 1970). As Curran (2010a) shows, cable television, community access television, and early Internet access also presented challenges for news media, but celebratory accounts ‘ignore[d] the way in which the wider context of society influences the new technology’s development, content and use’ (p. 31). Going back more than a century and a half, the arrival of telegraph wires across the US landscape not only promised a reconfiguration of citizenship through faster communication but also laid the foundation for a market-oriented paradigm, rooted in infrastructure investment and the commodification of information distribution, that persists to this day (Carey, 1983; Czitrom, 1983). Such is the discursive character of innovation: it flattens context so that certain formulations appear novel and desirable.

When considering the impact that Internet and digital technologies have had on the news industry, notions of innovation are often presented as progressive and ahistorical. Heflin (2015) shows that such formulations render journalism’s contemporary crises as merely technical and elide persistent epistemological and philosophical conflicts between journalism and the technology industries. In the broader discourse and across journalism’s history, innovation has been used in various ways, where each usage connotes a different possible strategy: technical changes in production, new business models, and adapting practices from other industries to rebuild authority over truth. Innovation is an ideal whose very openness offers the promise of harnessing an unknown future while eliding obstacles to that future. In a contemporary moment defined by a crisis in funding for news, a focus on innovation opens up journalism to myriad new actors and unsettles journalism’s governing norms to position an often simplified understanding of the market as the logical guide to the future (Curran, 2010a).

Critiquing innovation

Starting from the assumption that innovation is a desirable ideal, foundation and think tank research offers programmatic suggestions for creating the conditions necessary for this ideal to emerge. Much of this discourse starts from the assumption that exceptional contemporary conditions require journalism to shed many of its historical accretions, as Fancher (2011) exemplifies:

If journalism did not exist today, it would not be created in the form that it has been practiced for the past century. The values, functions and purposes of journalism are as important as ever, but journalism must be re-invented as an interactive endeavor if it is to remain relevant and accountable. (p. viii)

In this context, innovation, as a concept, narrows focus around what constitutes a legitimate solution to changes in business philosophies, editorial strategy, and journalistic identity. It is usually presented as the key to preserving journalism in the digital age, despite what other conditions in the industry may imply (cf., Grueskin et al., 2011; Huey et al., 2013; Wihbey, 2014).

Privileging quality over equity in innovation research

In the research on journalistic innovation, there is a striking lack of attention to socioeconomic inequities in digital news participation and to audiences underserved by digital initiatives. In theory, innovation could present a mode for addressing such public problems through creative approaches. The Knight Commission on the Information Needs of Communities in a Democracy (2009) report offered a promising start by bridging concerns about preserving quality news production with an egalitarian vision of engaging diverse communities. The report’s authors recognized that ‘the problem is not the lack of information’, but rather ‘an absence of engagement – personal involvement with the larger community based on accurate and timely information’ (p. 12). Hence, the report forwarded the goal of creating a media system capable of supporting an ‘ideal of truly informed communities’ (p. vii). This vision, however, has not remained at the forefront of the broader research agenda. Instead, research produced by the Knight Foundation and other groups has pivoted away from the ideal of informed communities, toward a narrow focus on innovation for the sake of revenue, technological advancement, and news quality.

A tension between market orientation and public ideals can be found in the original Knight Commission report. The authors speak broadly of informed communities but do not build on that ideal with an analysis of inequalities in news production and distribution. The Knight Commission’s (2009) first two recommendations encapsulate this split:

1. Direct media policy toward innovation, competition, and support for business models that provide marketplace incentives for quality journalism.

2. Increase support for public service media aimed at meeting community information needs. (p. xvi)

The first recommendation associates innovation and entrepreneurialism with a market orientation toward quality, while the second suggests public financing may be needed to fund news for communities not well served by the market. The Saving the News report, published by Free Press, echoed this latter call with specific policy suggestions (Pickard et al., 2009). Proposals from this report would appear alongside the ideals articulated by the Knight Commission in reports published in the years directly following the Great Recession, many of which endorsed increased public financing to enhance inclusiveness (Clark and Aufderheide, 2009; Cochran, 2010; Downie and Schudson, 2009; Harwood, 2011). Although it seemed at the time that a momentum for public solutions to journalism’s crisis was emerging, the political climate for promoting public media financing in the United States soon soured (Pickard, 2015b). In the corpus we analyzed, discussions of public financing and funding began to disappear in reports published after 2011. Abandoning the case for public financing has left the innovation research agenda with a focus on commercial and philanthropic funding that has largely been disconnected from discussions of news equity.

The language of ‘informed communities’ no longer serves an anchor value. Instead, more elite-centered notions of news quality, technological sophistication, and revenue sustainability have eclipsed informed communities as the ideals driving interventions seeking to improve journalism’s value. A 2012 report evaluating the Knight News Challenge, a signature grant competition for innovative news producers, exemplifies this shift. Researchers conclude that success should be measured ‘based on how funding improves the field’ rather than ‘impact of individual projects’ (Knight Foundation, 2012: 4). As the report operationalizes what it means to improve the field, it turns away from measuring community impact toward tabulating how grants have supported ‘leaders’ in the news field and sites credited with producing high-quality news (p. 13).

The same report offers Knight News Challenge winner Zeega as an exemplary case, illustrating a rationality that privileges audiences that can pay for news. Zeega originally built a platform intended to help a local news organizations create multimedia stories at lower cost, but found ‘local news organizations that [Zeega] had identified as its target users were not willing to pay for the tool’, so they shifted focus to a ‘wider tech-savvy population equipped with smartphones and tablets’ (p. 14). By retooling their product toward a tech-savvy niche, Zeega shifted from using philanthropic dollars to solve a cost-based problem faced by many in the industry toward developing a market investment that furthers divides between the digital haves and have-nots. Furthermore, the report fails to consider whether or not Zeega produced something audiences or newsrooms actually needed, instead promoting technical development as possessing a self-evident and tautological value.

Another example of this trend can be observed in a series of reports published by The Tow Center for Digital Journalism intended to guide journalists in developing best practices for new technologies and techniques. Focusing on developments, such as algorithmic accountability reporting, crowdsourcing, virtual reality journalism, and news games, these reports may indeed provide helpful insights for producing high-quality journalism, but they also reveal a bias for serving tech-savvy audiences. With one exception, none of these studies investigate how such techniques might be used for engaging lower income audiences. A study by Wenzel et al. (2016) is the exception, investigating whether ‘solutions journalism’ that emphasizes efforts to solve systemic community problems might engage marginalized communities more than standard reporting narratives. This report stands out because it explicitly acknowledges the disparities in news as a problem that media producers must address.

By emphasizing concerns about news quality and revenue, much of the discourse on innovation ignores the fact that increasing socioeconomic inequalities in news production, circulation, and target audiences are structural problems inherent to digital media (Hindman, 2009; Nguyen, 2012; Schradie, 2011; Tran, 2013). As digital advertising has made pursuing niche-oriented, generally wealthier audiences more lucrative than targeting mass audiences, news funded by philanthropic sources has followed suit by pursuing upscale audiences more likely to be deemed high-quality news consumers and to donate (Benson, 2016; Turow, 2012; Turow and Draper, 2014). The pervasive theory that philanthropic funders should only provide ‘seed money’ for news ventures, which will then need to find sustainability through advertising or donations, leads to a formula that ‘moves nonprofit media toward an increasingly exclusive mission, news by and for elites’ (Benson, 2016: 13). Such a trend adds pressure to the widening gap, documented by Prior (2007), between the information rich and information poor.

Structural conditions and newsroom cultures

For advocates of innovation, newsrooms offer a confounding obstacle. On one hand, they are the embodiment of journalistic value and tradition, the legitimacy upon which any interventions in the industry are built. On the other, they resist change and harbor a workforce with outdated skills and little time to master new ones or to think strategically about the threats facing journalism (Christensen et al., 2012). By positioning newsroom culture as an obstacle to innovation, this discourse questions the values and relations that underscore that culture (Stencel et al., 2014). In many ways, newsroom traditions and culture have to be abandoned so that innovative individuals may thrive, proponents argue (Pavlik, 2013).

The New York Times’ ‘Innovation Report’, an internal document leaked in the spring of 2014, which cataloged impediments to innovation, was celebrated as a ‘key document of this media era’ by the Nieman Foundation for offering strategic fixes to the paper’s culture (Benton, 2014). Changes to organizational structure, the report argues, allow innovative individuals to overcome the obstacles of hidebound culture to implement revenue-generating programs at the paper. The ‘Innovation Report’ codifies not just a certain way of talking about innovation but also exemplifies the assumption that conflict between newsroom tradition and the organizational relationships new technologies require is an intrinsic part of innovation. A Knight Foundation vice president quoted by Stencel et al. (2014) succinctly captures this conflict when he states, ‘A lot of people are still mad at the Internet for existing’ (p. 18).

In considering its own investments in newsroom innovations and evaluating the recipients of its innovation grants, the Knight Foundation (2012) has framed the split between innovation and newsroom culture as follows:

Media innovation often enters a space that is already occupied by time tested methods and approaches, and one that often is guarded by institutions that may be resistant to change. These institutions may not react kindly to new innovations invading their space, because the innovation disrupts their normal course of operations. Innovators need to anticipate this resistance. (p. 19)

This quotation distills an understanding of innovation as necessary because it offers a means to navigate changing market conditions when existing aspects of journalism culture have proved less than fruitful.

Innovation, when used this way, reveals an inherently revenue-and-market-driven logic, where it becomes synonymous with the term ‘sustainability’, as in the need to develop new products, processes, and journalism that can be considered valuable enough for funders, audiences, advertisers, or sponsors to invest in (cf., Cochran, 2010; Fancher, 2010; Knight Foundation, 2012, 2013, 2015). Much of the research argues that by championing innovation as an organizational value, news organizations can take charge of their own financial futures. However, because sustainability ‘will not be achieved through any silver bullet solution’, innovation also implies the need for news organizations to be engaged in ‘persistent planning, experimentation and learning’ (Knight Foundation, 2015: 23). Implicit in much of this discourse is acquiescence to the fickleness of the market in determining journalism’s value amid broader failures to secure reliable public funding (Cochran, 2010). In this way, the paradoxical assertion that news organizations must constantly innovate to remain financially sustainable amid unstable market conditions becomes common sense.

Exemplars of innovation

Crafting a narrative promoting the diffusion of innovative approaches across journalism, research reports often hold up a select group of news operations as pioneering best practices for the industry to follow (eg., Grueskin et al., 2011; Hindman, 2015; Howard, 2014; Stencel et al., 2014). Indicating a tendency to divide the industry into a handful leading lights amid a sea of late adopters, Stencel et al. (2014) label ‘the digitally savvy news organizations “the 1 percent” and the lagging media organizations “the 99 percent”’ (p. 4). Their research ostensibly focuses on how innovation may benefit the have-nots in the world of digital news, particularly smaller outlets outside major metropolitan areas (p. 3). Yet to provide exemplars of innovative practices, they turn almost exclusively to major news organizations or foundation-funded upstarts in cities such as New York, Austin, and Minneapolis. Offering another narrative of trickle-down innovation, Lynch (2015) suggests that news organizations of all stripes should follow the practices of a group of ‘digitally native’ companies like Vox, First Look, and Buzzfeed, although she recognizes that such ‘market disruptors … represented a measly 1 percent of total investment in the news industry’ in 2013, the year of her most recent data (pp. 7–8).

Accepting the premise that patterns of innovation should spread from select leaders to the broader field, innovation advocates assume that many organizations can replicate the successes of an exceptional few. Innovation advocates frequently suggest that the revenue-enhancing approaches of Buzzfeed, The Washington Post, The New York Times, and Vox should be applied by less well-known outlets (cf., Hindman, 2015; Howard, 2014; Lynch, 2015; Stencel et al., 2014). However, they fail to take into account problems of scale and the well-noted ‘winner-take-all-effects’ of the online economy (McIntyre and Chintakananda, 2014; Noe and Parker, 2005). These dynamics may complicate the replicability of successful innovations at a smaller scale. Consider, for example, structural features of the online advertising market that advantage the most popular news sites. Major news sites are able to sell some of their high-traffic ad space directly to advertisers at a premium for high-profile branding. Most of the rest of online ad sales on news sites go through advertising networks, which result in a much less favorable deal for publishers. Turow (2012: 78) estimates that direct sales bring in about 10–40 times more revenue per audience impression than those brokered through advertising networks. So if a major outlet like The New York Times makes investments in technological resources that increase traffic and thus direct advertising sales, such an investment may have a far greater leveraging effect than it would for a smaller outlet unable to negotiate direct sales with advertisers.

By keeping a tight focus on limited examples of successful innovation, this research largely excludes failed ventures. For instance, there is no detailed report examining the struggles of Patch.com, even though its hyperlocal news model had been heralded as a promising innovation as AOL poured millions into it (Auletta, 2011). Failed companies disappear from the discourse, with no lessons learned and no cautionary tales repeated. Furthermore, few reports return to promising startups or celebrated grantees to see whether they are living up to their anticipated potential.

These patterns in the research speak to the same type of ‘pro-innovation bias’ that has been widely discussed in management and organizational studies literature on the diffusion of innovations (Abrahamson, 1991; Rogers, 2010). As Rogers (2010) notes, several factors have biased researchers studying technological innovation, including funders themselves favoring the promotion of specific innovations and the use of case studies that avoid failures. As think tanks and foundations advocate for innovation from a privileged discursive position outside the blinders of journalists’ professional routines or media companies’ commercial self-interest, the parallels between the pro-innovation biases in classic diffusion research and this research are stark.

Entrepreneurial individuals

Much of the research focuses on interventions aimed at individuals, as if a technologically proficient class of journalists has the skills necessary to not just navigate new conditions but to offer a model for journalism’s innovation-driven future (Creech and Mendelson, 2015). For instance, Stencel and Perry (2016) deem individual technical competencies as the new ‘superpowers’ the industry needs: ‘The news industry is in the market for heroes – great journalists who also have the specialized skills it takes to tell the stories and build the products that audiences want, need and expect’ (para. 1). These are the terms that construe individuals as valuable when they combine technical skills with foundational, editorial-driven competencies, made most apparent in Lynch’s (2015) admonition that ‘Journalists must be technologists, analysts, entrepreneurs and intrapreneurs, community builders and mobilizers, and innovators as least as much as they are writers or storytellers’ (p. 20). Evoking the call for a shift in newsroom culture, she argues that entrepreneurial thinking is a necessary aspect of the innovative journalist’s identity:

But entrepreneurship and intrapeneurship can be as much a state of mind as it is a product-development process, a set of new operating assumptions that prompts journalists to assume ownership of the impact of their contributions on the growth and success of their news organizations. (p. 23)

Such justifications posit the ideal journalist as an entrepreneurial subject, capable of intuiting market logics in a way that makes her or his work both economically valuable and publicly relevant.

This line of thinking draws on a broader understanding of entrepreneurialism in the media industries, where ‘The ideas and ideals of entrepreneurship … constitute a new way of being and behaving in contemporary social life’ (Szeman, 2015: 472). A research agenda focused on cultivating entrepreneurial journalists ‘offloads the responsibility for journalism’s future onto individuals … Journalists are told that they must adapt because an institution central to democratic life is at stake’ (Cohen, 2015: 526). By focusing on the skills, conditions, and structural forces that allow these technologically savvy individuals to emerge, the innovation research cedes that the dynamics of the market dictate not just the practice and intellectual character of US journalism but also the ways individuals should position themselves in the industry.

As a signifier that indicates new ways of being and thinking for individuals in the industry as well as a persistent condition that news organizations must navigate, innovation situates journalism into what Anderson et al. (2013) describe as a post-industrial context. In such a context, individuals and institutions are woven within a broader technological ecosystem that has changed the way the public communicates with itself, and as such, requires ‘changing not just tactics but also self-conception’ (p. 2). Buoyed by such auspicious aphorisms as ‘the core virtue in this environment is adapting as the old certainties break and adopting the new capabilities we can still only partly understand’, innovation becomes a way of being, a conceptual register that encourages individuals to internalize constantly changing and often precarious market conditions (p. 118).

Conclusion

Calls for innovations in journalism are often veiled as calls for preservation. Many advocates take it as a given that something must change if journalism’s democratic value is to survive. Often, these advocates invoke a simplified version of Clay Christensen’s theory of disruptive innovation to deduce that established news organizations need to anticipate market-driven and technological changes if they are to preserve journalism’s public value (eg., Christensen et al., 2012; Grueskin et al., 2011; Lynch, 2015). However, critics from multiple disciplines have called into question the theory of disruptive innovation, noting the faddish enthusiasm with which it was taken up, despite the shakiness of its empirical foundations (Gobble, 2015; Lepore, 2014; Markides, 2006; Sampere et al., 2016). We argue that it is time for those of us in journalism studies to do the same with innovation. This requires shifting focus away from a fixation with anticipating technological change and emerging business models, turning instead to persistent, historically rooted concerns about journalism’s sustained democratic value.

A focus on innovation obscures the structural, historical, and cultural conditions exerting pressure on journalism. This moment is not without precedent. Pickard (2015a) argues that in the post–World War II era, media companies managed a hegemonic ‘post-war settlement’ by taking on the mantle of social responsibility as a way to settle a crisis in public confidence in the press. In this vein, professional objectivity became a kind of doxa that legitimated corporate liberalism in the industry. It is our perception that, currently, notions of innovation operate in a similar vein, offering a mode of discursive capture that legitimates capitulation to market forces that have made the work and institutional character of journalism much more precarious. To take up the terms used by Anderson et al. (2013), innovation advocacy harkens toward the promise of a ‘post-industrial settlement’ of the contemporary crisis, whereby the dynamics of technology industries dictate the philosophical underpinnings of the press, normalizing market conditions into every aspect of journalism. Like the changes facing other democratic institutions in the neoliberal era, innovation becomes a mode of civic being that assumes the conditions of the market should guide public life (Harvey, 2007).

The alternative to a market-oriented vision of journalism’s future is not a rejection of innovation or of experiments in news form and technology. Rather, the alternative is an inquiry that starts by asking: ‘What kind of news system does a robust democracy need?’ and ‘How can the potentials of digital media best fulfill this purpose?’ Instead of fetishizing innovation geared toward market sustainability as an end in itself, such an approach entails identifying what values should guide the design of a sustainable media infrastructure that supports democratic society. Building on the ideals put forward by the Knight Commission’s Information Needs of Communities report, the goals of cultivating actively engaged, broadly informed, and diverse communities of citizens should guide such an inquiry. These concerns have been neglected in research that advocates innovation, despite the public service missions of the institutes producing it. An alternative, value-driven inquiry into the future of news would have to address practical questions about funding, institutional stability, and mobilizing political will. Yet, while researchers should not retreat into an idealism that refuses to recognize real-world constraints, normative values need not be subordinated to a fixed notion of economic reality; it is important for scholars and observers to recognize the possibility of intractable market failure and the potential need for public funding. Surely, there will be disagreements about exactly what principles should guide news leaders and policymakers, but a critical inquiry would openly confront normative questions, not bypass them by letting market opportunity dictate digital journalism’s virtues.

Footnotes

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Author biographies

Brian Creech is an assistant professor of Journalism at Temple University. His research focuses broadly on the public epistemologies and discourses of journalism, technology, and popular culture from a post-structuralist perspective. His work has recently appeared in The Communication Review, Journalism Studies, Digital Journalism, Convergence, and Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies.

Anthony M Nadler is an assistant professor of Media and Communication Studies at Ursinus College. His research interests include online political culture, journalism history, digital culture, and critical theory. He is the author of Making the News Popular: Mobilizing U.S. News Audiences (2016, University of Illinois Press). His latest research project focuses on the growth of online conservative news and opinion outlets.

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