New Media,Enduring Values

Abstract

This case study uses theory about organizational culture and leadership and multiple sources of evidence to evaluate the effectiveness of an initiative by three news organizations to bring the core principles of journalism to life on the web. A newspaper, a local television station, a producer and distributor of public radio, and an academic institution participated in this effort. Drawing upon participant observation and in-depth interviews, this study examines the role this emphasis on core values, so important to the professional identity of journalists, played in securing buy-in for the project and overcoming resistance to change, as well as other internal factors that negatively affected implementation, such as lack of sustained commitment and poor communication.

Keywords

newsrooms news values managing change organizational change new media

Introduction

News organizations in the legacy media of newspapers, local television, and radio are facing powerful pressures to change their organizational processes and products to adapt to new technologies, economic realities, and audience expectations. Ideas for tackling this critical moment by improving online content are plentiful, but the task of executing change is difficult (Sylvie & Witherspoon, 2002). Researchers have found that values play a key role in the professional socialization of journalists (Schudson, 2001) and perceived conflicts with these values can inhibit change efforts (Daniels & Hollifield, 2002; Gade, 2004; Hansen & Neuzil, 1998; Stamm & Underwood, 1993).

This study uses theory about organizational culture and leadership and a case study approach to evaluate the effectiveness of a change effort as managers sought to put these values held so dear by journalists front and center. The project was called New Media, Enduring Values. Three news organizations, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, WHO-TV in Des Moines, and American Public Media in Minnesota participated in the yearlong initiative that began in mid-2006. An academic institution, the Committee of Concerned Journalists, and the Donald W. Reynolds Journalism Institute also participated, contributing research about media use and helping to monitor results.

Each news organization developed an online project exemplifying one of three key values drawn from The Elements of Journalism by Bill Kovach and Tom Rosenstiel: verifying the accuracy of information, finding ways to make important news more relevant, and creating a public forum for discussion. These principles were identified by Kovach and Rosenstiel (2007) following a series of forums, a survey, and interviews with hundreds of journalists, citizens, and academics across the nation and thus offer a useful framework about the values that animate the journalism profession. This study draws upon interviews and participant observation and the application of theories of organizational change to evaluate the effectiveness of this project in changing organizational routines and processes, which are historically areas in which people are resistant to change (Sylvie & Witherspoon, 2002). Although several researchers have analyzed the impact of the Internet on traditional media, few have examined the idea of using core journalistic values as a foundation for managing change in the Internet age.

The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel’s element was verification, and it created an interactive encyclopedia of education news online to encourage readers to help fact-check stories and contribute their expertise and perspectives to improve accuracy, as well as providing access to original source documents. WHO-TV emphasized making important topics significant and relevant and built a separate website to engage viewers and web visitors with dynamic multimedia content at IowaVotes2008.com. American Public Media focused on creating a public forum, adding greater interactive capability to its Idea Generator, a moderated online forum inviting citizens to contribute and discuss solutions to social issues.

Literature Review

One of the most common themes in research about change in news organizations is that perceived conflicts with core values of journalism will cause staffers to resist change, either directly or passively (Sylvie & Witherspoon, 2002), a pitfall that organizers of the New Media, Enduring Values project hoped to avoid. Core values are important to journalists because they are fundamental to their professional identities; these values serve as a defense against criticism and also as a way of solidifying journalism’s bona fides as a profession (Schudson, 2001; Shoemaker & Reese, 1996; Tuchman, 1972; Zelizer, 2004). Many people are attracted to careers in journalism based on these core values and they’re further reinforced as part of the socialization process in journalism (Schudson, 2001, 2003).

In their study of changes at CNN Headline News, Daniels and Hollifield (2002) found that most rank-and-file members of the organization perceived change negatively because they felt that the quality of their work was being diminished as values were subordinated to business pressures. Morale was abysmal, and stress diminished productivity. Gade and Perry (2003) also found that journalists at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, who began a new initiative with a hopeful outlook came to resist it 4 years later, mostly because they felt it was threatening their core journalistic values. That type of concern has continued in the Internet age. Singer’s (2004) study of four converged newsrooms that create content for a variety of delivery platforms found journalists generally agreed with the statement, “My company’s motivation for convergence is economic rather than journalistic.” Negative correlations have also been found between journalists' job satisfaction and their perception of their organization’s focus on earning high profits (Beam, 2006).

But journalists understand the need to shift to the Internet. A recent national survey of 585 journalists conducted by the Pew Center for People and the Press for the Project for Excellence in Journalism found a willingness to embrace new technology; respondents were split, however, about whether the focus on the Internet would strengthen traditional journalistic values (Project for Excellence in Journalism, 2008).

Research about organizational change suggests that businesses that adapt to a changing environment by building on existing strengths and values are often the most successful businesses (Schein, 2004). It’s easier and more realistic to change behaviors and attitudes than to ask people to rethink their fundamental purpose. Schein (2004) has discussed the important role organizational culture, defined as a set of shared assumptions learned by a group to solve its basic problems of external adaptation and internal integration, plays in implementing change.

Another important aspect of successful organizational change evaluated in the course of this project is leadership. Leaders must provide the vision for employees to connect the change effort to the organization’s mission and its core values, and employees must feel the change will meet their needs as well as the organization’s (Kets de Vries, 2001). Leaders not only play a prominent role in establishing the espoused values of an organization but also communicate their underlying assumptions through what they choose to reward, punish, measure, and evaluate, as well their allocation of resources (Schein, 2004). Staffers in all organizations are attentive to the underlying assumptions of their leaders, and as trained skeptics, journalists are especially likely to look for gaps between what their managers say and what they do and will become disillusioned if rhetoric doesn’t match reality (Hansen & Neuzil, 1998; Singer, 2004; Sylvie & Witherspoon, 2002).

Research Questions

This understanding of the factors that shape organizational change in newsrooms influenced the development of the following research questions.

Research Question 1: How did the organizations incorporate the enduring values into their websites and news routines?

Research Question 2: How did explicit focus on the core values of journalism that characterized these newsroom projects affect the project’s overall effectiveness and staff members' views of the project?

Research Question 3: What other organizational factors affected the implementation of the New Media, Enduring Values projects at the three participating news organizations?

Method

According to Yin (2003), case studies are valuable tools for evaluating the effectiveness of organizational change initiatives, in which an array of different outcomes and complex constructs cannot be divorced from real-life contexts. As appropriate to case study research, multiple sources of evidence were collected and analyzed to answer the research questions (Yin, 2003).

Researchers worked with the news organizations throughout the process as they altered their standard routines to create online content that would deepen their specific element of journalism, offering research-based suggestions and providing occasional feedback about the progress. This deep immersion in a project offers unique and in-depth opportunities for observation (Jankowski & Wester, 1991), and detailed field notes were kept throughout the process. Much of the research about organizational effectiveness includes an observational component, according to Harrison (2005).

Approximately 1 year into the project, researchers conducted 25 semistructured interviews of key players to evaluate the projects and their efforts to manage change. Interviewees were asked a series of open-ended questions about their roles in the project, their perceptions of the effectiveness of its implementation within their organizations, and the impact of explicitly introducing core values into the process. Interviews were conducted via phone, and notes were transcribed. Because leadership was identified as an important aspect of successful organizational change and communicating about values, these interviews included both top managers and lower level staff participants from all three news organizations. The identity of all interviewees was kept confidential to elicit honest feedback about the projects.

All memoranda, e-mails, and internal documents pertaining to the initiative beginning with the project’s inception were also collected. The organization’s websites were also captured at various points throughout the year to examine the project’s most tangible outcomes. Researchers then analyzed transcripts, field notes, and other documents, looking for common themes and identifying the factors affecting the implementation of the initiative.

The New Media, Enduring Values project provided a unique opportunity to focus explicitly on enduring values in trying to achieve organizational change, an approach that offered several lessons for an industry in crisis. Other industry programs or movements to improve journalism and engage readers have had some success in increasing the practice of certain actions known to increase credibility (Brown, Thorson, & Fleming, 2006) but generally proponents have struggled to overcome internal resistance (Singer, 2004; Sylvie & Witherspoon, 2002).

The news organizations were chosen for the project because all three had participated in free newsroom training workshops offered by the Committee of Concerned Journalists and had expressed interest in maintaining a relationship with the organization. These workshops emphasize the enduring journalistic values and engage participants in discussion in how they can better integrate them into their daily work while making their journalism more reflective.

Findings

In exploring Research Question 1, the researchers found top-level acceptance at each organization for the New Media, Enduring Values project. Given the state of change in the industry, leaders embraced the idea as a way to move into the new media landscape with more success than they’d had in the past. Managers of the sites tried to blend the needs of the newsroom with the realities of information technology, with varying degrees of success.

Milwaukee Journal Sentinel—Verification

Verification is defined by Kovach and Rosenstiel and the hundreds of journalists and academics they interviewed (2007) as the most fundamental of the core values of journalism: The pursuit of accuracy and truth. The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel began the project by creating a dedicated space on its website, pulling together its education news and features, deciding to start conservatively with just one beat first with the hopes of eventually including others. Web readers were invited to check facts, contribute expertise, or suggest ideas or perspectives about an issue that might have been missed. A video presentation and a column also explained the project to readers and emphasized the paper’s commitment to getting the most accurate and complete story possible. Thirteen community bloggers were recruited to add a greater diversity of voices to the mix. By opening up the news process in this way, reporters, in effect, modified traditional news routines by reducing their traditional reliance on bureaucratic sources of news (Fishman, 1980).

Milwaukee education reporters also posted source documents and databases when possible to allow readers to better judge the quality of the reporting for themselves. A staff blog capitalized on reporters' knowledge and experience to offer additional information and context about stories and engage readers about the news process. These site features fulfill an important aspect of the discipline of verification as described in Elements: transparency. Transparency enhances accountability and credibility by explaining directly to readers how the journalists obtained and verified the information and thus why readers should believe it (Kovach & Rosenstiel, 2007). The Journal Sentinel has since enhanced all of its web offerings and the education page was a critical first step in adding more multimedia and interactive content to the site.

WHO-TV—Making the Significant Interesting and Relevant

WHO-TV’s political reporter served as the contact point for the project and worked closely with the news director and webmaster to develop a web presence outside of the existing station website at IowaVotes2008.com for its element, which was “making the significant interesting and relevant.” Kovach and Rosenstiel (2007) note the element requires journalists to provide the news in ways that seize the public’s attention to engage citizens in important topics. WHO-TV’s site used many web-specific features to accomplish this goal. “Making the Grade” recruited undecided voters from a variety of backgrounds and political affiliations to serve as a focus group to grade answers candidates gave to a specific question about Iraq, without revealing which one made the statement. Results were integrated into traditional broadcast content. In this way, WHO-TV expanded upon traditional news routines that primarily involve relying on experts and bureaucratic sources of news described by Fishman (1980) and Tuchman (1972).

The site’s Dream Team feature, in which users pick their ideal ticket combinations, was an enhancement of the typical online poll to engage readers on a broader level in accordance with research showing that online audiences come to the web expecting not to passively consume information but to interact with it (Thorson & Duffy, 2006). The poll was dynamic, changing as users not satisfied with the existing choices added their own combinations to the mix. Although some cross-party tickets were obviously tongue-in-cheek, the poll introduced visitors to lesser known candidates whose information was available on the site alongside that of the front runners. One WHO-TV reporter put it this way: “It’s making people have fun while they eat their broccoli.” It proved to be among the most popular features on the site, garnering almost half of the 60,000 page views the site experienced from January to October 2007.

The station also developed nontraditional ways of providing information, expanding its definition of “news” for the public. “Clogs,” short for candidate blogs, were hosted on the site, allowing the campaigns to provide unfiltered information to the public. Besides providing an online archive of all video news reports during the Iowa caucus season, the station also created a repository of campaign press releases.

American Public Media—Journalism as a Public Forum

In Elements, Kovach and Rosenstiel (2007) note journalism must serve as a “forum for public criticism and compromise” (p. 166). They describe an arena of discussion based on fact and verified information; the typical heated rhetoric of online discussion boards doesn’t rise to the standard. To fulfill this element, APM revamped the organization’s online Idea Generator with a more interactive interface. The Idea Generator allows users to participate in a mediated online forum to develop solutions to community problems, with the goal of creating a fact-based conversation about issues. Users can post ideas about a number of topics and discuss and rate ideas posted by others. Information researched by the organization’s analysts helped seed the discussion with supported facts, and moderators checked solutions offered by web visitors for grammar and tone before posting. No anonymous voices were allowed; those submitting ideas were required to register with the system. This active involvement of citizens in the process again represented a departure from traditional news routines (Fishman, 1980; Shoemaker & Reese, 1996; Tuchman, 1972). Once redesigned at APM’s headquarters in Minnesota, the initial Idea Generator was launched through the organization’s Marketplace program, which is based in California. This geographic distance resulted in some miscommunication and ultimately affected the project’s overall success.

In exploring Research Question 2, researchers discovered during interviews that the focus on enduring values helped secure buy-in for change. Interviewees acknowledged that traditional journalism must change to adapt to the world of the Internet; they understood their routines would be disrupted. But they didn’t want to abandon their journalistic identities in the process. Those who understood the change in the context of the organization’s journalistic mission were the most accepting of the change effort.

At the Journal Sentinel, staffers agreed that verification was critical at a time when increased pressure for immediacy was pushing more of their paper’s content online quickly and with less editing. One editor said, “Verification is really the essence of what we do. It’s intriguing to be able to take advantage of the opportunities the Internet provides to achieve greater transparency, much easier than in print.”

One manager said the process helped them to see a multitude of new ways they could enhance rather than detract from verification online, which got those involved excited about the possibilities; the education team’s most experienced and oldest reporter was among the most active adopters of new media tools in the course of the project. One editor involved even coined a new term: “organic verification,” which she said was the cyclical process through which the most complete and accurate story arose post-online publication as readers comment, add facts, and offer new perspectives that can then be further reported on and used for future story ideas.

At WHO-TV, the web effort spread throughout the newsroom once staffers began to see how the project would improve their journalism not just the bottom line. The political reporter found the web presence improved his access to presidential candidates during the primary season. The production staff became more involved once it was seen as an outlet to provide expanded video to engage viewers. Also, some features such as the Dream Team poll would get several hundred page views a day on occasion, especially after being touted on air. By the end of the project, IowaVotes2008.com had become a newsroom-wide effort: “It has to be in the fabric of the newsroom, and everyone has to realize it’s a priority,” one manager said. “Everyone was expected to make some contribution to the site.”

The experience at APM highlighted this point. Marketplace staffers who were ultimately responsible for rolling out the Idea Generator initiative were brought in late in the process and didn’t see a clear connection between the project and their daily journalism. “It had no relationship,” one interviewee said. As a result, they were the least supportive. Commitment to the core value helped during the design and planning phases at American Public Media, but because the mission wasn’t communicated effectively to the California-based reporters and producers at the Marketplace, those journalists—under pressure to produce daily news segments for broadcast—didn’t see participating in the project as a way to improve their daily work. As one interviewee noted, “This was someone else’s idea, and it’s not making their lives any easier. If it didn’t happen, nothing would change.”

Research Question 3 drew upon theory of organizational change and leadership to evaluate the effectiveness of the project and examine the other organizational factors apart from values that also affected its implementation.

In Milwaukee, staffers said energy and enthusiasm for the education page began to wane when leaders didn’t maintain an ongoing focus on the project. Interviewees noted it’s not enough for leaders to express support at the outset; sustaining a project’s initial energy requires leaders to continue to emphasize it as a priority. One reporter said, “My leaders have trouble articulating to this day how we should prioritize our time as reporters involved in this … It’s not the worst thing, but hasn’t blossomed the way I hoped, not as energetic as I hoped. We are doing some things.”

Schein (2004) indicates that employees discern the organization’s underlying assumptions from the direction and intensity of leaders' attention. In Milwaukee, staffers said they were more likely to revert to their print-centered routines, if they didn’t see explicit rewards for and emphasis on new processes. Indeed, some of the site’s multimedia features weren’t updated as regularly as originally hoped, in part because managers didn’t help the rank-and-file employees prioritize the new duties in the context of the old.

Delays in getting the site designed also sapped momentum in Milwaukee. Interviewees said they should have opted to start with a few easy-to-make changes rather than waiting for a time-intensive redesign of the page, which was eventually dropped in favor of maintaining the standardized site design. Leaders said they were discouraged when traffic didn’t immediately rise. In a deadline-driven culture, a lack of immediately positive results lessened enthusiasm for the project, although most online efforts take time to build audience because of the plethora of options (Tewksbury, 2005). Editors were quick to question the choice of education as a topic, rather than pushing for continuous readjustments and ongoing learning.

Newsroom leaders took steps such as in-house multimedia training to mitigate learning anxiety. However, most of those interviewed felt that training was limited and not tailored for a variety of learning styles.

From the beginning of the IowaVotes2008.com project, WHO-TV’s news and online staffs collectively agreed to dedicate the resources to create the site as a separate but related web presence for the Des Moines news station. The station management gave its director of Internet operations a month to focus on learning Joomla, an open-source content management system, with which he developed an easy-to-update website. Interviewees said a key to the project’s success was creating a system that integrated with the station’s current video-to-web processes while remaining simple enough that anyone in the newsroom could post content. Such a consideration was critical in a newsroom with only 46 staffers.

At first, communication was lacking at WHO-TV, as only the original development team was familiar with the project. But the general manager deemed the project a priority and posted a giant mock-up of the website in the newsroom. He also hired a web producer dedicated to the site to provide regular updates and maintain the content, a hire interviewees noted was critical to meeting the new routines demanded by the site. Such a dedication of resources confirmed leadership’s commitment to the project in a tangible way, something researchers say is vital to securing buy-in (e.g., Schein, 2004; Sylvie & Witherspoon, 2002). Once the commitment to the project was apparent, other staffers started participating, including the production staffers, who were among the busiest at the station. Interviewees acknowledged the dedication of leadership to provide time and resources was vital to the project’s success.

WHO-TV’s consistent commitment resulted in a project that generated page views from across the country. For blogging purposes, the reporter was provided a laptop, a larger-than-normal expense for the small newsroom, and he committed part of his work schedule to posting online reports from the campaign trail. Videographers soon fell in line, as production staffers agreed to develop raw video footage as content exclusive for the website. By the end of the project, employees saw the website as intimately connected to their everyday routines. One interviewee noted: “It’s reinforced our commitment at the most basic level to find different ways to cover government.”

APM proved willing to dedicate the financial and staff resources to ensure the launch of the Idea Generator and like WHO-TV, had a top-level project champion. Staffers from throughout the organization, including the information technology and new media departments, were involved early in the process, a factor interviewees said helped keep the project on track. Most participants saw the project as closely aligned with the organization’s mission of reconceptualizing news as the gathering and sharing of knowledge, inviting listeners into the journalistic process. As one staffer noted, “Our mission statement sort of serves as a constitution for us, and this is an integral part of our mission.”

With IT on board, the organization hired a local outside vendor in Minnesota to design the Flash-based interface—an unusual step, as most technological projects are handled in-house. The organization worked closely with the vendor to ensure compatibility with APM’s existing website as well as its back-end database system.

Despite the success of the project’s initial phase, planners didn’t include the ultimate launch site, APM’s Marketplace program based in California, until late in the project. One interviewee noted the oversight likely affected buy-in at the execution stage, especially because the national Marketplace program was dealing with internal management changes at the time. As a result, the project’s launch also coincided with another major online initiative at Marketplace, resulting in a divided commitment for promotion, and on-air call-outs for the Idea Generator were limited.

Some interviewees noted the journalists had difficulty seeing how the project fit into their daily routines, especially because the online forum didn’t directly result in a traditional journalistic endpoint, such as a story or documentary. “In the culture of radio, you produce something for a Friday night spot and it goes away,” one staffer observed. Another who praised the Idea Generator’s innovative nature nonetheless likened it to an “alien being,” with little connection to everyday routines for the demanding daily format of the Marketplace program. The diffuse topic, “The American Dream,” involved asking participants to discuss major issues facing the country, such as health care, immigration, and taxes, topics that didn’t directly relate to specific stories being produced by Marketplace. Some also worried about the complexity of the interface itself. Despite some internal issues, the project reached the goal of 100 researched ideas submitted from the public within a month of launch, one of which led to a news story at Minnesota Public Radio.

Discussion and Conclusions

The New Media, Enduring Values project showed how legacy media outlets can reinforce their commitment to core values online and secure buy-in from staff for changes desperately needed in a time of economic and technological disruption in the news industry. This finding suggests that other news organizations should consider providing a focus to their new media efforts by looking at specific ways the organization can bring the enduring values of journalism to life on their websites, rather than simply taking this for granted. Doing so isn’t only the right thing to do in a time in which journalism’s important role in a democratic society is threatened by cutbacks and outright closings of media outlets but also a way to raise morale and inspire the best work from staff members.

However, other factors identified by scholars of organizational change and leadership were also confirmed to be important in newsrooms during the course of this project; paying attention to core values isn’t enough if the effort doesn’t receive sustained attention from leaders. Previously, researchers found that an important predictor of any initiative’s success is the commitment of time and sustained attention to the process of change (Sylvie & Witherspoon, 2002). This factor proved especially critical in all three of these organizations. WHO-TV and APM were more successful than the Journal Sentinel in sustaining commitment to the project, and both broadcast outlets garnered more web traffic than the newspaper did. Indeed, the top complaint from Journal Sentinel staffers involved in the project was a lack of follow-through and attention from on high after the initial excitement of launching a new effort faded.

At the three sites, interviewees noted the need to include staffers from all layers of the organization throughout the process. At American Public Media, the design and creation phases of the Idea Generator project worked effectively because the lines of communication were open among all participants. But the lack of communication between Minnesota and California affected the buy-in from the part of the organization ultimately responsible for launching the project. Conversely, once WHO-TV brought everyone into the IowaVotes2008.com project and asserted its importance, the website was incorporated into the newsroom’s everyday routine. In Milwaukee, buy-in began high when all were involved in a series of initial meetings to launch the project but began to diminish as the project was delayed and they began to hear less from leaders or online producers about the status and plans for the project. Some felt that more regular meetings to keep everyone updated about the project’s progress and for troubleshooting would have improved the initiative’s success in modifying routines.

Although interviewees were committed to the idea of improving journalism online, the reality of deadlines and tightening budgets in the legacy media still hung over the projects. IowaVotes2008.com wouldn’t have worked without the ability for everyone to update the website. At APM, Marketplace had trouble fitting the Idea Generator into its routine until the project was more closely aligned to its traditional mission, especially given the time and resource constraints on a staff producing a daily show.

The survival anxiety that Schein (2004) argues is critical in sustaining a change effort appears to be high in the media organizations studied; particularly in Milwaukee, a majority of staffers who participated in the project described themselves as willing to jettison typical news routines to augment their websites with greater multimedia and interactivity. They reported a willingness to take on the extra work and develop new skills, as long as the effort was rewarded and recognized by their managers. Considering how much has been written about resistance to change in newsrooms (e.g., Sylvie & Witherspoon, 2002), this result is striking. Interviewees said they realized their respective news organizations had to become more relevant on the web to survive. Similarly, WHO-TV saw IowaVotes2008.com as a competitive advantage against news organizations with greater resources in the market. “We have completely outflanked them on this thing,” one interviewee said of the other area web sites. “… I think it is a watershed moment for us.”

Organizational leadership proved an important factor in each of the three news organizations (Kets de Vries, 2001; Schein, 2004). Several interviewees at American Public Media and WHO-TV noted the projects, which pushed the journalists outside the boundaries of their usual routines, wouldn’t have been completed without that commitment. American Public Media dedicated more than 20 people and thousands of dollars to the design and creation effort. For WHO-TV’s project to take off, it required freeing a web designer to work on the project and hiring a web producer specifically for the website. In Milwaukee, the support of leaders was crucial to getting the project off the ground, but in this case, the espoused value of the project wasn’t reinforced as the project continued.

Although the routines changed to varying degrees, each project had limited success in building online audiences, another factor that affected long-term acceptance of the change effort. WHO-TV had the greatest success, with some 60,000 page views, and its newsroom embraced its project most wholeheartedly. APM had 209 registered users for its Idea Generator and made interface changes based on those users' experiences. Staffers also tried to tie the topics of future Idea Generators more closely to the content of the programs being produced.

At the Journal Sentinel in Milwaukee, readers responded positively to the effort. Still, traffic to the site wasn’t impressive; through October 2007, about 1 year after launch, the education page had 9,000 page views, and education stories had 100,000 views, though this could be attributed in part to failure to market the site or feature it prominently on the paper’s home page. However, several reporters and editors said they saw an increased number of comments and meaningful interaction with readers as the result of the project. One reporter said of the community bloggers: “I’m impressed with the voices. It’s been one of my worries that it’s just officials and the same people over and over … they represent a broad range of people and people who are in the schools not just onlookers. It has a lot of potential.” Two reporters, including one not on the education team but who had learned about their efforts and decided on his own to emulate them, posted blog entries that took readers inside the process of reporting controversial stories, and both of these efforts proved highly successful in both traffic and an explosion of comments and newsroom accolades. In August 2007, one reader wrote: “Thank you so much for your response to my comment on the new cable system. It restores my faith in ‘fair and balanced’ reporting to know that you asked the questions I wondered about. I didn’t expect a reply but I am impressed that I got one! You obviously know your facts and ask the right questions. Again, thank you.”

In summary, this study suggests that newsroom leaders seeking to guide their organizations in a time of change and uncertainty should reaffirm commitment to the enduring values of journalism and charge staff members with developing ideas about how new media can enhance rather than detract from these values. Second, news organizations should recognize that significant change takes time and that building an active audience community around a particular topic takes sustained effort. Third, staff members are attentive not only to rhetoric but more importantly to the tangible commitment of resources and rewards. Fourth, constant open communication among all levels and departments in the newsroom from project development to execution is critical. Fifth, increased workload will be an issue in any new initiative, especially in today’s stripped-down newsrooms. If staff resources aren’t available, organizations must work to make the technology accessible so that everybody involved can share responsibility for the web initiatives. Finally, this study indicates that survival anxiety is high, and legacy media staffs are ready to change. But leaders must play a role in providing a safe environment and resources such as training to reduce learning anxiety and build confidence in the ability to change.

Limitations

These results should be interpreted in light of this study’s limitations. It’s important to recognize that any study of three cases inherently suffers some threats to external validity (Yin, 2003). All organizations have idiosyncrasies and are strongly shaped by their individual histories and cultures (Schein, 2004), and there’s also no control group studied here in which a different approach to change without explicit attention to journalism values was used. However, previous studies have shown similar responses to change across news organizations (e.g., Singer, 2004; Sylvie & Witherspoon, 2002), and studies have long established a similar set of routines and news values among professional journalists, regardless of organization (e.g., Gans, 1979/2004; Shoemaker & Reese, 1996). We believe solutions to problems developed at these organizations should have broader relevance to all news organizations currently facing the same economic and technological upheaval.

Second, as with any participant observation study, the researchers' involvement in this project might have created bias. However, this risk was mitigated through careful attention to these biases, and detailed notetaking throughout the process to help reveal possible biases. The firsthand observation and ability to bring expert knowledge to bear on the findings can also actually increase validity in this kind form of research, according to Yin (2003).

Suggestions for Further Research

Further research should examine similar change initiatives to determine whether these findings remain consistent across news organizations of different sizes and cultures.

Footnotes

The author(s) declared no conflicts of interest with respect to the authorship and/or publication of this article.

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

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