Disruption and Digital Journalism

Assessing News Media Innovation in a Time of Dramatic Change

John V. Pavlik

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9780367629953
• eBook ISBN: 9781000487411
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Media Studies
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

This book offers a timely insight into how the news media have adapted to the digital transformation of public communication infrastructure.

Providing a conceptual roadmap to understanding the disruptive, innovative impact of digital networked journalism in the 21st century, the author critically examines how and to what extent news media around the world have engaged in digital adaptation. Making use of data from news media content production and distribution both off- and online, as well as user and financial data from the U.S. and internationally, the book traces how the news media embraced and reacted to key developments such as the invention of the World Wide Web in 1989 and the launch of Google in 1998, Facebook in 2004, and the Apple iPhone in 2009. The author also highlights innovative organizations that have sought to reimagine news media that are optimized for digital, online, and mobile media of the 21st century, demonstrating how these groups have been able to stay better engaged with the public.

Disruption and Digital Journalism is recommended reading for all academics and scholars with an interest in media, digital journalism studies, and technological innovation.

1 Adapting to disruption

A three-stage model of news media digital adaptation

DOI: 10.4324/9781003111788-1

Introduction

Digitization is more than simply a means of computerizing news content production and distribution. These are certainly characteristics of 21st-century journalism. But the digital disruption of journalism runs far deeper. It touches upon and transforms almost every aspect of the news media, from gathering the news, to telling the stories, delivering the news itself, engaging the public, and funding the enterprise. Even the quality and culture of journalism and the newsroom are transforming, whether in physical or virtual form.

Disruption does not change the fundamental premise that journalism is a public good. Digital or analog, the core mission of journalism is to seek and report the truth about matters of public importance. Journalism informs the public, helping hold the powerful accountable and acting as a check on government and other institutions in society.

Disruption of journalism can lead to a more robust form of news. Digital journalism can better contextualize the news and more deeply engage the public. Digital news content can be more nuanced. Digital news coverage could provide more context. The digital transformation of journalism can be more than simply faster and cheaper access to news. For many journalists, journalism is not just a job or a living. It is a calling. It is anchored in the belief that press, whether analog or digital, constitutes the Fourth Estate. It is indispensable to democracy. Independent journalism is the primary means by which citizens become informed and can make intelligent decisions about matters of public importance, including elections and the candidates for elected office. A meme popular on Twitter during 2020 showed a young protester holding a sign that read:

First they came for the journalists.

We don’t know what happened after that.

The transformation digitization and network connectivity bring about is in fact a complete disruption of journalism as it has been practiced and published in much of the world since at least the early 20th century. Many of the consequences are unintended and unexpected and often do not bode well for the future of journalism. This book investigates that disruption, proposes a three-stage model of news media adaptation to the digital transformation of the public communication infrastructure, and critically examines how and to what extent news media around the world have engaged in this digital adaptation. Data sources include news media content production and distribution online and off and user and financial data for news media in the U.S. and internationally as tracked since the 1970s, the beginning of the digital transformation of journalism.

Slow to adapt

The thesis that the book posits and tests by drawing upon diverse research and data sources is that initially most news media were slow to utilize digital technology for either news production or distribution, and that, for at least the first three decades, most news media did little more than put their analog-designed news content online. In the 1990s, leading journalists and news media began to embrace digital technologies more extensively for news production and distribution with the invention of the World Wide Web in 1989 (Berners-Lee, 1989), mostly to generate original online content.

Table 1.1 outlines a framework for understanding the nature of media adaptation to the digital platform. The horizontal axis arrays the originality of news content production. The vertical axis arrays the design of that news content, either analog or digital. Identifying two categories on each axis yields four types of media adaptation to the digital environment.

Table 1.1 Media content adaptation strategies for the digital age

	Repurposed	Original
Analog	Type 1	Type 2
Digital	Type 3	Type 4

Type 1 is news content designed and produced for one medium and repurposed for another, with virtually no change to or adjustment of that content to utilize the properties or qualities of the new medium. In the early days of online news, many newspapers repurposed their print news product for online distribution. This was often labeled “shovelware,” reflecting the idea that the content was poorly designed for the new digital platform; it was simply shoveled from one medium to the other. It was akin to producing a motion picture version of a book without making any substantive adaptations to the new medium; the movie would likely fall into the familiar category of “the book was much better than the movie.”

Type 2 is news content produced originally for the digital platform, employing only the qualities of analog design. Many early online “newspapers” took this approach, essentially creating text-based content that paralleled what the editors traditionally printed in the paper. Typical were stories that used the inverted pyramid designed to answer the 5 Ws: who, what, when, where, and, rarely, why. Most important facts came first, least important at the end, and they were occasionally supplemented with photos. Stories followed a linear narrative, assuming a mostly passive audience who read, watched, or listened to the news when it was published or broadcast, and then waited for the next cycle.

Some legacy news organizations committed to publishing their content online first, which was referred to as “digital-first” publishing. Many news organizations have since adopted a “digital-first” strategy, including The Guardian, and others have converted to online only (Jarvis, 2011).

In 2016, The Independent newspaper became the first national U.K. newspaper to commit to publishing online only (The Independent, 2016). Owners ESI Media announced the move was designed to capitalize on The Independent’s position as a fast-growing news website and as a way to build a sustainable and profitable future. The Independent’s monthly audience increased 33.3% in the next 12 months, with nearly 70 million global unique users. The site achieved profitability with revenue growth of 50% in the next 12 months.

Digital native news sites also entered the scene (Wu, 2017). Digital native refers to news products original to the online platform. Research shows that digital native news sites capture a substantial portion of the news-consuming public, an average of 21 million users a month in the U.S. in 2018 (Pew Research Center, 2019). Among the leading digital native news and information sites are Bleacher Report (sports news), Breitbart (conservative political news), Business Insider (business news), BuzzFeed (breaking news and culture), Deadspin (sports), Gizmodo (technology), HuffPost (politics and culture), Mashable (technology, digital culture, and entertainment), Politico (politics), Slate (politics and culture), TMZ (entertainment), Upworthy (positive storytelling), and Vox (politics, business, popular culture).

The digital-first strategy outlined in Type 2 news content also utilized social media platforms. National Public Radio (NPR), for instance, has a social media strategist who, during the Arab Spring of 2011, provided tweets and retweets of news from the region, up to a reported 1,300 times in a day (Jarvis, 2011). Posts are sometimes supplemented with additional news gathering, including reporting from witnesses on the ground, vetting facts, disproving rumors, and translating videos whose audio tracks are not in English.

Type 3 is repurposed content adapted for the digital environment. This often has meant adding links to text news stories. In some cases, additional reporting was conducted, and other media formats were included, especially what was called “multimedia,” or added video and audio. It was a way to offer the type of content already available in radio or television newscasts and sometimes produced via a partnership between a local newspaper and local TV or radio stations. The storytelling was substantially unaltered, usually featuring a linear narrative following the 5 Ws of mainstream journalism. A 1993 NBC News report illustrates (2016). The video begins with an anchor referring to the “information superhighway” and one of its main thoroughfares, a network called “Internet.”

Type 4 is news content that holds the greatest potential for journalism to thrive in the 21st century. It is original news content featuring the unique capacities of the digital environment. A digital report published by The New York Times in August 2020 illustrates. Accessed on a digital device, the interactive, data-based report reveals, using 3D visualizations and synchronized text, how the coronavirus might spread on a New York City subway car.

Changing newsroom culture

A major challenge of this early period in the disruption of journalism was to change newsroom culture. It meant changing thinking about news stories constructed using the traditional model based on analog technology to one based on digital and networked technology. This new way of thinking could enable reimagining of the entire process of news production from news gathering to news delivery and public engagement. Many journalists and news executives were extremely resistant or reluctant to make this kind of change. They perceived it as threatening the values of legacy journalism, its commitment to objectivity and to reporting the news impartially, accurately, independently, fairly.

A leaked internal document from The New York Times provided a glimpse into the challenges of changing newsroom culture in response to the digital age (NYT Innovation Report, 2014). The New York Times’s “Innovation Report” reveals in a critical fashion how vexing adaptation to the online era was proving to traditional news media organizations (Benton, 2014). The report states that what had been a mainstay of online journalism, the home page, was decreasing precipitously in value, as mobile and social media ascended in how the public engaged with journalism. Between 2011 and 2013, traffic to The Times home page had dropped from 150 million to 80 million unique visitors annually (Benton, 2014). “Only a third of our readers ever visit it. And those who do visit are spending less time: page views and minutes spent per reader dropped by double-digit percentages last year.” The Times must do a better job encouraging sharing of content: “But at The Times, discovery, promotion and engagement have been pushed to the margins, typically left to our business-side colleagues or handed to small teams in the newsroom” (NYT Innovation Report, pp. 23–25).

Thought leaders have been reimagining journalism for a digital era since at least the 1980s. Journalism design pioneer Roger Fidler proposed a tablet newspaper in 1981, long before Apple introduced its iPad. While on a fellowship in 1991 at the Media Studies Center, Fidler turned his vision of a tablet newspaper into a prototype (Fidler, 2004; Reinan, 2012; Fidler, 2019). Beginning with a conceptual prototype, Fidler designed the idea of a digital newspaper, eventually creating an actual physical prototype, although it was not a functional prototype. It merely demonstrated the idea of a portable, tablet newspaper. When Fidler occasionally took his prototype with him while dining in restaurants, he told the author, other patrons would often approach him and ask where they could get one.

Since Fidler’s pioneering work, Briggs has offered a multistage model of how to develop a successful news startup or digital news innovation (Briggs, 2011).

Nicholas Negroponte, founder of the MIT Media Lab, proposed a fully customizable digital newspaper called The Daily Me in his 1995 book, Being Digital. Customizable news has become a substantial part of online journalism, especially using algorithms to automate the process based on user preferences, choices, actions, and characteristics.

The reimagining of journalism in the digital age continues in the 21st century as the challenges continue evolving. In the 1990s, much of the reimagining focused on the delivery of news electronically, typically via the Internet or cable television systems. By the 2000s, the reimagining shifted toward how the content and the storytelling could be...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• 1 Adapting to disruption: A three-stage model of news media digital adaptation
• 2 Stage 1: Repurposing analog content online
• 3 Stage 2: Generating original online content
• 4 Stage 3: Optimizing news for a digital, networked, and mobile platform
• 5 Cases in news media adaptation: Content strategies, usage, ownership, and revenue data
• 6 News deserts: Local journalism’s struggle to adapt
• 7 Concluding reflections: Prospects and problems in optimizing journalism for the digital domain
• Index