The new news media ecology

Be careful where you step — the Net is crawling with new species of news: citizen sites, hybrid msm-citizen efforts, foundation-supported news orgs, journalists’ volunteer collectives (for the out-of-work journalist), and corporate sites trying to look like news.  There’s also the  granddaddy of them all, the news blog, which come in community, corporate and news org flavors. If we’re talking organizational forms of news, we should really add the social network community. Journalists are being encouraged (required) to Tweet and Facebook short bits from their reportings and musings, and many are gaining followers — if not orgs with formal hierarchy and division of labor, then at least substantive nodes in the news network. And of course, mainstream news media also populate the system.

So, what are all the “populations” of species out there? And more interesting, how and why did they form? Are they showing staying power or are they endangered? How do they compete and collaborate within and across niches, and what kind of impact does all this development and interaction have on society, communities, readers and the powers that be (who do most of the news viewing)?

Theory from the sociology of organizations can shed some light on these questions. Here’s an outline of the theory from a paper I submitted to AEJMC for the 2010 convention:

Organizations and other social collectives exist within a changing ecosystem, as members of wider “populations.” Organizations and their populations are porous relative to their environments and it is probable, though not determinedly so, that they will change in order to better fit these environments for purposes of gaining resources and legitimacy (i.e., both economic and cultural capital). The approach includes the notion of “agency,” in that actual people (managers, owners, etc.) select changes, though with varying levels of intent and often within taken-for-granted frames and structures. Though the impetus to fit environment through selection is an underlying driver, selections benefit fit only to varying degrees. Change may be pursued via routinized, institutionalized and/or arational paths that buffer from good fit with environment, and trajectories followed in the past can constrain future decisions. The perspective assumes “punctuated” rather than continuous change, meaning a high degree of inertia often follows selection of change, as social collectives retain and reproduce changes over time, only tinkering with change via mimicry during these periods. Predicted changes within this approach include practices and forms, as well as “vital rate” variables at organizational and population levels, such as foundings and mortality, transformation and mergers.

Work by sociologists Glen Carroll and Michael Hannan deserve the lion’s share of credit for the approach, though Howard Aldrich does a nice job of laying out the theory in detail in his book Organizations Evolving. Organization ecology is a substantial subfield in the soc of orgs. It’s well-researched and generally well-supported. And I think it’s applicable to news forms.

So, I’m setting out on a large-scale research effort that involves (1) identifying and establishing boundaries and niche areas for populations of new news forms, (2) tracking foundings, transformations and “deaths” of these forms (populations) over time, (3) developing a model that explains the foundings, transformations and deaths of news forms and their populations. The impetus toward an institutional orientation (seeking wider social, political and economic legitimacy) or toward an instrumental orientation (seeking resources and turf) are key predictors in the development of populations and organizations.

I will be studying these forms on a national scale, but also conducting several case studies of ecological communities of populations. These “communities” include a geographical community and the domain of local news; an occupational community and the domain of photojournalism; and a community of interest (topic community) and the domain of health/medical news. All of these communities should be rich with intermingling news populations. How do they play together and/or compete, why, and to what effects?

One of the main contributions of this approach to our understanding of news production is that it accounts for development over time, and not merely constraints, motivations and resources across fields within the same time period (as with hierarchical models by Shoemaker and Reese, and McQuail, and Peterson’s Production of Culture perspective). Orgs pursue certain forms and practices because of path dependence, because they develop competencies over time and fall into “competency traps” that leads to the displacement of stated goals for pursuit of routines for routine sake. And orgs born during certain time periods evolve differently than those born at other times. It’s these dual dimensions of time and field interaction that lend power to this approach. More to come, as I continue getting my thoughts together on this project.

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