Journalists in a Digital Age April 5, 2008
Posted by Robert Rich in symposium.Tags: arne krumsvik, oslo
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Arne H. Krumsvik from Oslo University College (Norway) presented his paper “The Role Of Journalists In A Digital Age: Strategy and Structure for Online News Production”.
Some highlights after the jump
Typology of strategic configuration
- Defenders – organizations which have narrow product-margin domains (fits perfectly with the traditional media company)
- Prospectors – continually search for market opportunities and experiment with potential responses to emerging environmental trends
- Analyzers – operate in two types of product-market domains (most np editors would say they are analyzers)
- Reactors – lack a consistent strategy-structure relationship
Research Questions
-How does the strategic role of new media development in a traditional media organization affect the journalism production process?
- What kind of journalists and journalism are shaped under changing individual institutional and technological frameworks?
Findings
- Despite differences between CNN and NRK, both have developed defender strategies
- The operation of this strategy is to develop an organizational structure to realize the efficiency of centralized news production, enabling an increased breadth of market service and to hold the marginal cost of each new channel in check
- This leads to the development of standard formats fitting a growing number or output channels
- Rather than utilizing the comparative storytelling advantage of each channel or platform, there will be a higher focus on the lowest common denominator
- The identity of the journalist working in a centralized news gathering organization will be strongest linked to the most prestigious output context for the content produced
Future Outlook
- This Tayloristic image of the situation after the first 10 years of online news production does not represent a static situation. Social structures are changing over time.
- Changes toward analyzer strategies and utilizing the unique storytelling features of each channel might be a scenario if differentiation is needed to meet competition and increase the total time spent on their own brand.
Nowadays print media is following new technologies in circulations as the online readership rate is increasing rapidly all over the world. Most of the publishers are already using the web to circulate their publication in order to increase their revenue and giving the competition to the rising broadcast media. Companies like http://www.pressmart.net helping publishers to circulate their publications through new distributions technologies like web, social media, blogs, pod cast, mobiles, RSS, etc… and this would be good news for publishers.