Creative Autonomy in the Newsroom: How Hierarchy Impacts Innovative Behaviour

Abstract

ABSTRACT News organisations are in need of creativity to enable their own innovation. Yet “creative autonomy”, the freedom to experiment, to be creative, and to investigate radical possibilities at work, which is conditional to innovation processes, is still under-researched in journalism studies. In this article we fill this gap by addressing creative autonomy in newsrooms in transformation from an organisational perspective. We do so by using “innovative learning culture” or “ILC” as a lens to understand how creative autonomy is perceived within the newsroom, and what organisational aspects and social dynamics influence this perception. From a larger ethnographic study on innovative behaviour in two national newspaper newsrooms in the Netherlands, “creative autonomy” emerged as a relevant theme to journalists in both organisations. Their perception of creative autonomy is multi-layered, unevenly experienced across the newsroom, and strongly influenced by hierarchy. We also find that the perception of creative autonomy coincides with the perception of having close communicative relations with management. We argue that this can hinder the innovative behaviour of the majority of news workers who are not part of elite groups and typically perceive more distance from management.