Theorizing “Co-operative Advantage” in News-Markets: Rethinking Media-Ownership, Renewing the Sociology of Journalism’s Radical Tradition, and Reframing Democratic Media Reform

Abstract

ABSTRACT The sociology of journalism has traditionally neglected news co-operatives’ potential. This largely reflects the investor-owned news sector’s entrenched growth through most of the twentieth Century. However, investors increasingly fail to sustain quality, independent journalism into the twenty-first Century. This failure creates openings for the co-operative news-sector’s expansion and media democratization, practical projects implicitly intertwined with the theoretical project of renewing the sociology of journalism’s radical tradition. Embedded within Curran’s media reform model, this theoretical essay therefore blends co-operative and journalism studies’ conceptualizations to more rigorously account for news co-operation’s evolving prospects. Drawing from Spear’s general theory of co-operative advantage, I argue news co-ops have six inbuilt advantages over investor-owned media firms. The emerging news sector’s varied governance types, development trajectories, and examples demonstrate how co-operative advantages are relevant to news-markets. This novel conceptual synthesis thus illustrates that a more robust focus on co-operative news innovations can both renew the sociology of journalism’s radical tradition and inform the news industry’s democratic reconstruction.