Journalism Innovation Labs 2.0 in Media Organisations: A Motor for Transformation and Constant Learning (original) (raw)
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Journalism innovation: how media labs are shaping the future of media and journalism
Brazilian Journalism Research, 2021
This paper discusses journalism innovation through experimental units known as "media labs", addressing motivations, processes and outputs related to them. It is based on collaborative four-year research projects that mapped 123 labs within industry, civic society, and academia globally, with a focus on Latin America, North America and Europe. The data spans 45 interviews and 54 survey answers from lab leaders across 17 countries and covers 60 innovation outputs, with 30 closely related to media and journalism. The paper's main theoretical frames incorporate open innovation and constructs from media innovation and media management. The results indicate that media labs are either within organisations or alongside them, producing projects systematically and experimentally as a reaction to digital disruption. Within an environment of scarcity, they catalyse innovation and combine technical and creative skills, unveiling solutions beyond new narratives or content-related innovations.
Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies, 2021
Over the past decade, media labs have become an increasingly visible structure to create, catalyse and diffuse innovation within, and beyond, journalism. In this article, we offer insights into the multiple forms media labs can take, and how innovation in the media field is being organised through labs. As such, we focus on innovation processes and practices rather than innovative outcomes. Drawing on 45 semi-structured interviews with media labs around the globe, conducted between 2016 and 2018, this exploratory study explores the multifaceted nature of the media lab concept across academia, legacy media and independent structures. To help better understand the many different manifestations of the media lab construct encountered in our study, this article adopts a purposefully interdisciplinary approach spanning open innovation, institutional and social theories to illuminate and sense-make the global lab phenomena. First, we unpack the media lab construct by detailing the where, w...
Brazilian journalism research
– This paper discusses journalism innovation through experimental units known as “media labs”, addressing motivations, processes and outputs related to them. It is based on collaborative four-year research projects that mapped 123 labs within industry, civic society, and academia globally, with a focus on Latin America, North America and Europe. The data spans 45 interviews and 54 survey answers from lab leaders across 17 countries and covers 60 innovation outputs, with 30 closely related to media and journalism. The paper’s main theoretical frames incorporate open innovation and constructs from media innovation and media management. The results indicate that media labs are either within organisations or alongside them, producing projects systematically and experimentally as a reaction to digital disruption. Within an environment of scarcity, they catalyse innovation and combine technical and creative skills, unveiling solutions beyond new narratives or content-related innovations. ...
Exploring innovative learning culture in the newsroom
Journalism
Culture has been viewed as the biggest obstacle to change in the legacy media newsroom. Older as well as recent literature points out that professional culture typically hinders newsroom innovation processes, and newsrooms in transformation often seem to find culture clashes on their path. These transformational problems, however, appear to be viewed predominantly from a management point of view. By looking at journalism culture from the broader perspective of a learning culture which fosters innovation, including both management and newsroom workers, a more nuanced picture can be presented. In this article, the concept of innovative learning culture is introduced to provide a different lens through which drivers and obstacles of innovation in the newsroom can be observed. Furthermore, innovative learning culture can be used in empirical research to gain insights in the learning and innovation processes of professional journalists, a strikingly under-researched area. As such, innova...
Unlocking the Newsroom: Measuring Journalists’ Perceptions of Innovative Learning Culture
Journalism Studies
Thorough understanding of how "outside the box" ideas in the newsroom can be triggered and fostered is fundamental to grasp innovation in journalism, but is still largely uncharted territory. Comprehension of its key elements would enable news organisations to reinvent themselves and improve chances for survival. In this article we develop an instrument to investigate if and how newsroom workers and management perceive an Innovative Learning Culture (ILC). This survey enables us to locate which aspects of ILC are bottlenecks or foster creativity and innovation processes. First we focus on how the different aspects of ILC are perceived: which aspects are experienced to foster or hinder an overall ILC. In a second step we analyse how respondent characteristics influence perceptions of these processes. In combining these two steps, the survey can be used as a key to "unlock" the newsroom with respect to its creative and innovative potential. We validated the survey in the newsrooms of two Dutch national quality newspapers, each with a different history, culture, audience and size. Findings show that they have similar perceptions of which ILC-aspects typically foster or hinder ILC in their newsrooms. We discuss the outcomes and provide suggestions for future research.
The Journal of Media Innovations
This paper explores how innovation emerges in the media through the views of journalists who are leading the process of newsroom change in Spain. Data were collected from semi-structured interviews with 20 journalists working in some of the most innovative outlets, according to the 2014 Index of Journalism Innovation in Spain (García-Avilés, Carvajal-Prieto, De Lara-González, & Arias-Robles, 2018). The results highlight the importance of innovations in content production, internal organization, distribution, and commercialization as the drivers of change in the media industry. Our study also reveals several factors that shape both the practice and implementation of innovations in newsrooms. We draw on these factors to outline a model of diffusion of media innovation.
Examining innovation as process: Action research in journalism studies
Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies, 2019
In this article, we discuss how ‘action research’ as an experiential research approach allows us to address challenges encountered in researching a converged and digital media landscape. We draw on our experiences as researchers, co-developers and marketeers in the European Union-funded Innovation Action project ‘INnovative Journalism: Enhanced Creativity Tools’ (INJECT) aimed at developing a technological tool for journalism. In this media innovation process, as in other media practices, longstanding delineations no longer hold, due to converging professional disciplines and blurring roles of users and producers. First, we discuss four features of innovation in the current ‘digital’ media landscape that come with specific methodological requirements: (a) the iterative nature of innovation; (b) converged practices, professions and roles; (c) the dispersed geographic nature of media production and innovation processes and (d) the impact of human and non-human actors. We suggest actio...
Journal of Media Innovations, 2018
This paper explores how innovation emerges in the media through the views of journalists who are leading the process of newsroom change in Spain. Data were collected from semi-structured interviews with 20 journalists working in some of the most innovative outlets, according to the 2014 Index of Journalism Innovation in Spain (García-Avilés, Carvajal-Prieto, De Lara-González, & Arias-Robles, 2018). The results highlight the importance of innovations in content production, internal organization, distribution, and commercialization as the drivers of change in the media industry. Our study also reveals several factors that shape both the practice and implementation of innovations in newsrooms. We draw on these factors to outline a model of diffusion of media innovation.
TRENDS IN NEWSROOMS 2019#3: MEDIA LABS, 2019
This report is the third of the 2019 series covering Trends in Newsrooms. It reflects the increasing establishment of media labs, worldwide, to help solve some of the pressing problems facing newsrooms and media organisations.It will provide guidance to anyone considering setting up a lab and an insight into some of the outputs achieved. The report is based on four years of research on Media Labs conducted by a range of partners. Supported by WAN-IFRA’s Global Alliance for Media Innovation, this investigation was produced by a core research team from Pontifical Catholic University of Rio Grande do Sul (PUCRS) and the University of Central Lancashire (UCLan).
Innovation Journalism: a multiple concept
Thinking about the journalistic activity beyond its traditional forms is a recurrent practice in contemporary journalism. The plurality of audiences, behaviors and technologies challenge the classic models of journalism in a way that encourages innovation in di erent aspects of the activity. However, the term innovation is being broadly applied without rigorous and interesting delimitation to the academic environment. In this sense, we propose in this article initial directions under which aspects it is possible to understand the journalism innovation. It starts from the original concept in the eld of Economics and Management to expand its meaning to the Social Sciences and Journalism. We expose three instances in which contemporary journalism already has changes, to understand the journalism as a process and product, which are: 1) content and narrative, 2) technology and format and 3) business model. In addition to this segmentation, some initiatives are presented to illustrate each sub-category and to design an updated concept about innovation journalism.