ORGANIZATIONAL IMPLICATIONS
In the early days of the Internet, legacy players tended to compartmentalize their new online businesses in standalone units. But as digital technologies spread into all processes of media organizations, the organizational forms that had been developed for the industrial production of mass media products proved increasingly inappropriate.
Once content creation, production and distribution systems are digitized, distinctions between old and new media and between different media platforms and products begin to evaporate, and structures need to be optimized for digital data: the route is clear for bi-media, tri-media and cross-media working and converged newsrooms.Integrated newsrooms have been described as the dominant discourse on the future of news production (Garcia Aviles et al., 2009). These take the form of a single newsroom with a single planning and newsgathering operation that replaces the individual production systems for radio, TV, print and online that had existed before, and with technical specialists and designers integrated right the heart of the newsroom, rather than located in an ‘IT support function’ (Westlund, 2011).
Integrated newsrooms not only bring online and offline journalism closer together, but are also altering the practice of journalism. Journalists need to be able to produce content for different platforms, and to adapt that content in response to feedback from audiences and the information on users’ needs, interests and preferences that are intrinsic to the online environment. Such newsrooms have also led to the emergence of high-profile multimedia journalists who are 24-hour news brands in their own right, both generating income for the parent brand and building their own individual economic value. New players in comparison are not burdened with the legacy systems and assets of legacy media firms, and can therefore focus investments on what is essential to the fast-developing online news industry (Christensen et al., 2012).8
Ironically, although online news operations and new workflows create synergies and allow simpler organizational structures, they have increased investment costs. Digital production and distribution systems must be bought, installed and continuously upgraded in order to remain competitive.
Software engineers and digital designers need to be employed, and buildings must be bought or renovated.The immediacy and volume of news available for free on the Internet undermined the value of newspapers, and transformed the strategic assets that once acted as barriers to industry entry, notably non-digital production and distribution infrastructures, into liabilities. As Warren Buffet told attendees at Berkshire Hathaway’s 2009 annual meeting: ‘Imagine that someone came along saying, “I have a great idea: Let’s chop trees down, buy expensive printing presses, and buy a fleet of delivery trucks, all to get pieces of paper to people to read about what happened yesterday”.’
Amidst mounting losses publishers are implementing a range of cost-cutting measures, including reducing the extent of their publications, cutting special supplements, introducing pay freezes, reducing their use of freelancers, and cutting jobs. Financial pressures are accelerating the shift towards integrated newsrooms. Synergies can be achieved by combining content, staff and resources. This degree of organizational change, combined with cost cutting, provokes high levels of stress and limits the ability to respond innovatively to the new environment.
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