Creativity in strategic lock-ins: The newspaper industry and the digital revolution

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During the last decade newspapers all over the world have faced a severe and in many cases even existential crisis. At the same time, the technology for producing and supplying journalistic content has changed dramatically. While digitalization, along with socio-cultural and technological changes, threatened the established newspaper business models and therefore increased the necessity for change, it simultaneously offered various opportunities to establish new business models, not least for quality journalism, which is crucial to a vital democracy. Adopting a strategy process perspective and introducing the concepts of “horizontal” and “vertical” creativity, we analyze how the key players in the quality-newspaper sector in Germany have tried to benefit from digitalization and why they have failed so far. Our analysis of select cases shows that, under specific conditions, organizations tend to use up all their creative potential in order to maintain problematic strategies rather than explore new ones. • We analyze the digitalization of quality daily newspapers in Germany. • We apply a strategy process perspective to explain counterfactual stability. • Publishers merely became creative in a horizontal direction. • A critical strategic pattern is transferred from the print to the digital business. • Publishers became creative to maintain the strategic trajectory adopted.