Essay on Social Behaviour

Kopje 1 technological innovation in legacy media organizations:
• The relation between technological change and change in journalism is complicated and widely contested.

• Undestanding the interplau netween journalism and technologu has taquired a new urgency and spawned a growing literature from the early 2000’s onward.

• Researchers quickly converged on a more multi-casual understanding of technological change, focusing in more extensive and detailed empirical studies on hjow endogenous factors like organizational structures, dominant work practices, and specific conceptions of what people might want and expect from tnheir news media shape thje adaptation of new ICT’s for journalistic purposes in particular settings.

• Constructivism: Blogs do not represent one particular tech ology with one set configuration and mode of use, but a family of tools and associated expectations, genres, and enabled forms of action that can be developed in various ways that realize some technological properties and enable certain practices while foreclosing other possibilities. The properties associated with particular technologies or a word like blogs should not be seen as fully fixed and pre-determined, biut as shaped over time in an ongoing interplay between artifacts and those who use and develop them in various settings.

• I demonstrate the need to consider not only the role of jopurnalists and managers but also the role of technologists when trying to understand how technological innovation plays out in legacy media organizations

• Normalization of blogs
• Most journalists used bl;ogs on the basis of the existing norms and practices (Singer 2005)
• Blogs are used by mainstream journalists in ways that reify traditional norms, and shore up their professional claim to authority even as the new tools also gradually push a more subtle evolution in formats and form of interaction (Robinsons 2006)
• Journalists professional culture exhibits strong inertia, remaining relatively unchanged and sometime inhibiting innovation. (Hartley 2011)
- These studies represent important empirical contributions but leave one with the impression that technological innovation in news media organizations primarily is a question of journalistic adoption of new tools rather than of organizational development.
Cases, methods, data:
• Two newspapers: both have in common that they are legacy media organizations, primarily baeed on a print platform in structural decline, and that they are both perceived by others in the indursty as early adopters of new technologies.
• What seperates them: their different histories, business strategies and particular resources, one being a well established and dominant organization with a long history the other a new entrant struggling to establish its position.

• I will suggest that the processes themselves and in particular the active role plaued by technologists in both organizations highlight important and recurring aspects of how technological innovation in news media organizations work more generally.

• NIKS

Centralized versus integrated forms of blogging:
• Politken developed a centralized approach -> a hack of their existing Esenic content management system to brand certain parts of the papers website as blogs, publish their content in reverse chronology and allow for reader comments
• Nyhedsasvisen developed an integrated approach: Set up their website in a way that equipped all their 170 editoral staffers with a personal blog allowed registered users of the site to set up their own blog hosted, branded and promoted by the newspaper.

• There is a difference between how journalists see their sites and how technologists see their sites. There is tension between different communities working for the same organization and involved in developing the same technology
• Journalists at both papers generally wanted to develop blogs as a tool for existing journalistic purposes, the publication of professionally produced content for people to read and perhaps comment on.
• The technologists were more interested in enabling a much wider breadth and depth of user engagement with the site through the development of blogging as a platform open for all who signed up.

• Managers in older and more established organizations resist more to radical innovation in part because the managers remained unconcvinced that the more open forms of blogging favoured by the technologists held substantial commercial promise. This works the other way around aswell.
• Manager approach vs. Technologists approach.
The three communities involved in developing blogs:
• Three communities took part in the development work within each organization: Journalists, Managers, and technologists. -> contentious collaboration. (contentious:work was full of tension, and collaboration because they were team efforts intended to help the newspaper)
• Managers and journalists have long been recognized as important parts of legacy media organizations.
• Technologists are often overlooked

• The three communities involved in the development progress are united by a shared abstract mission: to integrate blogs into journalistsic and commercial practices of the newspaper they work for.

• The journalists in both communities defined the value of blogs mainly in terms of editorial value.\

• niks

• Managers see the commercial potention

• Managers have a near monopoly on commercial projections.

• Central value for the technologists at both papers was the realization of technological possibilities.

• People see technologists to have a privileged relationship to the future, as journalists are by some seen as representatives for the past.

• Journalists are seen as more sceptical by managers and technologists.
• Journalists think that the downside is greater thatn the upside

• Discusses what they think are the flaws of every community.

• The communities can continue to ascribe different meanings to new rools but an element of common ground has to be forged at a pratical level and in terms of technological configurations.
• Despite clear differences between an old and a newly established paper: Development processes at the two newspapers involved communities that were strikingly similar. These communities are likely to be involve in future innovation processes too as legacy media continue to contend with rapid technological change and the rise of new, new media like social media and mobile media.
Conclusion:
• All three communites have different needs and hopes, that explain how they seek to shape the new media technologies, that old media organizations increasingly incorporate into their editorial and commercial operations.
• But the tension they produce may also be a resource as the deep diversity they reflect can be a key driver of innovation.
• A lot of tension between the 3 communities.
• Which community or constellation will shape the development of a given technology cannot be decided a priori but can only be determined empirically
• But in most cases all three communities will be involved in the process of development and adaptation and should be the subject of closer inquiri.

• Blogging software does not necessarily offer more participatory and interactive forms of publishing than other web platforms. That depends on how the tools are developed and used

• Technologists will become increasingly involved in these processes, because legacy media move more and more aggressively into new platforms.

• Its important to look how the three communities together develop new media in old media organizations through collaborative and often contentious processes, changing not only the practice of journalism, but also the business practices and indeed very organizational structurs of a set of legacy news media organizations that continue to plau a central role in our democracies.