Reengineering Journalism: Product Manager as News Industry Institutional Entrepreneur

Abstract

The current media environment demands a continuous stream of products ready to meet audience needs, and the emergent role of product manager serves to prioritize those needs by providing a holistic perspective on a news organization’s goals. Product managers meet a crucial business imperative of journalism by bringing new skillsets into the newsroom to help bridge the divide of the varying operating logics and align priorities among editorial, business, and technology departments. Thus, the increasing popularity of the product manager across news organizations serves as a prime example of the reengineering of journalism’s institutions. While much scholarship explains how journalism’s institutions evolve with regard to digital transformation, less focuses on the specific impact to the business of news and the role of actors as embedded yet still responsible for change. This article frames journalism’s product managers as institutional entrepreneurs to better understand how actors can promote change and reengineer journalism’s longstanding professional boundaries. A unique dataset of product manager employment histories from a sample set of news organizations in both the US and UK is systematically analysed to examine hiring patterns, training backgrounds, degree of professionalization, and organizational field structure, shedding light on the enabling conditions of institutional entrepreneurs.