Abstract
While facing cuts, downsizing and revenue losses, media organizations experience paradoxical demands in being organized for print or linear production with daily deadlines and simultaneously striving to be ‘digital first’ and produce and publish stories online on a continuous basis throughout the day. In this paper, we describe efforts applied when introducing the metaphor flowline in a medium-sized newspaper organization in Norway with the aim of aligning their production and publishing processes to readers’ consumption of online news. Both the production volume of journalistic content, reader consumption and the newsroom workers’ experience of mastering their everyday work life increased dramatically in a very short time. The involvement of a temporary autonomous team in the planning and designing of a test pilot aiming to make flowline “as practice”, was integral to the digital transformation success, allowing for participative action across newsroom boundaries. Based on the empirical findings from the local newspaper organization and drawing on theories on liminality (Turner 1982, 1986) and metaphorical work (Schön 1993), this article presents a set of six interrelated steps incorporating a structure for autonomous teams and their role in enabling lasting change in organizations facing digital transformation.
Highlights
How do you enable change in an industry that has been operating in more or less the same way for forty odd years? The major digital transition that has changed the global media business in colossal, and for many even catastrophic ways, has had particular impact on newspaper organizations
We focus on what measures are needed for changing the flow of production, organizational structure and workflow of news organizations, with an emphasis on how one can create lasting change in an organization where many of the employees are long-term staff, with a large degree of individual autonomy within strict managerial frames
We describe our methodological approach and present the six stage process model for sustainable change in organizations, using empirical examples and reflections of the employees in the local news organization following a pilot period of digital transformation
Summary
The major digital transition that has changed the global media business in colossal, and for many even catastrophic ways, has had particular impact on newspaper organizations As they have mainly adhered to the principles of print journalism, with its traditional modes of producing an editorial (printed) newspaper within a fixed deadline, this ‘digital revolution’ has to a large extent implied having to explore, develop and adapt to new and different ways of producing and distributing news, more often than not without generating satisfying revenue for survival. Media organizations experience paradoxical demands in being organized for print or linear production with daily deadlines and simultaneously striving to be ‘digital first’ and produce and publish stories online on a continuous basis throughout the day The discrepancies between these two modes of news production are reflected not merely in terms of their lived temporality, i.e. linear vs non-linear, and in terms of the types of knowledge and competence applied and acknowledged, work practices, tools and platforms for production and distribution, as well as their business models. We discuss how the (idea) work of autonomous teams contribute to the identification of needs and suggestions for measures taken, and to the integration of lasting changes and innovations in the organization as a whole
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