Abstract
In the wake of the news industry’s digitization, novel organizations that differ considerably from traditional media firms in terms of their functional roles and organizational practices of media work are emerging. One new type is the field repair organization, which is characterized by supporting high-quality media work to compensate for the deficits (such as those which come from cost savings and layoffs) which have become apparent in legacy media today. From a practice-theoretical research perspective and based on semi-structured interviews, virtual field observations, and document analysis, we have conducted a single case study on Science Media Center Germany (SMC), a unique non-profit news start-up launched in 2016 in Cologne, Germany. Our findings show that, in addition to field repair activities, SMC aims to facilitate progress and innovation in the field, which we refer to as field advancement. This helps to uncover emerging needs and anticipates problems before they intensify or even occur, proactively providing products and tools for future journalism. This article contributes to our understanding of novel media organizations with distinct functions in the news industry, allowing for advancements in theory on media work and the organization of journalism in times of digital upheaval.
Highlights
Along with its technological, economic, and societal shifts, journalism’s production structures and practices are undergoing profound transformation (Alexander, 2015; Buschow, 2020a; Reese, 2020)
Science Media Center Germany (SMC)’s direct supporting services for news work resonate with the concept of field repair (Graves & Konieczna, 2015; Konieczna, 2018), so SMC can be understood as a field repair organization by meeting the signifying prac‐ tice of news sharing
When we look at its field advancement arm, SMC tends to resemble parts of an media lab, i.e., an organizational struc‐ ture built for journalism innovation (Mills & Wagemans, 2021)
Summary
Economic, and societal shifts, journalism’s production structures and practices are undergoing profound transformation (Alexander, 2015; Buschow, 2020a; Reese, 2020). Financial upheavals in the industry have led to cost cutting, downsizing and layoffs, the discontinuation of entire publications, and a significant increase in atypical, precarious forms of media work (Deuze & Witschge, 2020; O’Donnell & Zion, 2019). One response to this transformed environment comes in the form of digital‐native news media start‐ ups which attempt to mitigate the deficits and chal‐ lenges of the contemporary news market (e.g., Buschow, 2020b; Deuze & Witschge, 2020; Konieczna, 2018). Current journalism research lags behind in exploring such non‐traditional organizations, as most existing
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