Organizations as Innovations: Examining Changes in Journalism Through the Lens of Newly‐Emerging Organizations

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Introduction: Organizations as Innovations in Journalism
In journalism studies, a perspective on organizations is well established, with such research primarily centered on the influence of organizational factors on the nature of journalistic content (Hanusch & Maares, 2021;Westlund & Ekström, 2019).This research strand, however, has mainly looked into the traditional organizational entity of journalism, i.e., the newsroom and its routines, processes, and standards of newsmaking (Bantz et al., 1980;Gans, 1979;Tuchman, 1978).Ever since the 19th century's era of mass media, when the newsroom was born and "imprinted" (Stinchcombe, 1965, p. 153), this monolithic form of organizing has become taken for granted as the natural way to produce news.As a consequence, a newsroom centricity prevails in research (Deuze & Witschge, 2018;Ferrucci & Kuhn, 2022).Ethnographic studies from the 1960s onwards provided pivotal findings for progress in news production research, yet failed to extend the organizational perspective beyond the newsroom.Moreover, they focused almost exclusively on uniform daily newspapers and television stations, which have never been representative of the field as a whole (Boczkowski, 2010).
Although digitization has shaken up this line of inquiry, which has developed new approaches to transformation since the turn of the century (Cottle, 2007;Gade, 2022), its main focus remains on innovation inside the conventional newsroom, such as the implementation of technological, work-related, and managerial changes, as well as on barriers to organizational development (e.g., García-Avilés et al., 2014, 2019;Paulussen, 2016).What this research does not account for is today's broad and increasingly differentiated spectrum of new forms of organizing news production beyond the newsroom.Ferrucci and Kuhn (2022) dedicate an entire essay to the argument that, against the backdrop of technological and industry disruptions and rising labor precarity, the single organization's power over news production practices has never been greater than it is today.They recommend "envisioning the journalism industry as a collection of organizations" (Ferrucci & Kuhn, 2022, p. 13).While their essay makes a pointed argument for the new relevance of organizations in the hierarchy of influences on journalism, it gives less consideration to organizational innovations and new ways of organizing the news production process.This prevailing research gap is evident in current literature reviews (Belair-Gagnon & Steinke, 2020;García-Avilés, 2021b), which reveal a primary focus on technological developments, formats, genres, and platforms, as well as on business models perceived as key dimensions of innovation and change.However, a recent empirical study in five European countries by Meier et al. (2022) found that with collaborative investigative networks and new organizational teams, two organization-related phenomena were among the most important innovations in journalism in the decade since 2010.Still, new organizations and novelty in organizing journalism remain an under-explored dimension of current research, despite there being much to learn about the changing institution of journalism by investigating its pioneering organizations (Hepp & Loosen, 2021).
By new organizations, we refer to recently emerging ventures, started independent of established media, related in one way or another to the field of journalism and the news production process (Deuze & Witschge, 2020;Usher & Kammer, 2019).However, "new" does not necessarily mean that an organization has no historical antecedents.Organization scholars emphasize that new forms are often recombinations of characteristics of established organizational templates.An operationalized definition of when an organization is different enough to be considered truly "new" in a manner relative to existing conditions is hard to establish in light of the current state of research, as these forms have not been well explored and are rather poorly understood (Buschow & Suhr, 2022b).Furthermore, we use the term "new organizing" because the creation and maintenance of organizations is understood as an active and dynamic process of organizational becoming under prevailing environmental conditions, rather than something which naturally occurs in journalism (Weick, 1979).Moreover, "organizing" can capture different analytical levels-both the formation of entirely new types of organizations as well as the design of organizational structures, processes, and practices within such collective entities.
Recent studies conducted on non-traditional organizations and new forms of organizing in journalism are  (Buschow & Suhr, 2022b).While recent research has typically taken the changing institution of journalism as a starting point to examine the downstream implications for organizations (e.g., Ferrucci & Eldridge, 2022;Reese, 2022), these examples underscore the significance of also studying organizational innovations more deeply as a means to gain insights into broader trends that the institution is undergoing.The main contribution of our article is to propose a conceptual approach to explore the changing institution of journalism, its structures and practices through the lens of its novel organizations, which are both manifestations and catalysts of these transformation processes.
To do so, journalism research must expand its organizational perspective beyond the traditional templates of organizing.Such an endeavor can draw on the vast array of insights offered by organization studies (e.g., Aldrich et al., 2020;Davis & Sinha, 2021;Powell & Brandtner, 2016;Sandhu, 2018;Scott, 2014).
Against this background, our article aims for three contributions.First, we explore the drivers and conditions of new organizing in journalism.We intend to show why the established organizational template of the newsroom is losing viability, while a growing variety and diversification of organizations related to the field of journalism can be observed (Section 2).Second, in order to broaden the organizational perspective, we shall bring together recent studies on the plurality of new organizations in journalism and arrange them according to three levels on which organizational innovations can occur: the field level, the level of organizational populations (certain clusters of similar organizations), and the internal level of the single organization (Section 3).Third, we will propose a research agenda for establishing organization and new organizing as a fruitful lens through which change and innovation in journalism can be better understood (Section 4).

Drivers and Conditions of New Organizing in Journalism
In a classic, more functional way, Gade (2022, p. 2) defines news organizations as: Specialized entities that are functionally assembled to efficiently achieve the work of their industry, the creation of news.Organizations define the nature of work, divide that work into specific tasks, design jobs around these tasks, coordinate the tasks, and create processes that ensure work quality.
In recent years, a number of developments within and beyond the industry have increased the pressure on traditional news organizations and thereby fostered the development of novel organizations and new forms of organizing.Among these developments are shifting labor markets, the increasing virtualization of media work, economic upheavals, the growing relevance of new types of media products that demand different modes of production, and societal changes that journalism responds to by reorganizing.In many ways, organizations are both the result and key agents of this ongoing change, social arenas, and power containers where broader transformations are negotiated and may even originate in the first place.

Shifting Labor Markets and the Virtualization of Media Work
In business in general, there is a current discourse on flatter, less hierarchical, and more flexible organizational models which stand in stark contrast to the traditional hierarchical and bureaucratic enterprises of the industrial age (e.g., Reitzig, 2022).Agile organizational models are expected to be better equipped to navigate the volatile and rapidly evolving landscape of the digital age, while also aligning with the growing demands for "new work" among employees.This is particularly relevant in the context of shifting labor markets in the Western world, which are marked by a competitive "war for talent."These debates on "new work" and "new organizing" also affect journalism, which is already under considerable economic pressure since digital media basically destroyed its traditional business model (Nielsen, 2019).
Moreover, the Covid-19 pandemic called for creative methods of cooperation, virtualized much journalistic work, and dramatically reduced the importance of physical office space (García-Avilés, 2021a).A basic requirement for the virtualization of media work is digitization, which has proven to be an enabler for the dematerialization of newsrooms (Wall, 2022) and the rise of alternative forms of collaboration and new organizational models-something which could even be observed before the global pandemic hit (Bunce et al., 2018;Reyna, 2023).In organization studies, digital tools and technologies are seen as "raw materials available to those who organize firms" (Davis & Sinha, 2021, p. 2), with which they then lay the foundations of new organizing and different forms of media work.For example, digital environments enable more collaborative, participatory forms of organizing journalism, with methods originating from IT and programming, such as Scrum (Usher, 2016), and hybrid networks of open-source investigations (Reese & Chen, 2022).

Economic Upheavals
In the last couple of years, it has become clear that the operational cost structure of the traditional newsroom as the main site of news production in the industrial era is apparently no longer viable under conditions of digital journalism, where revenue has fallen sharply when compared to former media businesses.Legacy media has primarily resorted to cost-cutting and downsizing, layoffs, outsourcing, and the closure of entire newsrooms.Novel ways of cost saving can be observed among legacy media, but few fundamental renewals of organizational designs.Deuze and Witschge (2020) underscored this point by noting that an examination of a newsroom located within a legacy media organization today would reveal, first of all, a significant number of "empty chairs" (p.92).
Nevertheless, it is precisely journalism's difficult economic situation that is a key driver of organizations' genesis and a wide spectrum of new types of organizations and organizational designs.What could be considered the creative destruction of legacy industry structures is thought to free up resources for newcomers, with the global start-up movement in journalism increasing the sheer number of organizations (Deuze & Witschge, 2020;Usher & Kammer, 2019).Although many start-ups tend to reproduce existing organizational forms, they are "imprinted" (Stinchcombe, 1965, p. 153) by the historical and cultural context from which they emerge.Additionally, many of these new organizations, whether for-profit or not-for-profit, have the explicit aim of tackling current challenges within the journalism industry and preserving (what they consider) quality journalism (Konieczna, 2018).Therefore, the increasing variation and diversification of these start-ups can be seen as a quasi-natural response to a changing structural context, as entrepreneurs search for new ways to deal with this context (although many of these ventures will inevitably fail along the way; Buschow, 2020).Some start-ups are even intentionally created in response to the limitations and disadvantages of the traditional newsroom model.For example, Young and Callison (2021) investigate a data journalism start-up that had been founded to tackle prevailing issues of gender discrimination and colonialism in North American journalism.
Even after the entrepreneurial turn and the emergence of a creator economy, both of which are often connected to the fragmentation and individualization of media work, organizing remains a critical aspect, giving rise to novel types of journalism organizations, such as online outsourcing journalism labor markets (Hoag & Grzeslo, 2019) or the newsletter platform Substack, sometimes referred to as a new operating system for individual journalists (Hobbs, 2021).

New Media Products
The emergence of new digital presentation modes (e.g., listicles, news quizzes), journalism genres (e.g., slow journalism, solutions journalism), and distribution channels (e.g., media platforms and streaming services) has contributed significantly to the changing landscape of journalism organizations.Although new organizations may not always result in the development of new forms of journalism (Deuze & Witschge, 2020), it is apparent that different media products require specific ways of media work.For example, podcast studios and newsletter collectives are distinct from the conventional newsrooms of broadcast stations and daily newspapers simply due to the frequency with which they publish their content, the technological requirements and the more interactive role of their audiences, among others.The traditional assembly-line mode of organizing is no longer applicable to news production, as each new media product calls for specific forms of media work (Gade, 2022).

Societal Developments
Societal shifts demand new ways of organizing journalism to cope with changing environmental contingencies and societal complexity.If journalism serves the function of societal self-observation, a transformed (e.g., globalized, digitalized) society requires new organizing for journalism (along with new working structures) that enables such self-observation.Cross-border collaborative investigations (such as in the Panama Papers and Paradise Papers) are a prime example of this need, as these project-based, temporary collaborations are established to respond to interconnected global challenges, topics such as the climate crisis, international finance flows, and tax havens (Buschow & Suhr, 2022a;Konow-Lund, 2019).Dealing with such complexity requires a departure from the conventional editorial structures and beats of newspaper journalism.In his groundbreaking study from the 1960s, the German journalism researcher Manfred Rühl, from a Luhmannian system theory perspective, looked at the environmental conditions which a newspaper's editorial office required to emerge and persist (Rühl, 1979).Today, this question must be turned around: What organizational innovations in journalism are currently being created in response to the contemporary environmental context?

Conceptualizing the Landscape of Organizational Innovations: Fields, Populations, and Single Organizations
As organizations shape their environment while also being shaped by it, newly emerging organizations might serve as seismographs for forecasting developments in journalism, and investigating them is key to understanding more general changes and innovation in the industry.In order to widen the perspective on organizing in journalism and to develop an advanced understanding of the organizational landscape, we will propose theoretical concepts derived from organization studies.Based on this conceptualization, exemplary non-traditional new media organizations are introduced to illustrate the potential of novel organizations as a lens for innovation.
Informed by sociology-based organization studies, this article distinguishes between three analytical levels of organizing: the field level, the level of organizational populations, and the level of the single organization, ordered by the scope of the phenomena observed (see Figure 1).Following organization studies, these levels are nested within each other.At the field level, we can observe the diverse spectrum of actors involved (in one way or another) in newsmaking, some of which are part of a certain population.A population is a cluster of organizations that are alike in key respects (Aldrich et al., 2020).Others are exceptional, unconventional cases for which a population has not (yet) emerged.Single organizations, whether part of a population or not, can be investigated regarding their specific organizational designs and elements of organizing (e.g., in terms of formal hierarchies, specific beats, work roles, meeting structures), as shown in the units of analysis on the lowest level of Figure 1.Although organization studies have developed a multitude of conceptual approaches, we chose to stick to this rather classic heuristic differentiation as it is both familiar and useful for our purpose (Scott, 2014).

Field Level
At the field level, the "collection of diverse, interdependent organizations that participate in a common meaning system" (Scott, 2014, p. 106), one stream of current journalism research primarily focuses on the boundaries of the field and on new entrants whose journalistic status is frequently disputed (Eldridge, 2019).
These newcomers, such as bloggers or content creators, are regularly termed strangers, peripheral actors, interlopers, or intralopers (e.g., Holton & Belair-Gagnon, 2018).They bring in alternative values, norms, and beliefs, challenging traditional notions of journalism.Typically, a Bourdieuian perspective is applied here that focuses on the competition between incumbents and challengers, i.e., power struggles over doxa and dominant visions of the field.Another common approach is to investigate the boundaries and demarcations of traditional journalism vis-à-vis newcomers (Carlson & Lewis, 2015).
Today, the actors "formerly known as the outsiders," are, as Ferrucci (2022, p. 181)  research (Eldridge, 2022).However, so far, such novel organizations are rarely studied regarding how they produce news or how they perform new functional roles in the industry.Instead of focusing on how actors from outside the industry influence traditional journalism, the study of newly emerging organizational innovations at the field level paves the way to more in-depth inquiries into how news work is distributed across the field and how activities and functions are (re-)distributed among organizations and novel sites of news production.This is exemplified by the genesis of new types of "meta-organizations" (Lowrey et al., 2023), focused on supporting and sustaining journalism with novel functional roles and responsibilities in the industry and a variety of organizational goals.These meta-organizations are typically formed in reaction to societal and economic developments that affect journalism (e.g., limited resources for quality journalism), as illustrated in Section 2. Among them are entities that are neither legacy media players (such as publishers or broadcasters) nor news agencies, but organizations operating somewhere in between and beyond, regularly taking on tasks that have traditionally been integrated into a single media company.These are typically non-antagonistic actors trying to be an aid to journalism by reacting to the changing structural context.
In this, they differ from the likes of bloggers, influencers, and organizations such as Wikileaks, which were often regarded more as a threat in field-centered journalism research (Eldridge, 2019).Among these remarkable organizational innovations are cases such as the for-profit journalism tech consultancy start-up Hearken (Crispim da Fontoura, 2021), the non-profit media start-up Science Media Center Germany (SMC) as a supporting organization for the work of science journalists (Buschow et al., 2022), and the discontinued Civil, a blockchain-technology-based journalism platform (Le & Loebbecke, 2020).
Their investigation offers fruitful avenues for revealing more general change and innovation in journalism, as they amplify the trend toward a shifting division of labor in the field.This shift is characterized by decoupling and repackaging certain activities of journalistic production, traditionally bundled in legacy media companies, into novel organizational units.One organization driving such change in the field is SMC, a non-profit meta-organization that exerts "field repair" and "field advancement" activities (Buschow et al., 2022).
In doing so, SMC aims to compensate for deficits in science journalism (such as work intensification, cost cutting, and downsizing in legacy media) by taking over certain elements of the journalistic practice of research/investigation in order to provide qualitative "raw material" for journalistic content production in legacy media newsrooms and news start-ups.Moreover, SMC develops and provides tools and support infrastructure for news work.The fact that their new industry roles, organizational characteristics, and practices of media work have not yet been examined shows the lack of research on such organizations-see understudied cases such as The Tiny News Collective, a platform providing tools, resources, and knowledge to US news entrepreneurs starting new journalism projects in underserved news deserts, or Lawyers for Reporters, providing pro-bono legal support to news ventures.
In summary, and with regard to theoretical advancements, investigating the organizational field level through a lens of "organizations as innovations" allows us to see the wide spectrum of novel organizational species that populate journalism today and their interdependencies.By examining these different species, as well as the new roles and functions at play, we can gain insights into the redistribution of tasks and functions amongst actors in the field.This dynamic process is characterized by the emergence of new organizations that assume novel roles in the industry, while existing ones undergo specialization or even cease to perform certain functions, ultimately leading to a reconstitution of value creation in the journalism field.

Populations Level
A pressing question of research on new organizing is whether a non-traditional organization can serve as a template or a prototypical role model for the genesis of a whole new population.In organization ecology research, a population refers to a specific group of organizations that share certain similarities, although there may be some degree of variability among members (Aldrich et al., 2020).The emergence of similar organizations marks the proliferation and stabilization of certain trends and, over time, reveals some remarkable broader changes in journalism.For example, SMC can already be seen as a blueprint for followers, as it is part of a larger global movement of science media centers in, among other countries, Great Britain, Australia, and New Zealand (Buschow et al., 2022).Even if these organizations differ in nuances, they mark a gradual institutionalization of an innovative infrastructure support system that reshapes work in (science) journalism.Other examples of organizational populations that have recently emerged in journalism include stand-alone fact-checking organizations (Brookes & Waller, 2023;Graves & Konieczna, 2015), innovation-orientated media labs (Mills & Wagemans, 2021), and hybrid non-profit university centers (Olsen, 2020).These organizations differ significantly from the classic templates of organizing journalism, as they specialize in certain tasks (fact-checking news), take on new ones (transforming news by innovation), or combine functions that were previously separated (bringing together employment and education).
Although these organizations have been studied, they are still under-researched as populations, hindering an advanced understanding of their larger impact on journalism.This can be seen in the rise of the novel organizational population of cross-border collaborative investigations, such as the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists and the European Investigative Collaborations (Buschow & Suhr, 2022a;Konow-Lund, 2019).In this novel organizational form, journalists temporarily cooperate on a transnational investigation (as in the Panama Papers or Paradise Papers), enabled by shared digital technologies, infrastructures, and resources (e.g., investigative material, leaked data sets).While extensive research has been conducted on the working structures and collaborative practices of these particular organizations, their characterization as an organizational population has not yet received adequate attention.By investigating this organizational population through a lens of "organizations as innovations," a more general organizational trend towards the "projectification" (Buschow & Suhr, 2022b) of journalism can be gleaned.These projects can be perceived as a reaction to a complex environment, interwoven global challenges of news reporting (e.g., international finance flows and tax havens) which are partly caused by the increasing digital interconnectedness of societies, and new societal developments that demand more networked ways of reporting and practices of resource pooling.Due to specialization and temporality, projects fundamentally challenge the traditional newsroom structure by dissolving its permanent structures of societal (self-)observation, developing more towards "what are sometimes called pop up newsrooms" (Wall, 2022, p. 139).
Whether a single organizational variation develops into a prototype and gives rise to a novel population is, of course, unclear and depends, among other things, on the extent to which this organization succeeds in acquiring resources and the extent to which it fits its environment and gains legitimacy (Pfeffer & Salancik, 1978).Journalism studies need to closely and longitudinally follow non-traditional organizational forms soon after market entry, while also focusing on the decline of populations since traditional mass media entities (such as commercial newspapers) are under immense economic pressure and might have come to the end of their organizational lifecycles (Nielsen, 2019).Given the increasing influx of foundations and non-profit organizations in journalism (Ferrucci & Nelson, 2019), it is worth exploring whether there is a shift from a predominantly for-profit industry structure to a prevalence of non-profit organizational populations.
In summary, on the level of organizational populations, the rise of new populations (such as infrastructure support organizations and cross-border collaborative investigations) and the breakdown of existing ones (such as newspapers and traditional newsrooms) draws attention to a growing mix of organizational forms in journalism.As the example of cross-border collaborative investigations shows, organizational populations underline the manifestation of certain trends and the redistribution of resources (capital, labor, knowledge, customers), as well as power shifts among populations.Since the emergence of novel organizational populations interacts with environmental conditions, these clusters of organizations serve as expressions and indicators of such conditions, demonstrating how journalism responds to them organizationally.

Level of the Single Organization
At the level of the single organization, investigations can focus on the media work of recently emerging organizations with new roles and functions in the field (e.g., Buschow et al., 2022;Crispim da Fontoura, 2021) or novel organizations that deliver journalistic content similarly to the traditional newsroom but employ alternative procedures and structures of news production (e.g., Stringer, 2018;Wall, 2022).In either case, adopting a perspective of "organizations as innovations" allows for an exploration of the organizational elements involved in news work and the design of structures, coordination processes, and work practices within such collective entities.
For example, in platform environments such as YouTube, Instagram, and TikTok, novel organizational designs are emerging that are specifically geared towards producing journalistic content for these global media platforms.Additionally, novel organizations built around principles of participation and peer production are experimenting with work practices and less formal processes that offer to include both professional and non-professional actors beyond the newsroom (O'Riordan et al., 2020).By understanding contemporary organizational designs, it becomes possible to uncover new facets of journalistic work, including aspects related to organizational hierarchies, work roles, coordination and decision-making processes, levels of autonomy, and workforce structures (e.g., occupational security, financial security, socialization, and on-the-job training).While some of these categories have already been pinpointed by traditional newsroom ethnographies, new organizational designs offer the potential to identify additional, omitted, or innovated elements of organizing that influence contemporary journalistic production.
When encountering a novel organizational design, it is essential to ascertain whether it can be regarded as an archetypical organizational configuration, a template for organizing that is different from the classic newsroom model.This perspective enables an examination of how remarkable practices of media work spread and are adopted beyond the boundaries of a single organization.
In summary, studying the individual organization level through an "organizations as innovations" perspective provides a fresh view of the evolving nature of media work, the transformation of organizational designs and elements of organizing, and their impact on journalistic production today.By gaining an understanding of these organizational elements, practices, and transformations, we can glean valuable insights into broader changes in the industry.

Conclusion: Towards a Research Agenda on Innovative Forms of Organizing Journalism
Historically, organizations research in journalism studies primarily focused on examining work routines, recurring practices, and standardized processes within the traditional newsroom.Given the emergence of a multitude and variety of new organizational forms of news work and fundamentally new types of organizations in the journalistic field, this article proposes a shift from stasis and routine to innovation and change.As demonstrated by the conceptual lens of "organizations as innovations," observations made by research on different organizational levels contribute valuable insights to develop a better understanding of more general transformations of journalism, especially since novel organizations might be capable of anticipating future developments in the field.In doing so, our article adds another category of novelty to innovation research in journalism, broadens our understanding of media organization, and enriches theory building in the field of journalism organizations.
At each of the three organizational levels and in their interplay, there is potential for shedding light on the key dynamics currently unfolding in journalism and thus enriching wider conceptual discussions, as Table 1 highlights.Understanding organizational innovation in the journalistic field reveals significant changes in the division of labor and the transformation of value creation configurations among organizations, providing a complementary perspective to Bourdieuian-inspired field research.As seen from recent meta-organizations, certain parts of the journalistic workflow are decoupled and repackaged into specialized organizational units, sometimes working on a non-profit basis.The emergence of science media centers exemplifies this reconfiguration of journalistic labor at the field level and offers a compelling avenue for further research into such infrastructure support systems.Further research at the field level should ask how the division of labor is changing among actors, and which new types of actors are developing in response to societal changes.
Table 1.Research agenda following from a lens of "organizations as innovations."

Analytical level Research questions
Organizational field • How is the division of labor changing?How is news work (re-)distributed among different organizations and units in the field?
• Which new types of actors with which (specialized) tasks and functions are developing in response to institutional and societal changes?
• How can meta-organizations support journalistic labor and compensate for shortcomings in the industry?
• What roles and responsibilities do meta-organizations (as infrastructure support systems) take on and what are their influences on journalistic practice and norms?
Organizational populations • Which novel organizational populations are developing in the field?
• What are the preconditions for a new organizational template to grow into a population?
• How do new populations react to societal developments and the shortcomings of traditional media organizations?
• To what extent are there shifts in industry structures in journalism that are evident in the rise and decline of populations, such as a shift from for-profit to not-for-profit populations?
Single organization • How do novel organizations perform elements of news production differently from traditional newsrooms?
• Which new roles are performed by novel organizations?
• What makes an archetypical organizational design that can potentially be adapted by other organizations?
At the organizational population level, researching new organizing highlights the diverse mix of organizational forms and the redistribution of resources and organizational power in journalism.Organizational forms and structures that better fit the societal challenges of the 21st century will eventually give rise to new populations, as exemplified by cross-border collaborative investigations, while older forms (such as traditional mass media should also longitudinally monitor the mix of populations in the sector (e.g., market entries and exits), as such analyses can provide insights into the more general shift towards a non-profit industry structure.
The single organization level reveals the dynamic nature of media work, changes in organizational designs and elements of organizing, and their influence on contemporary journalistic production.By comprehending these organizational aspects, practices, and transformations, we can acquire valuable knowledge about wider changes within the industry.However, traditional news ethnographies that rely solely on single case studies may not be the most suitable approach for investigating the vast and diverse landscape of novel organizations in journalism.Instead, adopting an approach such as Usher's (2016) "hybrid ethnography," which involves broadening the sample size while reducing depth, could offer a more effective means of researching and categorizing a greater number of (innovative) elements of organizing.
As can be seen from this research agenda, there is a steady need to study the ongoing transformation of the organizational landscape of journalism, utilizing the conceptual lens of "organizations as innovations" proposed in this contribution.Moreover, this lens has the potential to enrich existing research streams in various ways.For example, research on media ecologies (Anderson, 2016), hybrid networks of professional and non-professional media actors (Reese & Chen, 2022), and innovative news epistemologies (Zamith & Westlund, 2022) could benefit from a differentiated approach focusing on the three levels: field, populations, and single organizations.
fragmented and have not yet coalesced into a sustained research program, meaning the research agenda may overlook key developments.As this article shows, novel organizations and new organizing are key to understanding changes and innovations within the field.For example, project-based, temporary journalism cooperations (such as in the Panama Papers) shed light on a broader trend towards a projectification of journalistic work, open collaborative structures for participative news production with non-journalistic actors show a changing division of labor in the field, and social media-based journalism organizations illustrate how platformization transforms journalism
organizations) will tend to be deinstitutionalized.Further research on novel organizational populations should consider the preconditions necessary for a new organizational template to develop into a population and how Media and Communication • 2024 • Volume 12 • Article 7399 new populations react to societal change and the shortcomings of traditional media organizations.Studies Media and Communication• 2024 • Volume 12 • Article 7399