Abstract
I summarize both the four contributions to the theme issue - innovations in the newsroom - and the general article, highlighting their common threads and connections with larger literatures. The two major threads are (1) the primary brakes on media innovations, for better and for worse, frequently come from within the media sectors (e.g., editorial offices, newsroom practices, business practices), in contrast with innovation as developed and "pushed" from the ICT industries; and (2) two of the theme issue articles take up the core normative value of autonomy, highlighting how far innovations may foster and/or hinder consumer and/or journalistic autonomy. These connect in turn with themes and threads raised in our Inaugural Issue, beginning with the necessity of taking a holistic approach in our analyses of media innovations.
Highlights
Innovation in the Newsroom We begin with the more theoretical and move more and more towards the practical and the empirical. In their “Agents of Media Innovations: Actors, Actants, and Audiences,” Oscar Westlund and Seth Lewis take up a holistic approach – explicitly following the advice and example of Axel Bruns in his opening article for our Inaugural Issue (2014)
The resulting “Agents of Media Innovations” (AMI) model thereby helps bring to the foreground especially two categories of active participants implicated in the processes of media innovations that are otherwise downplayed or even ignored in some previous discussions – namely: (1) actants – i.e., the technologically-based agents such as APIs, web analytic engines, various algorithms, etc.; and (2) audiences whose responses and often highly interactive engagements with and shaping of especially newer forms of digital media are increasingly important to the construction and ultimate success and/or failure of media innovations created initially by editors, journalists, and technologists
We will see a similar concern raised in the last article – namely Gunnar Nygren’s findings that journalists’ increasingly reliance on social media may lead to an increasing homogenization of journalism, even while in other ways digital media more broadly may entail greater autonomy and creativity for journalists
Summary
Sandrine Roginsky’s “Social network sites: an innovative form of political communication? A socio-technical approach to media innovation” takes up the critically important topic of how politicians use – or seek to use – social media as an ostensibly innovative form of media communication. Roginsky’s analysis is compelling first of all as an ethnographic and empirical analysis of how Members of the European Parliament and their staff utilize social media Contra the technological determinism that underlies what she characterizes as “celebratory accounts” of social media that claim that it is these media that are innovative – Roginsky documents how these users of the media bring about changes in the technologies themselves. In doing so, she underlines the social constructivist approach to technology (SCOT) that we’ve seen in Westlund and Lewis. Leyla Dogruel identified multiple ways in which media innovations depend on older media (2014; cf. Bruns 2014) – a dependency that can, worstcase, amount to the “suppression of radical potential” (so Winston 1998, cited in Nyre 2014, 105)
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