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The new news: vision, structure, and the digital myth in online journalism

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The new news: vision, structure, and the digital myth in online journalism

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The New News:
Vision, Structure, and the Digital Myth in Online Journalism

A Dissertation Presented to the

FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL

UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA

In Partial Fulfillment of the

Requirements for the Degree

DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

(Communication)

By Elisheva Weiss Klagsbrun

May 2014

Committee:
Patricia Riley
Francois Bar
Nandini Rajagopalan

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Acknowledgements
It is difficult to list all the people who have supported me in this research, both
academically and emotionally.
Firstly, I must thank my advisor, Professor Patricia Riley, who taught me so much
of what I know about organizational communication and who constantly pushed me to
improve my thinking and my writing. I would also like to thank my other committee
members, Professors Francois Bar and Nandini Rajagopalan, who provided me with
excellent feedback and guidance throughout. My teachers were superb, as were my
fellow students. I was lucky to spend the past five years surrounded by smart and
passionate people who inspired me to work harder.
More personally, I would like to thank the friends and family who supported me
as I studied, researched, and wrote. I have a cadre of people behind me who sent me
cookies and cards and care packages and could be reached at all hours of the night and
day. I quite literally could not have finished this dissertation without them. I especially
thank my husband, Zev, the first Ph.D. in our family, who was there to listen to me talk
through new ideas, to take care of me, and to tease me for not being a doctor yet.
3
Abstract
The journalism industry’s editorial practices and business model are being pushed
to change in the online environs, and while some of the ideals behind journalism and
many of its traditional practices are evolving with the change in medium, the transition is
a slow process as inertia grips an industry that had relied on these practices for over a
century. Organizational literature finds that it can be difficult for organizations to change
their structures once they are created, which can explain some of the reluctance to change
even as traditional media move online. Born-online news organizations, however, which
have never had traditional media counterparts, seem to be in an advantageous position as
they do not have to change existing practices in order to make the best use of the Internet.
Rather, born-online publications can build new organizations that approach the Internet
and new technology without being held back by traditional journalism practices that may
not work in the online environment. This study used ethnography to compare an online-
only newsroom with the online arm of an established news radio station, with regard to
their structures, leadership, and approach to technology. A survey of online journalists
was also conducted. The results found, however, that online-only newsrooms may be at a
disadvantage as they may start without the ingrained structure, routines, and business
leadership that are crucial for an organization’s success, while still mimicking traditional
print practices that may not make sense online. The online journalists surveyed also
maintained a fairly traditional approach to the audience, even as they recognized the need
to change. While cognitive inertia may mean that established newsrooms have a difficult
time changing their practices in response to technological changes, the task of building a
new organization from the ground up without any assumed business structure and
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routines is a difficult task as well, rendering success at online-only news organizations
more difficult in some ways than slow changes at established newsrooms, highlighting
the importance of structure, leadership, and vision.
5

“The current challenge for journalists is to dare imagining what they could be in the
future, instead of hanging onto the myths of their past.”
—Van Der Haak, Parks & Castells, 2012

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Table of Contents

Chapter 1: Introduction & Literature Review …………………………………………. 7
Chapter 2: Structure, Staff Meetings, and Leadership (or Lack Thereof) …………….. 51
Chapter 3: Two Different Approaches to the Nonprofit Business Model for News …... 97
Chapter 4: Social Media and Building an Audience …………………………………. 140
Chapter 5: A Survey on Online Journalism, the Audience, and Financial Health …... 177
Chapter 6: Conclusions: The Advantages of Structure, the Digital Myth,
and the Inertia of Newness …………………………………………….... 202
References …………………………………………………………………………… 214
Appendix A ………………………………………………………………………….. 234

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Chapter 1: Introduction & Literature Review

The Internet has drastically changed the media ecosystem, transforming both the
way news is produced and consumed. At first glance, the Internet seems like a great
advantage for newspapers. More people are reading news than ever before. More people
can access more news. There are no space constraints to what can be printed. Without the
cost of ink and paper, the cost of publishing becomes nominal. Journalism is no longer
bound by a news cycle but can print news as soon as it happens, keeping its audience
better informed. The audience itself has become a knowable entity whose preferences the
journalist can know in a new way. And, yet, the Internet has caused a crisis for
journalism, which seems to be unable to adapt to a different media world than the one in
which it had been so comfortable for so long. The technological changes have spurred
questions of identity and finances and have substantially changed the media landscape.
In many ways journalism’s response to the Internet is a story of difficulty taking
advantage of new technologies and a hard time adjusting. It is too simplistic to say that
technology has rendered the old way of journalism obsolete or has destroyed journalism.
The technology of the Internet allows for as much advantage as disadvantage for
newspapers, and technology alone did not do anything to the journalism industry. The
question is of how journalism uses the Internet and to what ends. Much of the problems
the journalism industry now faces can be explained by the inertia the industry displayed
as technology became more and more prevalent. Even as journalistic outfits began to use
the new digital tools, they still insisted on remaining the same in many ways instead of
embracing the new technology and fully appropriating it in ways that could strengthen
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journalism. The industry tried to remain the same in the face of a startling technological
change, and if anything is clear, it is that remaining the same is not an option. Journalism
will have to change to move forward—and that means taking advantage of the vast
opportunities afforded by the new technology instead of holding onto a model that
worked in the past.
To that end, this dissertation is concerned with publications that were conceived
of and created in the online environment and were never part of more established
journalism companies—born-online or online-native publications. Because they did not
create their Internet presence in light of their already existing products, they may have
been able to make changes to the traditional journalistic processes, instead of carrying
those traditional print practices to a different medium with different capabilities and
limitations. This dissertation compares an online-only publication with the online arm of
a radio station in terms of their management and leadership, editorial ethos, approach to
the audience, and business models. This paper began with the proposition that while
established journalism organizations used the Internet to sustain their offline practices,
born-online publications may have been able to create new processes and take advantage
of the technology to do journalism in new ways. They may have been able to appropriate
the technology differently and adapt the technology to what they wanted to do better
without the strictures of what they had done in the past holding them back. Through an
ethnographic study of two similar news websites in the same Northeast city—one
traditional radio with a website component and one born-online—combined with
interviews of staff members, and a survey of numerous online-only publications, this
paper aimed to gain a better understanding of how news is being done—both on the
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financial and editorial sides—in the Internet age and of how technology is used to make
news. The goal was to understand ways in which journalism has been able to take
advantage of the unique capabilities of the Internet and new technology instead of being
hindered by the obstacle of change.
What I found in my fieldwork and survey was at once more nuanced than what I
expected and also more diverse. The approaches to digital journalism are varied both
within and across institutions, and, in fact, being the online counterpart for an existing
organization seems to afford many advantages to a news website. Beginning with some
structure and rules in place was an advantage for a news website, and building that
structure from the ground up was more daunting than I predicted. Neither of the two sites
from my ethnographic work had fully figured out a successful business model to sustain
news into the future, but, again, having institutional support by being part of a larger
institution was a definite advantage. Good leadership and management were also shown
to be crucial to a news organization’s success regardless of its origin, as was a vision and
stated goals for the organization. The survey results showed that even as online
journalists collect data and usage metrics, they are not quite sure what to do with that
information. My research showed that many traditional news values have moved with
journalists to the Internet, but that did not mean that online journalism is the same as
traditional journalism. Online journalism has elements of traditional journalism reflected
within, even as technological tools are used and adapted and new ways of doing things
are slowly being discerned.

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1.1 A Definition of Journalism and its Role in Democracy
Before elaborating on how technology has changed journalism or how journalism
is changing technology, this paper must define what it means by the term journalism.
Though the newspaper has taken on many roles in America—entertainment, excitement,
a source of coupons—its primary import is in its role in the functioning of democracy.
For a democracy to function, the argument goes, it needs an informed public, and the
newspaper’s job is to provide the information that can inform the public (Schudson,
2003). “[T]he purpose of journalism is to provide people with the information they need
to be free and self-governing” (Jones, 2009, p. 106). Lippmann (1922) goes so far as to
argue that democracy could not exist without the presence of some form of journalism:
“representative government … cannot be worked successfully, no matter what the basis
of election, unless there is an independent, expert organization for making the unseen
facts intelligible to those who have to make the decisions” (p. 19). Thomas Jefferson
famously said that if he “had to choose between government without newspapers, and
newspapers without government, I wouldn't hesitate to choose the latter,” suggesting that
newspapers might be even more important than the democracy he had helped found
(Cardin, 2009). The current form of American media may be a result of “the primacy of
the nation-state … [and] the emergence of liberal constitutionalism” (Starr, 2004, p. 389).
Democracy is central to journalism’s very mission and was formed as a result of that
mission.
Journalism’s function is to provide its audience with the news necessary to be
informed citizens of a democracy. “Journalism is the business or practice of producing
and disseminating information about contemporary affairs of general public interest and
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importance” (Schudson, 2003, p. 11). Of course, not all the news that is produced is of
public import, but the news that defines the role of journalism in America is associated
with the public service of providing politically useful information. Jones (2009) calls the
reporting that contributes to democracy the “iron core.” This reporting includes
accountability reporting, investigative reporting, and explanatory journalism (Jones,
2009). These are all types of reporting that can explain what the government is doing so
as to keep the public informed. In fact, Jones (2009) lists five standards of journalism, all
of which are clearly designed around journalism’s role in democracy. These standards
are: accuracy; balance; holding the government accountable; separation of news and
advertising and news and editorial; and checks on maximizing profit (Jones, 2009).
Journalism must stay accurate and free of bias so as to provide reliable news. The
separation of news and advertising and news and editorial are also designed for this
purpose; reporters are expected to remain free of any pressures from advertisers or
concerns for money and also removed from any opinions so that they can provide
objective news. Deuze’s (2007) traits of journalism reflect the same purpose: public
service, objectivity, autonomy, immediacy, and ethics. The job of the journalist is to
provide the citizens with the unbiased news they need to participate in democracy—and
to provide that news fast. Nowhere is this idea of news as necessary for democracy more
evident than in the way the narrative of Watergate is told: It is a narrative about the hero
journalists taking down a corrupt president by informing the public of the president’s
actions (Zelizer, 1993). The journalist, then, does not view the reader as a consumer, but
rather as a citizen, and part of the job of journalism lies in creating a public sphere in
which people can debate ideas and make decisions about democracy (Schudson, 2003;
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Starr, 2004). Freedom of the press is not so much an individual right as it is an
institutional role in democracy (Starr, 2004).
As online news has become more and more prevalent, it is important to note that
this public service role of journalism is not exclusive to print or any other medium. The
journalist is determined not by the medium for which she produces news but for her
“practice and contribution to the expanding body of reliable information about the world”
(Van Der Haak, Parks & Castells, 2012). Journalism as defined herein relates to the
public service role of producing news necessary to a functioning democracy, no matter
the medium.

1.2 Technology and Technological Change

As the journalism industry adapts to the new technology that is the Internet, it
becomes clear that technology has had myriad effects on news organizations—and that
organizations, in turn, affect the technology and how it is adopted. Technology, in short,
is complicated, and how technology becomes part of organizations is complicated. The
changes that technology effects on organizations are widespread and deep, affecting both
the environments and the organizations, affecting different processes in the organization,
and affecting the mission of the organization. “[T]he task, the tools, and the social
organization of work are not totally independent but mutually influence and affect one
another,” so as technology changes, so do many different aspects of the organization
(Drucker, 1982, p. 345). Newspapers are both adapting to a greater technological change
that is the Internet and adopting internal technological changes to their organizational
structures and content.
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Technology, then, cannot be understood without understanding the organizational
context and the social contexts in which it exists. “There is no such thing as pure
technology. To understand technology, one must first understand social relationships”
(Contractor & Eisenberg, 1990, p. 143). How technology is used is deeply affected by
who is using it and in what situation. In an organization, technology is used as part of
relationships between employees. People in an organization will talk about a technology
(sometimes even before it is introduced in the organization) and form perceptions of the
technology, which then affect how the technology is used and how it becomes part of the
organization (Fulk, Schmitz & Steinfeld, 1990). “[T]he effects of advanced technologies
are less a function of the technologies themselves than of how they are used by people”
(DeSanctis & Poole, 1994, p. 122). As technology is used in a specific organization, rules
and routines and resources—structures—are embedded in that technology (Orlikowski,
2000). The theory of structuration approaches technology in the organization as the
“mutual influence of technology and social processes” (DeSanctis & Poole, 1994, p. 125).
Just as social processes influence technology and its use, technology influences the social
structure in which it is used. This dissertation aims to study the social context of each
newsroom and how technology interacts with that social context. Neither can be
understood without the other.
Technology poses new problems for organizations, and the approach we take to
studying technology must take into account the unique facets of technology (Weick,
1990). Weick (1990) suggests approaching “technology as equivoque.” Technology can
be understood in many ways and has many interpretations and meanings. Technologies
are equivocal “because they can be interpreted in multiple and perhaps conflicting ways,”
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and the interpretations have large effect on the processes and structures of the
organization (Fulk, 1993, p. 922). Technology is not merely an artifact that can be
understood in a superficial sense but must be approached and studied as something deep
and strong that affects and is affected by the organization.
Technological change often starts with the anticipated change but there is
emergent change as people begin to use the technology differently, and so technological
change in an organization is actually a series of changes (Orlikowski & Hofman, 1997).
Organizational forms are fluid, which means technologies change as the organization
changes, and many technologies are open-ended and need to be adapted to the
organization (Orlikwoski, et al., 1999). “[A]daptation is a process of modifying existing
conditions in an effort to achieve alignment” (Majchrzak, et al., 2000, p. 572). This
process is not a singular event, but rather multiple alignments and adaptations may be
needed (Majchrzak, et al., 2000). There will often be misalignments between the
organization and the technology, and the two mutually adapt in a cycle of consistently
smaller misalignments until they reach an equilibrium of sorts (Leonard-Barton, 1988).
Technology is negotiable and can adjust to the organization as the organization adjusts
(Williams & Edge, 1996). Misalignments are often between the way technology
accomplishes certain tasks and the way the organization used to do that task or about
shifting roles as a result of the new technology (Majchrzak, et al., 2000). The same
misalignment can often be addressed by either technological or organizational adaptation,
and there will be a decision about whether to change the technology, group structure, or
social context to address the misalignment (Leonard-Barton, 1988; Majchrzak, et al.,
2000). When new technology is introduced in an organization, “the very skills that made
15
people productive under the old technology now become a major obstacle to their being
able to produce at all” (Drucker, 1982, p. 345). Technology can challenge some of the
very foundations of what an organization is and what it has been doing. And that
challenge obviously has an effect on how the technology is integrated into the
organization.
It is plain to see from this model of structuration and how it occurs in an
organization, that the same technology can present wholly different results in different
organizations. In fact, it must produce different results in different organizations. “[B]y
treating technology as an occasion for structuring, researchers will confront contradictory
results head-on because of structuring's central paradox: identical technologies can
occasion similar dynamics and yet lead to different structural outcomes” (Barley, 1986, p.
105). Each organization makes its own appropriation decisions about how to use
technology, and each organization has unique social contexts (DeSanctis & Poole, 1994).
This means that even the exact same technology can effect different outcomes and thus
different structures as institution and technology interact. Orlikowski, et al., (1999) even
found a unit within an organization that had adapted a system to use a certain piece of
technology but were not able to transfer their system to other units in the same
organization. The affordances of a technology depend on the context it is used in and the
way it is perceived; the same object can have different outcomes based on context
(Leonardi, 2011). Domingo (2008b) emphasizes the constructivist approach to the study
of technology specifically in newsrooms. He posits that it is important not to be
technologically deterministic and to acknowledge that technology is a “social product”
whose evolution is not predetermined (Domingo, 2008b). This paper follows his lead in
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studying the “historicality of journalism” to attain a greater, deeper sense of why changes
are happening in the newsroom (Domingo, 2008b, p. 18).
My question, then, is about the differing reactions different types of newsrooms
have had to the introduction of the Internet and the differing ways different types of
newsrooms have approached the new technology and how that technology has become
integrated in those newsrooms. As established above, the effects of the very same
technology can be different depending on different social contexts and different
organizational structures, and organizations can also change the technology in different
ways in order to use it in a specific context. While traditional or established news
organizations are forced to adapt their practices to the Internet and to transfer their
content to a new platform, online-native publications face a different set of challenges, as
they lack extant internal processes and management. My interest in online-only
publications lies in this different context. While both born-online and established news
outfits may have similar goals, they are organizationally different, and this could have a
great effect on how they adapt new technology and adapt to the Internet. I aim to study
how these different contexts have affected digital news making at different organizations.

1.3 Leadership, Management, and Organizational Culture
It is obvious from the discussion of structuration that organizational context must
be a focus of this study. The organizational culture and leader are central to defining any
organizational context. The literature on leadership and organizational culture emphasize
the role of the leader in being able to change an organization’s culture. And it becomes
clear from the literature that the primacy of the leader becomes ever more important as
17
the organization enters a turbulent external environment that necessitates internal change.
The newsroom, in many ways, seems like the ideal learning organization—an
organization that could respond to change and innovate. It empowers employees with its
bottom-up structure, where reporters are given autonomy and employees share a vision
and responsibility for achieving that vision (Barker & Camarata, 1998; Gans, 1979;
Schudson, 1978). A more in-depth understanding of organizational culture and leadership
and how those factors play out to create the newsroom context is necessary to understand
why, even as on the surface the newsroom may look like it should be able to incorporate
technology and innovate, it has had some difficulty doing so.

Organizational Culture & Change
Understanding organizational culture is crucial to understanding how
organizations function and what goes on within the organization. A cultural view of
organizations views them as “social entities that were constituted in interaction”
(Eisenberg & Riley, 2001, p. 293). Understanding, then, the interactions and underlying
values that form the organization can shed light on why the organization and its members
act in specific ways and, indeed, on how exactly to define any individual organization, its
motivations and its state of being. “Culture is usually defined as social or normative glue
that holds an organization together” (Smircich, 1983, p. 344). Organizational culture
entails the shared basic assumptions, values, and beliefs of an organization’s members
(Denison & Spreitzer, 1991; Schein, 1985). These shared assumptions that make up
culture are learned responses to the environment for the purposes of survival in the
external environment and of internal cohesion (Schein, 1985).
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Sensemaking is central to understanding how organizational culture is formed. As
organizations make sense of their environments and develop shared meanings and
interpretations, they develop shared frameworks and structures for understanding their
purpose and their environment (Weick, 1993). Sensemaking is interactive and social; it
builds on interconnections (Weick, 2005a). The joint meanings that are formed within an
organization in many ways become part of its culture (Bantz, 1993). Cultural meanings
confine what is a culture and what the culture can do (Bantz, 1993). Cultural meanings,
then, also facilitate organizational actions (Bantz, 1993). Culture and structure are
interconnected in the way the organization forms and how it is defined. The structure of
an organization can affect its culture just as its culture can, reciprocally, affect its
structure. Weick (2005a) finds that “the organization of the workflow can affect the way
people think” (p. 55), and Riley (1983) shows that whether an organization has a highly
regulated task environment or a flexible environment can be a determinant of culture.
Though culture is defined as a consensus on mission, strategy, and goals, an
organization may not have a singular culture (Riley, 1983; Schein, 1985).
“[O]rganizational culture should be viewed as a system of integrated subcultures, not as a
unified set of values to which all organizational members ascribe” (Riley, 1983, p. 414).
Different groups or departments within an organization may have distinct subcultures,
and these subcultures overlap or interconnect to form the organization. This becomes
especially relevant in a study of newspapers since they are characterized by a strict
separation between the business and editorial functions therein (Gans, 1979). These
different functions have different goals, and, it stands to reason, different cultures as well
even within the larger umbrella of the newspaper.
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Examining the culture of an organization can be important for understanding the
organization because a “cultural analysis moves us in the direction of questioning taken-
for-granted assumptions, raising issues of context and meaning, and bringing to the
surface underlying values” (Smircich, 1983, p. 355). Culture is the way the organization
deals with the external environment and how it comes together internally. “[O]nce culture
is formed, it affects how the environment is perceived and dealt with” (Schein, 1985, p.
51). Organizational culture can be a driving force between an organization’s reaction to
change and the way it deals with the external environment.
As organizations face technological changes at increasingly dizzying speeds,
cultural change becomes necessary. “Occupations typically build their practices, values,
and basic self-image around their underlying technology,” so if that technology changes,
“the organization or occupation not only must learn new practices but must redefine itself
in more substantial ways that involve deep cultural assumptions” (Schein, 1985, p. 36).
Organizations have to move at least at the speed of change just to keep up, and they need
to redefine themselves so that they can move that fast (Cushman & King, 1995a). While
it is true that an organization can change without any cultural change taking place, often
cultural change is necessary and even integral to an organizational change (Schein, 1985).
DeLisi (1990) even claims that culture “is the primary driver of strategic organizational
change” (p. 85). Organizations must be constantly redefining themselves, creating an
identity that works within their external environment (DeLisi, 1998). But cultural change
comes with difficulty for organizations. “The primary strategy of an organization is the
maintenance of its cultural identity in terms of prevailing values,” and cultural change
often questions that identity (Gagliardi, 1986, p. 117). When an organization needs to
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change, often only changes that are consistent with the organization’s identity will even
be considered in order to avoid the large-scale shift in values that a true cultural change
could entail (Gagliardi, 1986). This becomes especially relevant to news organizations
when technological possibilities, like more interaction with the audience or immediate
publishing, can challenge some of the profession’s values.
Another hurdle to large-scale organizational change is inertia. Organizations have
an internal tension between stability and change, with inertia holding the organization
back even as momentum tries to drive it forward (Denison & Spreitzer, 1991; Goodman,
1995). Organizations must find ways to overcome inertia so that they can change, but this
is a difficult task, as intertial forces can be very strong while organizations try to maintain
stability (Haveman, 1992). Virany, Tushman, and Romanelli (1992) highlight this inertia
when they say that organizations are characterized by convergent periods of stability and
incremental changes and periods of reorientation, which entail dramatic, turbulent change.
The longer the convergent periods last, the stronger inertia in an organization grows; as
the organization becomes more stagnant, it becomes more averse to change, and change,
when it happens, may be incredibly slow in these cases (Hannan & Freeman, 1984;
Virany, Tushman and Romanelli, 1992). This, too, is a relevant insight on the study of the
journalism industry, which has maintained the same basic structure and cultural ideology
with little change for about a century (Schudson, 1978). This past stability presents a
strong source of inertia in the face of change.

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Leadership
In light of how difficult organizational change can be for an organization, it
makes sense that the leader’s role is more about sensemaking than it is about decision-
making, especially in the face of change and ambiguity (Weick, 2005a). Being able to
collectively help an organization make sense of its environment and the internal changes
that are occurring as a result of the external environment are perhaps a leader’s key tasks.
Leaders are especially important in stabilizing the organization and reducing anxiety
(Schein, 1985). Bennis & Nanus (1997) draw a distinction between leadership and
management. Managers may be good at routine, but not at questioning whether the
routine should be happening; managers are efficient but leaders are effective (Bennis &
Nanus, 1997). The leader and not the manager, of course, is where this paper focuses, but
perhaps one way of understanding the inertia that occurred in the journalism industry as it
faced great technological change is that there were many managers but not enough
leaders to guide the organizations through. The idea of a leader encompasses the
responsibility to lead the employees of an organization, to take them into account and
take care of them. Organizational culture and leadership, in fact, have similar functions;
they both revolve around an organization’s goals and missions (Giberson, et al., 2009).
There is a constant interplay between leaders and culture in that leaders create culture or
work within culture (Bass & Avolio, 1993). “[T]he problems of organizational leadership
and organizational culture are basically intertwined” (Schein, 1985, p. ix). Leadership is a
form of organizing, which means leadership becomes integral to the organization because
it does not just guide the organization but forms the organization (Barge & Schlueter,
1991).
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Leaders also have an integral role in organizational and cultural change (Schein,
1985). Effective leadership can help an organization respond to the uncertainty and
complexity in the environment and change in the necessary ways (Bennis & Nanus,
1997). “[L]eaders may play a critical role in the success or failure of organizational
change and development initiatives” (Giberson, et. al., 2009, p. 135). Communication is a
key part of being a successful leader, and effective communicating is fundamental to the
leader’s success (Treviño, Daft, & Lengel, 1990). To make a change, a leader needs to be
able to articulate that change (Bass & Avolio, 1993; Bennis & Nanus, 1997). The leader
must be able to explain the change and to legitimize it so that the organization’s members
accept it (Ford, Ford & D’Amelio, 2008). When an organization changes, the identity of
the organization is altered, and so the leader’s job is to make sense of how the change fits
with the organization’s values and then to share that revised notion of the organization
with the employees, or in other words, “sense-giving” (Gioia, D. A. & Chittipeddi, 1991).
Leaders need to thoroughly explain any organizational change to be able to guide
employees through (Moran & Brightman, 2000). It is important, too, that leaders give
realistic assessments of the change so staff members do not feel misled (Ford, Ford &
D’Amelio, 2008).
Being a leader is not about the change so much as it is about leading an
organization and taking into account the people in the organization (Bovey & Hede,
2001). It is in this vein that Vince & Broussine (1996) suggest a “move away from
problem-solving or planning-based approaches to change, towards a method which
focuses primarily on organizational members’ emotions and relations, and on forces of
uncertainty and defensiveness” (p. 1). Problem-based approaches to change only take into
23
account rational responses, but managers also need to take into account emotion and
emotional responses to change (Vince & Broussine, 1996). Managers should understand
the complexity and uncertainty involved in change, clarify boundaries between groups in
the organization, understand which responses are due to uncertainty and fear and which
are “rational responses,” work through the feelings surrounding the change. It is to this
end that a leader must garner the trust of employees (Bennis & Nanus, 1997; McAllister,
1995).
As the environment changes faster and faster, leaders must work to enact
organizational change in response (Moran & Brightman, 2000). High-speed management
must be “innovative, adaptive, flexible, efficient, and rapid in response” (Cushman &
King, 1995b, p. 10). When speed becomes important, communication becomes more
important, too. Cushman & King (1995b) suggest that in a turbulent environment, leaders
should engage in a continuous improvement strategy. In fact, large amounts of change
could necessitate a “frame-breaking change, … [requiring] the creation of a new vision,
and the significant realignment of existing organizational integration processes to
implement that vision” (Cushman & King, 1995c, p. 35). It certainly seems reasonable to
suggest that journalism organizations may need that sort of “frame-breaking change” in
the light of the digital transformation. As journalism faces undeniable changes in the way
news is made, strong leaders are needed in the organizations to guide them through the
change.
The literature distinguishes between two types of organizational leaders:
transactional leaders and transformational leaders (Barge & Schlueter, 1991; Bass &
Avolio, 1993). Transactional leaders work within the culture of the firm, while
24
transformational leaders change the culture of the firm (Bass & Avolio, 1993).
Transformational leaders are innovative, they have a vision, they believe in and support
their workers, they motivate their workers (Bass & Avolio, 1993). To successfully
navigate change, the leader must follow a “change management cycle: understand the
current situation, develop a change plan, enlist others to develop critical mass and track
and stabilize results” (Moran & Brightman, 2000). Change management is not about
managing the change, but about managing the people in the organization and managing
the impact of the change on the drivers of work behavior (Moran & Brightman, 2000). A
strong management team is necessary to make bold and significant organizational change
in the face of dramatic environmental change (Suarez & Oliva, 2005). A transformational
leader, even while changing the organization, does not act without a sense of the past.
Leaders need to be aware of an organization’s culture and understand the culture in order
to change it (Bass & Avolio, 1993). When constructing a new vision, which is an
important step for a leader, the leader must consider what has worked in the past for the
organization, the current constraints and opportunities, and what the future will look like
(Bennis & Nanus, 1997). A vision that will guide the organization forward, that will
make sense of the changing environment and re-create the organization’s identity is
crucial. Merely having a vision, though, is not enough; a leader also needs to be able to
turn that vision into action (Bennis & Nanus, 1997).
The literature is clear that leaders play an important role in an organization,
especially as that organization undergoes major change, and so it is obvious that leaders
play an increasingly important part in journalism organizations as they integrate new
technology into their work practices and product. Kurpius (2000) suggests just this: “[I]t
25
is apparent that far-sighted news managers hold the key to changing routines within the
organization to address challenges to journalistic norms … managers, not individual news
workers are the key to success or failure of the public journalism effort” (p. 353). But
little wok has been done on newsroom leaders, with much of the journalism scholarship
focusing specifically on the journalists while ignoring the managers (Napoli, 1997). More
research is necessary on how newsroom leaders are currently leading and managing. My
ethnographic work especially focuses on the leaders in both organizations, aiming to
understand both their individual approaches to leadership and how their staff members
perceived them.

1.4 Changes Within Journalism
The advent of the Internet was surely an occasion when an industry needed to
engage in a massive cultural change to match the changing environment and to engage in
innovation learning. And, yet, in facing the turbulent external environment, the
journalism industry has done too little too late. Newsrooms have made small changes:
They have moved content online, while still relying on the old advertising business
model; they have websites but they do not take advantage of the interactive features the
Internet affords; they cling to the same rules and ethics they have had for more than 100
years, even as it is clear that the rules of the game are dramatically changing
(Boczkowski, 2004). The mistake was “not to treat the arrival of the Internet with
urgency, not to pour resources into a vibrant online newspaper” (Auletta, 2009, p. 231).
Riley’s (1983) finding that “distinct cultures can coexist in one organization” can
perhaps begin to explain why newsrooms did not change even as it became evident that
26
responding to the digital changes that were occurring was necessary (p. 432). A
traditional newspaper embodies two completely distinct sections with two distinct
cultures: the editorial side, which reports and writes and provides content for the paper,
and the business side, which is responsible for selling the advertising that makes the
newspaper profitable (Gans, 1979). They do not interact with one another. These distinct
parts of a newspaper are deliberate. The commonly referred to “separation between
church and state” is intended to keep the news removed from any influence that could be
imposed by advertisers who would request favorable stories about their products (Gans,
1979). In fact, this separation of the business and editorial functions of the newspaper has
an even more important function: It allows for the two departments to have conflicting
goals. While the editorial side of the newspaper clings to its notion of providing the news
as a public service in the Habermasian public sphere isolated from the business of news,
the goal of the publishing side is simply to make a profit (Deuze, 2007). Cohen (2002)
argues that “news departments operate within an organizational culture that attempts to
balance journalistic and market (business) norms” (p. 535). My contention is that there
are two organizational cultures at play in the newsroom to deal with this very problem.
These two conflicting goals, and indeed conflicting cultures, could not exist together. The
complete separation of the two allowed the news organization to function. The way
newsrooms deal with the ambiguity—the different purposes of public service and
profitability—was to divorce them completely from one another even while technically
being part of the same organization. There are two competing logics within the media
institution: editorial logic and market logic (Deuze, 2007). Therefore, to understand how
the internal and external environment of journalism is changing, one must separate the
27
two distinct parts of the news organization and discuss them individually, though it
should be noted that the nonprofit business model may change this equation in a different
way—by eliminating the profitability component of news.

Editorial Changes to Newsrooms
As technological changes lead to changes in the way journalism does its job,
these changes are also prompting a greater re-definition of what journalism is, who the
journalist is, and how the journalist goes about performing that job. “For news
organizations, going digital is not as simple as filling web pages. This transformation
requires them to reinvent themselves—how they think of themselves, how they operate,
how they relate to the public, how they make money—and fast” (Jarvis, 2009, p. 125).
While the Internet affords journalists many opportunities, it also forces more choices on
them and requires that they are skilled in more areas (Mitchelstein & Boczkowski, 2008).
Newspapers moved online in a defensive move as they saw competition online, but the
move was about short-term profit and failed to make use of the new opportunities the
Internet offered; instead, newsrooms reacted by defending their existing territory (Beckett
& Mansell, 2008; Mitchelstein & Boczkowski, 2008). This resulted in a lack of
innovation online as traditional journalism carried their established practices to websites
and chose not to take advantage of the web’s abilities and opportunities (Mitchelstein &
Boczkowski, 2008).
[T]he news media sector is entering a period of profit reduction precisely at the
moment when new technologies offer the potential for new product development.
The new forms of journalism that are emerging today will not achieve their
28
potential for enhancing a public service environment if the new opportunities are
treated simply as a way of securing ‘free’ content to compensate for cutbacks.
(Beckett & Mansell, 2008, p. 96)

Newspapers must not treat the Internet as a place where they can continue doing the same
thing they were doing before these digital changes. “Technology creates feasibility spaces
for social practice,” but the newsroom must decide to take advantage of those new
feasibilities to change in any significant way (Benkler, 2006, p. 31).
Perhaps the largest mistake traditional journalism made with the advent of the
Internet was to initially ignore the call for redefinition. Newspapers treated online news
the same as print news, merely putting the same content online without innovating
significantly or considering how the Internet changed what journalism does and its role.
Boczkowski’s (2004) study of news websites of print newspapers found what he called
“mimetic originality” instead of innovation. “[N]ewspapers tended to project features of
the print paper in the electronic environment. That is, they usually replicated existing
information artifacts and practices, rather than creating something different”
(Boczkowski, 2004, p. 33). Though newsrooms were faced with a new medium, they
mostly approached it by repurposing and recombining their content instead of
approaching it with its own content that was appropriate for the different medium
(Bozkowski, 2004). “[O]nline newspapers were usually stepchildren of print editions, not
allowed to break stories or employ their own separate staff, not allowed to look or feel
much different from a print newspaper” (Auletta, 2009, p. 10). This response was
characterized by fear of a new and different medium and an inertia that stymied change
while defending what they already had (Auletta, 2009; Boczkowski, 2004; Deuze, 2007;
29
Seelig, 2002). Technology tends to be used in ways that amplify current practices instead
of radically altering the way the newsroom conducts itself (Deuze, 2007). Traditional
journalists must be asked “not only to change the way they do their work but also to re-
examine notions about themselves as journalists” (Singer, 2004, p. 838). The way
journalism has functioned represents a worldview that is changing and the very processes
of news production must change along with it (Matheson, 2004).
This is one reason why online publications that were never printed are interesting
to study. The mimetic originality that Boczkowski (2004) observed in news organizations
as they moved online could not exist in online-only newspapers that had no practices to
mimic. Born-online newspapers have no standard practices or routines to mimic in their
production of digital news. They, therefore, may have the opportunity to create practices
that take better advantage of the new technology and that avoid some of the hindrances of
the traditional ways of doing things. Online-only publications may have the ability to
ignore some of the traditional newsroom practices and to create practices that work better
in the new technological environment. At the very least, born-online publications had the
opportunity to approach the Internet differently than established news organizations,
which had to worry about preserving their organizations in a new environment. Of course,
just because born-online newsrooms have the ability to rethink some of journalism’s
preconceived notions and practices does not mean they have done so. Only an in-depth
ethnographic study of an online-only news institution focusing on how its practices and
approaches to technology have evolved would be able to answer these questions.
Despite traditional journalism’s reluctance to change, the Internet has changed the
way journalism does its job in several major ways. The Internet has moved journalism to
30
a 24-hour news cycle, in which news can be constantly published (Beckett & Mansell,
2008; Boczkowski, 2010; Klinenberg, 2005; Scott, 2005). This creates what Klinenberg
(2005) calls a “news cyclone.” There is a constant tension between publishing the news
as fast as possible and fact-checking. The Internet’s “culture of speed” often means that
accuracy falls to the wayside in the rush to publish as often as possible and to publish
more attention-getting stories (Jones, 2009; McChesney, 2008). There is a heavier
reliance on news wires for information so as to be able to constantly update, but this leads
to homogenized content, where even as there are many places online to find news, the
news is similar across sites (Deuze, 2007; Klinenberg, 2005; Thurman & Myllyahti,
2009). Web editors are constantly monitoring what news their competition has posted and
if another site has a new article, it is mimicked, again leading to homogenized content
(Boczkowski, 2010). Online newspapers are in constant, vicious competition with one
another, and decreasing budgets mean “working conditions for many journalists have
deteriorated, and their workloads have increased” (Van Der Haak, Parks & Castells,
2012). There is constant tension between established news organizations and their web
counterparts (Boczkowski, 2010). The news process has become non-linear in that the
journalist is in constant contact with information and has become more collaborative as
there is boundary crossing in the production process and in the newsroom (Beckett &
Mansell, 2008). There are also changes in news consumption brought on by the Internet.
People mostly consume their news at work and so are interested in multiple updates
throughout the day (Boczkowski, 2010).
The Internet has also significantly changed the journalist’s interaction with the
reader, creating a bidirectional medium. More people can join in the discussion online
31
than could before, and the audience has thus become a factor in journalism. Journalists
have created a notion of their job that includes what the consumer is looking for
(Mitchelstein & Boczkowski, 2008). This is a significant shift in the relationship between
journalist and audience. Historically, journalism has had no way of gauging audience
interest in any specific article or topic (Gans, 1979). News was a one-way medium in
which the journalist gave the audience what the journalist wanted (which was generally
public affairs news), with little regard for the audience or what the audience wanted to
read (Schudson, 2003; Williams, Wardle & Wahl-Jorgenson, 2011). Journalists had no
feedback from their audience and so had no reason to produce a newspaper different from
the one they wanted (Darnton, 1975). Gans (1979) found that journalists did not imagine
their audiences often, but when they did, they imagined their audience to be like them,
preferring the news that they preferred, interested in the topics in which they were
interested. This is reflected in a quote from a New Yorker editor, who said: “ ‘Who the
readers are I really don’t want to know. I don’t want to know because we edit the
magazine for ourselves and hope there will be people like ourselves and people like our
writers who will find it interesting and worthwhile’ ” (Bagdikian, 2000, p. 111). In
general, the journalist had no way of knowing her audience or interacting with that
audience and showed little interest in doing so.
But the Internet gives the journalist the tools to know her audience and has turned
what was once a unidirectional medium into a bidirectional conversation between
journalist and audience, even as journalists resist this turn of events (Boczkowski, 2010).
With the use of technology, like site metrics, journalists now know more about their
audience’s preferences than they ever did before (Boczkowski, 2010). Journalists know
32
in detail what news stories are more popular and what articles get read by how many
people. Story metrics becoming increasingly important, and there is a pressure to raise
the number of site visitors (though no indication yet of how to monetize those visitors),
and since journalists know what those readers are interested in reading, there may also be
a shift toward a more consumer-oriented product (Thurman & Myllyahti, 2009). It is not
just that journalists know more about their audience. There are also more opportunities
for the audience to voice their opinions and weigh in on news content. Journalism has
always had some element of audience participation in letters to the editor or radio callers,
but it was still a mostly unidirectional medium. The Internet allows for vastly more
audience participation, increasing the role of the public in what would previously have
been the realm of journalists (Williams, Wardle & Wahl-Jorgenson, 2011). Media is now
two-way and collaborative, allowing the audience a place in its journalism (Jarvis, 2009).
“[T]he old limitations of media have been radically reduced, with much of the power
accruing to the former audience,” with interactivity becoming a possibility online (Shirky,
2008, p. 12). The audience can blog, can comment on news stories, can e-mail journalists.
The ease of this bidirectionality and its presence on the news websites creates an entirely
different dimension of dialogue between the reader and the journalist. Social production
necessarily changes the relationship between organizations and customers, as customers
become participants (Benkler, 2006).
The Internet allows for the opportunity to involve the readers in producing
journalism, which could foster community between the reader and the journalist; it allows
for more interaction with the local communities (Bowman & Willis, 2003; Riley, et al.,
1998). This becomes increasingly important as consumers have a lot of choice in media,
33
and news producers must build a community to keep readers engaged (Beckett & Mansell,
2008). This, however, clashes with the way journalists have traditionally seen their
audiences and represents a fundamental shift in the way journalists have done their job,
and, so, journalists approach the concept of participatory media with caution (Riley, et al.,
1998; Robinson, 2007; Williams, Wardle & Wahl-Jorgenson, 2011). This reluctance is
obvious in the journalistic response to interactivity attempts. “For most news journalists
there has been no radical upheaval in the way they work, and no great change in the
structural roles played by traditional producers and consumers of the news” (Williams,
Wardle & Wahl-Jorgensen, 2011, p. 96). Yet user-generated content and some form of
participatory journalism can be beneficial to journalism, can be complementary to
traditional journalism and not in competition with it (Bowman & Willis, 2003).
The Internet makes interactivity with the news possible, but that does not mean it
is happening in substantial ways or that readers are participating (Shirky, 2008). To take
advantage of the possibilities, shifts in the way journalists think about the reader and in
the way the reader thinks about journalism are both necessary. The traditional models do
not allow for any substantive role for the public, but the possibility of interactivity could
lead to better, richer news that helps fulfill journalism’s role in democracy. “Lower the
barriers of participation and provide new channels for publicity and distribution, and
people will create remarkable things” (Jenkins, 2006, p. 152). This could be an area in
which online-only publications may have a wholly different attitude than more traditional
publications. With nothing dictating how they view their audience, perhaps interactivity
is a built-in assumption for born-online publications or at the very least a capability that
is met with less reluctance. Perhaps there is no patronizing sense of the audience as an
34
unknown entity being served by whatever the journalist deems worth knowing since for a
born-online news site, the audience has never been an unknown entity. Or perhaps
online-only publications, even with the technology available for interactivity, begin with
the same assumptions toward the audience as traditional newspapers. The approach to the
audience and audience engagement will be one of the focuses of this research, as it
represents one of the largest changes journalism has faced in its digital transition.

Changes to the Business of News
While the journalism industry has been prompted to change on its editorial side as
technological advances have changed news, the business side of journalism has also been
changed by the Internet—perhaps even more significantly. “This dynamic landscape of
continuous and diversified witnessing and reporting does not represent a crisis of
journalism, but rather, an explosion of it”; the crisis, though, is that with the expanded
opportunities for journalism comes a crisis of the business model for news (Van Der
Haak, Parks & Castells, 2012). The traditional business model of advertising-supported
journalism is not working online. Whereas print newspapers received 80 percent of their
revenues from advertising and only 20 percent from subscriptions, this has not transferred
to the Internet, where ads are worth much less than they ever were in print (Schudson,
2003). Online newspapers are still sustained by their print counterparts and are not able to
finance themselves, and a new business model for online news is elusive (Auletta, 2009).
Technology has changed “how we make and exchange information” and so the
companies whose business is that information are threatened (Benkler, 2006, p. 2). The
Internet challenges several parts of the journalism business model and has put the
35
newspaper industry in dire straits. Pickard, Stearns & Aarons (2009) call the current crisis
journalism is facing the “perfect storm” of the rise of the Internet, the fall of local
advertising, and an economic downturn. “The forces of creative destruction have hit the
newspaper industry the hardest” (Evans, 2009, p. 54). These challenges to the business
model of both newspapers and radio are changing the entire journalism environment.
Media industry business models fall into one of two categories: the audience buys
the content or advertisers buy access to the audience. Radio is financed through ads, but
the newspaper industry falls into both these categories simultaneously, operating a dual
business model (Albarran, 1998; Picard, 1998). Newspapers charge subscription fees to
their readers, while also selling access to their audience to advertisers (Picard, 1998).
This has presented unique capabilities for financial success in the past but presents
unique hurdles as journalism moves online and the industry tries to find a way to make a
profit there. Newspapers, though, make most of their money from advertising (Schudson,
2003). “News on its own has never been profitable” and, in fact, the newspaper is heavily
subsidized by advertising (Scott, 2005, p. 94). One of the biggest changes on the Internet
is that advertising fails as a business model that can support journalism online.
Newspapers and radio stations, of course, sell ads for their websites, but they have
been unable to make comparable profits from their online ads. Newspapers are only
getting 10 percent of their revenue from Internet ads, and radio websites are not making
much on their online ads and are also seeking a better online business model (Albarran,
1998; FTC, 2010). “Traditional advertising simply cannot be carried over to the internet,
replacing full-page ads on the back of The New York Times or 30-second spots on the
Super Bowl broadcast with pop-ups, banners, click-throughs on side bars. … [T]he
36
internet is not replacing advertising but shattering it” (Clemons, 2009). The failure of
advertising to garner profits online is due to two basic reasons: site metrics that allow
advertisers to know how many people actually see their ads online and the abundance of
ad space online.
Where the newspaper once did not know anything at all about its audience and
preferred it that way, the technology of the Internet tells newspapers—and their
advertisers—much about their readers (Gans, 1979). Site metrics can easily tell an
advertiser how many people read a specific news site or the specific news article in which
their ad is placed. And site metrics can also be tracked to show how successful an ad is.
How many people clicked on the ad can be measured, and then how many people
followed through and bought the advertised product from that click can also be measured.
This gives advertisers a lot more information, and that information helps lower the price
of ads, so that advertisers can pay for each click or pay for each resulting transaction
instead of paying based on a newspaper’s circulation rate, which could have had limited
correspondence to who actually saw the ad.
Traditional newspaper advertising worked on business model of scarcity: There was
limited space for ads, so ads could be sold for high costs, but on the Internet, where there
is unlimited space for advertising (and, in fact, for news), advertising is just not worth as
much. “There is no end of unsold ad inventory on billions of pages all over the internet”
(Jarvis, 2009, p. 58). The business model of scarcity does not work on the Internet, where
space is not limited (Jarvis, 2009). There is a lot of ad space online and not enough
people and no proof that people are spending time looking at the ads (Scott, 2005). The
truisms of the economics of the newspaper industry were that printing was expensive and
37
advertisers had no other choices for where to put ads, but the Internet changes that by
letting companies advertise without the newspaper, which they never had an interest in to
begin with (Shirky, 2009). After all, on a seemingly limitless Internet with many popular
websites, why tie advertisements to news at all?
The second part of the traditional newspaper business model, the subscription
model, has also had limited success in the digital environment. As newspapers began to
move their content online, very few enacted any sort of subscription model, instead they
gave their content away for free online, and even though a number of newspapers did
attempt paywalls, many brought them down soon after they saw a steep decline in
readership (Milstead & Fitzgerald, 2010). The overwhelming belief was that people
would not pay for information online (Scott, 2005). Jarvis (2009) argues that “free is a
business model”—and a profitable one at that. And, in fact, many media industries work
on the basis of giving content to their audiences for free—television and radio both do
this—but it is unclear how newspapers or radio will be able to be substantially advertiser-
funded in the online environment where advertising has become a challenge. Still, many
argue that newspapers need to reject the idea that content should be free online or people
will not pay for content online (Scott, 2005; Shirky 2012). Paywalls are the logical
translation of subscriptions to the online environment. In its simplest form, a paywall
prevents readers from accessing news content unless they subscribe to the publication.
Lambert (2011) asserts that more and more news sites are going behind paywalls, but
only points to three examples of sites that have done so. Paywalls are also difficult for
newspapers to use successfully (Shirky, 2010). “The advantage of paywalls is that they
raise revenue from users. The disadvantages are that they reduce readership, increase
38
customer acquisition and retention costs, and eliminate ad revenue from user-forwarded
content” (Shirky, 2010). Because so much news content is available online for free, it is
hard to convince readers to pay for journalism online, so using a paywall may lower an
online newspaper’s readership. The competition for news readership online is far fiercer
than the competition in print, essentially online newspapers are competing with all other
online newspapers (Shirky, 2010).
Radio has faced many similar economic concerns as newspapers. One large factor
in both mediums is the concentration of corporate ownership, which generally refers to
horizontal integration of the industry, whereby a single company owns multiple
newspapers or radio stations (Albarran, 1998; Croteau & Hoynes, 2001; DiCola, 2006).
There are many benefits to this consolidation. Resources, like national news coverage,
can be shared across all of the papers owned by the corporation, though it can lead to
homogenous content (Compaine, et al., 1982; DiCola, 2006). Advertising can also be
sold to a bundle of papers or radio stations, which increases efficiency in advertising
departments (Bagdikian, 2000). But even aside from the increasing difficulty
consolidation causes for smaller owners, there is also a journalism-based critique to the
concentration of ownership (DiCola, 2006). McChesney (2008) points to the
“incompatibility between a corporate-run news media and an ostensibly democratic
society,” even citing a comparison of newspapers and prostitutes, saying they are both
controlled by the rich and powerful (p. 83). This critique points to “news as a
handmaiden of its owners’ corporate ambitions,” and since the owners of corporations
tend to be conservative, it argues that those conservative values show up in the
journalism these corporations produce (Bagdikian, 2000, p. xi). This produces a
39
politically narrow journalism that is not a true representative of the marketplace of ideas
(Bagdikian, 2000).
Journalism’s notion of professionalism and ethics is designed to counterbalance
these conflicting forces, but it is unclear how successful these norms are when journalism
faces a financial crisis (Cohen, 2002). The Internet is pushing journalism to return to its
pre-ethics days, as economic concerns often trump ethical ones, and without economic
prosperity, newspapers must seek profit above all else (Jones, 2009). The traditional
separation between business and editorial sides of the newspaper also seems to be falling,
as newspapers try to find a revenue stream that will sustain them online (Klinenberg,
2005). “The penetration of market principles and marketing projects into the editorial
divisions of news organizations is one of the most dramatic changes in the journalistic
field, and there is no question the mythical wall separating the editorial and advertising
are mostly down.” (Klinenberg, 2005, p. 60). Editors, too, are now focused on creating a
profitable product, and corporate managers are part of editorial decisions (Klinenberg,
2005). Riley, et al. (1998) also noted the editorial side’s close relationship with sales and
marketing in terms of building and maintaining a news website. With the financial
problems looming, there is an increased pressure for profits, which leads to cutting
resources, less investigative journalism and ultimately less good journalism (McChesney,
2008). “[T]he online commercial news environment increases market pressures at all
levels” (Cohen, 2002, p. 537).
Entrepreneurs see the Internet as an opportunity, but to an old-media company
trying to protect its business, it is a threat (Auletta, 2009). And, in fact, The Internet could
be a boon to the business of journalism, even as it challenges the industry. The Internet
40
makes it easier to gather and distribute information and provides multiple funding options
for news (Downie & Schudson, 2009). The Internet provides both more competition and
more cooperation among sources of journalism (Downie & Schudson, 2009). The
Internet allows for vast amounts of information to be available, which leads to more
opportunities to create niches with this information (Benkler, 2006). The journalism that
was once only locally available in the newspaper or on the radio now has a much broader
reach (Albarran, 1998; DiCola, 2006; Picard, 2009). But finding a financial model that
takes advantages of digital capabilities to sustain news has been difficult for journalism
outfits.
There are some ideas about how to create profit in online news. Many other media
industries have found that there is profit in multiple revenue streams, and there is a push
for online news to also develop “multiple micro-revenue streams that are insignificant on
their own but sustaining when taken together” (Scott, 2005, p. 101). Hybrid business
models with many different revenue streams coming from many different places will
become necessary (Downie & Schudson, 2009). Jarvis (2010) suggests multiple ways
that newspapers could make up non-journalism revenue streams, including conferences,
sales and marketing training, local business listings, SMS alerts, and coupons and deals.
The Tribune Company attempted to take advantage of non-newspaper revenues, and the
Washington Post Company does this by owning diverse companies, including Kaplan
(Auletta, 1998). Radio, too, has taken advantage of multiple and non-traditional revenue
streams with contests, sponsorships, and events to raise funds, though it is acknowledged
that these types of revenue, while a nice complement to advertising, could not replace
advertising profits (Albarran, 1998).
41
Many media scholars have also argued for some sort of government support for
failing newspapers (Pickard, Stearns & Aarons, 2009). The suggestions for how
government should step in to support the journalism industry are varied. Bagdikian
(2000) proposes a progressive tax on advertising and lowered postal rates for publications
without advertising. Cowan and Westphal (2010) list many possibilities, including
ensuring that content creators are paid for work that is reprinted without regard for
copyright and investing in technology and innovation. Some enforcement of intellectual
property laws is also suggested by others, hoping to at least make the news that is
published profitable for the writers (FTC, 2010). Other suggestions also highlight
government support for technological experimentation, since that is something news
organizations are slow to do themselves (Pickard, Stearns & Aarons, 2009). Allowing
news organizations to have nonprofit status or some other version of tax-exempt status
could also save them money, though it is unclear exactly how this would work (Downie
& Schudson, 2009; FTC, 2010; Jarvis, 2010; Pickard, Stearns & Aarons, 2009). A
journalism jobs program, something akin to AmeriCorps for journalism, to encourage
people to become journalists has also been proposed (FTC, 2010; Pickard, Stearns &
Aarons, 2009). Others emphasize that the government should increase accessibility of
public information so journalists are better able to do their jobs (Downie & Schudson,
2009; FTC, 2010).
The nonprofit model may offer hope for the future of investigative news, though it
is unlikely to completely replace other types of news funding (Lewis, 2007; Shaver,
2010). Nonprofits could also prove to be more stable, and some have suggested
endowments, specifically, as a way to “enhance newspapers' autonomy, while shielding
42
them from the economic forces that are tearing them down” (Christoffersen, 2009). But
some argue that nonprofits may be less stable than other types of news organizations and
subject to more fluctuation (Maguire, 2009). Overholser (2006) also emphasizes the
benefits of nonprofit journalism, though she notes it raises concerns about who controls
the news. If foundations fund journalism, they could have control over the news that is
produced, and, indeed, the ownership structure of a news outfit can affect the amount and
quality of news produced (Browne, 2010; Westphal, 2009; Yanich, 2010). The nonprofit
model can have another disadvantage for news organizations: Innovation and risk-taking
may be more difficult in nonprofits, but they are important to organizations in turbulent
environs, like journalism (Morris, et al., 2007).
Even now, the approach of most journalism organizations is that they need to
build an online presence so eventually people will be attracted to it and then they will be
able to make the bulk of their profit off ads like they always have (Jones, 2009). There is
no inherent rethinking of journalism or its failed business model reflected in this plan, but
online-native publications may be able to offer a different view since they were never
possessors of the successful news business model. Here, too, born-online publications
could make an interesting case study. Perhaps these types of publications began with
other business models or at least tweaked the business model in a way that allowed them
to take advantage of the Internet. Traditional newspapers are now gaining 90 percent of
their revenues from the print product, but online-only newspapers must be getting profit
from somewhere (FTC, 2010). What revenue streams have they found for online news?
Have they rethought the business model of news? Are online-only newspapers effectively
43
using paywalls? Understanding how born-online publications conceive of their business
model could be a first step to understanding how newspapers can be profitable online.

1.5 Summary & Method
As journalism and the Internet engage in the mutual back-and-forth of adaptation,
there is little that is known about online-only publications, which could offer many
insights into digital journalism. Organizations and their rules and hierarchies often
discourage imagination, and it is easy to see how that could be the case for the journalism
industry (Weick, 2005b). Journalism has been stuck in a past model that worked for a
long time, but it needs to think creatively about the future. Yoo, Boland & Lyytinen
(2006) describe the term gestalt as a company’s need to approach new problems
creatively and use different approaches even while maintaining a strong sense of identity
across those approaches. As newspapers face a “crisis of legitimacy” (Starr, 2009) and
technology that changes many of the ways newspapers have done business, they must
approach these problems with a modified concept of gestalt; they must approach these
problems imaginatively and creatively and come up with new solutions, while still
maintaining their identity and the core of what makes them what they are. “The current
challenge for journalists is to dare imagining what they could be in the future, instead of
hanging onto the myths of their past” (Van Der Haak, Parks & Castells, 2012).
Born-online newspapers may have a better ability to look at the business of
newspapering anew and create a novel way of doing business, a new definition that
works for the news. Since born-online publications are less tied to the old way of doing
things and do not have entrenched systems and processes and values, they may be better
44
able to embrace the new technology and use it to their advantage. “[P]rofessional
culture—articulated in skills, ideas and practices—acts as a network that weakens the
potential impact of technology towards innovation and audience-oriented models of
journalism,” making it difficult for news organizations to make real changes even in
response to technological changes (Spyridou, et al, 2013, pp. 76-77). Absent that
ingrained professional culture, online-only news organizations may be able to enact more
drastic change in their use of technology. Lowrey (2013) also discusses the balance that
newsrooms must strike between “optimized change” and the “familiar,” and so born-
online newsrooms become interesting as both similar to traditional news but perhaps
distanced enough that they can better optimize for change. Though born-online
newsrooms do certainly start with some similar values, they may still have enough
freedom to innovate in the industry in a way that more staid print players cannot, even as
those traditional news organizations have created some online presence. This dissertation,
thus, seeks to explore how born-online publications are using the Internet to do
journalism and specifically, how they are changing traditional journalism practices in the
way they are using the Internet. If traditional newsrooms have mimicked some of their
print practices online and have been unable to look at the new affordances technology has
offered in an effort to rethink the way they do their jobs, perhaps born-online publications
with fewer inborn hindrances have been able to do a better job at harnessing the power of
the Internet in order to do journalism. This paper hopes to find the ways in which online-
native publications approach journalism—in terms of editorial functions, the business
side, management, and leadership—to gain a better understanding of what digital
45
journalism could look like and how newspapers—traditional and online—can use the
Internet to do their jobs better.
What follows is my investigation into how online-only journalism is making news
and how it is both distinguishing itself from traditional newsmaking and maintaining
some of those practices. In 2008, Paterson claimed that “for a phenomenon that has
become so ubiquitous in the lives of all but those in the least connected parts of the world,
we know virtually nothing about online journalism” (p. 1). We certainly know more
about online journalism than we did six years ago, but research about online-only
journalism, that is journalism that does not have direct ties to established news
organizations, is still sparse. Part of the problem in comparing online-native news sources
to more established news organizations is that it is difficult to even find an apt
comparison. Many online-only sites consist mostly of gossip or resemble blogs more than
newspapers. The quality is varied as is how often these sites post, how big the staffs are,
and the commitment to any professional norms. But ignoring online-only news because it
is not directly comparable to the news with which we are familiar is a mistake and a
disservice to our understanding of current-day journalism.
To the academic, that most online-native news sites are not directly comparable to
traditional newspapers is significant, but it is of little practical importance to news
consumers who use these sites to get their news. If these born-online sites are significant
sources of news and are being used as journalism, then they are important to study. In
that vein, this research project is a comparison of two newsrooms, one that is online-only
and one that emerged as the online arm of a radio station, in the same Northeast city. The
project assesses how they used technology, how their organizational structures and
46
leadership were formed, how they were attempting to become financially viable, and,
more broadly, how they were making digital news. Sites in the same city were chosen to
hold constant the news coverage area. This city, many people at both sites noted, is an
especially media-saturated city. Additionally, both sites had the same business model;
both were nonprofits. These basic similarities between the two sites allowed me to
highlight the many differences and to isolate those differences based on how the
organizations were formed, structured, and managed.
DataNews.com is a small born-online nonprofit news website that focuses on
data-driven news. The staff is made up of a CEO, an editor, four reporters, four web
developers, and an individual with an administrative position. The site had several
million dollars in startup funding and intends to collect money from donations, not from
advertising. But, as of the time I started observations, the site had existed for six months
and had not received any further funding and had also not been granted legal nonprofit
status. The site focuses on news in its specific city and defines itself on its website and in
its press releases as a public service news organization.
RadioOnline.com is the online arm of a public radio station in the same city. It has
a different name and website than the parent radio station, though, and was intentionally
branded separately. However, it occupies the same building as the radio station, uses the
radio reporters as the source for much of its news content, and is funded, like the radio
station, with grant money. Its own staff consists of two managers and six others, each
responsible for a different part of the web operation (including social media) but also
with shared web production duties that are split up by day. It defines itself as invested
heavily in the city and interested especially in reader engagement and dialogue.
47
This study is primarily ethnographic augmented by interviews and document
analysis. This approach is the best—and maybe only—way to see the how technology is
actually used in an everyday setting and to observe the “deep structures” of organizing at
work (Barley, 1991; Domingo, 2008b). Ethnographic observations in organizations often
focus on culture, and newsrooms have a distinct culture that can be observed through this
method (Singer, 2008). “[O]nline newsrooms appear as sociomaterial spaces in which
technical considerations affect who gets to tell the story, what kinds of stories are told,
how they are told,” and so the study of those spaces and of what happens in those spaces
is important (Boczkowski, 2004, p. 177). I was interested in the people, institutions, and
technology and the interplay among these factors. I used a participant-observer approach
in studying these sites, in which I became part of the organization so as to better observe
how the organizations function (Burawoy, 1991; Strauss & Corbin 1998). “[P]articipant
observation is the paradigmatic way of studying the social world” and allows for deep
understanding of social interactions (Burawoy, 1991 , p. 3). As a former copy editor, I
offered both organizations my copy-editing services as part of my ethnographic approach
to participant-observation, though it should be noted that RadioOnline.com took far more
advantage of this offer than did DataNews.com. I attended staff meetings at both
publications, which were daily at RadioOnline.com and weekly at DataNews.com, and
was put on some e-mail aliases at RadioOnline.com, which used online communication
more frequently since it was part of a much larger organization and its staff members did
not all sit in close proximity to one another. Each organization was studied over a period
of six weeks (thus it is a mini-ethnography), in which I observed them for full business
days, typically 3-4 days a week. The organizations, their member sites, and the
48
publications have been anonymized. My field notes and coding for analysis for the
ethnographic portion of my project followed the guidelines set by Strauss & Corbin
(1998) and Emerson, Fretz & Shaw (1990) to create a systematic way of recording and
analyzing my observations.
I followed the participant-observations by conducting interviews with the staff at
both publications. In all, 12 interviews were conducted. The interviews were informed by
my observations and allowed me to ask questions that were not answered by those
observations. The semi-structured interviews, which lasted for about 30 minutes each,
focused on how the staff members came to work in journalism, how they define their jobs
and their organizations, and what they think about digital journalism. The goal was to get
staff members talking about how they defined journalism, what they think the importance
of journalism is, and how they approach technology in a free-form way.
Boczkowski (2010) emphasized the need to study newsrooms at all levels, not just
the reporters. This is a necessary step in understanding the way the organization as a
system makes sense of its surroundings and its turbulent environment and how the
newsroom understands the future. Most studies of newsrooms focus on the editorial side
of the newspaper, but, more specifically, on the individual reporters. There are few
studies on newsroom leadership. This is probably at least partially a result of the fact that
the newsroom is often a bottom-up organization with fairly autonomous reporters. While
reporters provide much material to study, ignoring the leaders—editors and publishers—
of the news organization is a mistake. Researchers are missing important parts of the
organization if we do not observe how leaders and managers interact with workers, how
staff members from different sections (especially editorial and publishing) interact with
49
one another, and how all the staff members approach making digital news. Chapter 2
discusses leadership at DataNews.com and RadioOnline.com.
The scholarship on newsrooms is also quiet about business models and financial
sustainability. It is easy to see why this is the case. And since the separation of business
and editorial concerns is traditionally separate within the publication, it is easy to study
the newsroom as a self-contained world without studying the publishing or money-
making side. It is a mistake, however, to ignore the business side in our studies of news.
Any method that is accurately going to understand the news organization must know the
whole organization. This becomes increasingly important as news organizations struggle
to find a successful business model for online news. Chapter 3 discusses the approach to
business models at each organization.
As discussed above, one of the most significant changes that the Internet has
presented to journalism is the ability to interact and engage with the audience. Chapter 4
discusses how this opportunity is used in practice and whether online news is
meaningfully engaging with its audience or just engaging because it can.
I followed up on my fieldwork by conducting a survey of online journalists at
many more publications. This survey was constructed based on some of the unanswered
questions that were left after the ethnographic studies were completed and specifically
focused on how online journalists view and interact with their audience. Chapter 5
discusses the survey findings.
I began this research with the assumption that born-online newspapers would be,
in many ways, better at doing digital news. While it may be logical to think that the born-
online news publication would be more adept at using technology and not held back by
50
the strictures of a non-digital world, in fact, the born-online newspaper I studied was less
adept at using technology to its advantage and was less adept at newsmaking overall.
RadioOnline.com was able to transfer much of its leadership, staff management,
newsmaking, and business practices to an online environment, which put in place an
infrastructure that DataNews.com did not have. DataNews.com had to build its
organization from the ground up and without any pre-existing structure, and this made it
difficult to function. This paper finds that traditional news organizations are able to
transfer some of their practices to an online environment while still retaining enough
flexibility to use the technology to their advantage, whereas born-online news
organizations have a much harder time making use of the new digital world to make news.
51
Chapter 2: Structure, Staff Meetings, and Leadership (or Lack Thereof)

This project begins by discussing the news organizations themselves and the
routines and leadership that made them up. It is important to understand the actual space
in which the journalism is made in order to best understand how newsmaking is changing.
“[N]ewsrooms are the actual space for decision making in the development of online
journalism, where genres, routines, values, and products are tested and created” (Paterson,
2008, p. 3). To that end, this chapter is focused on the routines, structures, and leadership
of the newsrooms at DataNews.com and RadioOnline.com. The underlying question is
the same as Robinson’s 2011 question: “How are digital adaptations modifying news
production, particularly workflow patterns, workplace organization, and power
hierarchies” (p. 1123-1124)? But the question becomes ever more salient—and the
different ways newsrooms can evolve become ever more apparent—when an online-
native newsroom is compared with the online arm of a news radio station.
Though both DataNews.com and RadioOnline.com had fairly small staffs and
were relatively casual places to work, there was a noticeable lack of structure at
DataNews.com. This was portrayed in the routines at both organizations; in the frequency
of staff meetings and what was discussed therein; and in the way leadership functioned at
each organization. Though a casual workplace without many rules could be viewed as an
ideal situation by many, the distinct lack of rules of any sort at DataNews.com left the
staff members unsure of who was in charge and unconvinced that anyone was watching
out for their well-being in the organization. This came into stark relief when a crisis hit
and no one was sure what they should be doing, what they were responsible for, and even
52
what the mission of their organization was. In contrast, though RadioOnline.com was a
workplace where staff members had some flexibility in deciding what they focused on,
there were structures put in place in the form of daily staff meetings and schedules that
provided the staff with some stability. The presence of their leaders was also an area in
which the two organizations differed. Whereas the CEO of DataNews.com was distant
and uninvolved in the daily goings-on of the organization and the staff members were
basically left with no guidance, at RadioOnline.com, there was a director of online news
who led their daily meetings and provided them with regular feedback. Staff members at
DataNews.com said they appreciated their freedom to choose what to work on—and
indeed when to work and how to do so—but in a crisis, the lack of leadership left them
confused and even before that, they were unclear what the goal of their organization was.
These differences between the two newsrooms highlighted the importance of
leadership, especially in times of uncertainty. “Leaders often cannot control events, but
they can control the context under which events are seen if they recognize a framing
opportunity” (Fairhurst, 2011). The role of a leader is to manage meaning and construct
reality for the staff of an organization—to frame (Fairhurst, 2005). In this way, even as
the environment cannot be controlled, the leader is able to control the way the
environment is perceived and how it is reacted to (Fairhurst, 2005). Framing events and
social context so as to create a “shared reality” and manage meaning is always a key part
of a leader’s job, but this becomes even more important in turbulent environments
(Fairhurst, 2005; Fairhurst, 2011). As the journalism industry undergoes large changes,
the leader’s ability to frame becomes increasingly important, and framing became even
more important at DataNews.com when the CEO stepped down and the staff was faced
53
with unexpected changes and uncertainty about the future of the organization. Fairhurst
(2010) emphasizes that leaders are not expected to have the answers to all the problems
that an organization faces, but they are expected to “frame problems and collaborate to
help their organizations engage the right knowledge networks, amass the right
intelligence, and collectively decide possible futures.” In other words, framing becomes a
way to make sense of organizational problems, to define both the problem and the
method of reaching a solution. It is not about solutions so much as it is about
communicating. Organizational culture is an integral part of framing, which must be
specific to an institution and its individual goals and makeup.
Strategy and vision are also important components of framing. Leaders must have
strong mental models, which they can then frame and communicate to their staffs
(Fairhurst, 2005; Fairhurst, 2011). Included in these mental models are vision, mission, a
core set of values, and a collective identity, and leaders must put thought and effort into
how they will communicate these mental models (Fairhurst, 2011). Some of the main
benefits of framing are managing organizational goals, generating confidence and trust,
and constructing and maintaining an organizational identity (Fairhurst, 2005 Fairhurst,
2011). “[I]n the absence of frequent communication of mission, vision, and values, an
organization's identity cannot take hold” (Fairhurst, Jordan & Neuwirth, 1997, p. 245).
Framing is the ability of a leader to make sense of situations and the organizational goals
and to communicate that to the staff. All too often, however, leaders “take their
communication for granted, dismissing it as something they just do automatically”
instead of something that has a large and meaningful impact on their staff and their
organization (Fairhurst, 2011). Communication is more than just language: “When
54
communication reduces to the transfer of meanings rather than its negotiation, its
complexity is vastly underestimated” (Fairhurst, 2005, p. 176). Leaders often overlook
this ability of communication to “create the realities to which we must then respond,” and
often miss framing opportunities (Fairhurst, 2011).
One of the largest differences between the leaders at DataNews.com and
RadioOnline.com was how well they were able to frame the organizational environments
and how clearly their visions were communicated to the staff. Communication was
overlooked by the leaders at DataNews.com, whereas the leaders at RadioOnline.com
took advantage of regular newsroom routines to create meaning by framing and to share
that meaning with the staff, thus “defining ‘the situation … in ways that connect with
others” (Fairhurst, 2011). At DataNews.com, problems were often framed by the leaders
as something they had no control over and framing opportunities were not taken
advantage of to create shared realities. Leadership and vision are almost inextricably
bound together in the organizational literature, which makes it clear that for a leader to
succeed, especially in times of change, he or she must have a strong vision of what the
organization should be (Bass, 1990; Dutkiewicz & Duxbury, 2013; Kanter, 1999;
Morden, 1997; Ryfe, 2009a). Especially as news organizations face changes in their
environment, news leaders must develop a vision and strategy of where their
organizations are going so they can work toward that goal. This is what Fairhurst (2011)
calls “mental models,” and in order for leaders to create frames, they must first have solid
mental models of their vision for the organization. The vision becomes even more
important if there are multiple leaders who work together in an organization in a
complementary leadership arrangement (Miles & Watkins, 2007). Part of the importance
55
of this vision is so that strategic action can be taken to ensure that the organization and its
employees are working toward the same goal (Steyn & Steyn, 2010). But the vision itself,
though crucial, is only one of many necessary steps that a leader must take. That vision
must then be communicated to the staff members of an organization in a clear and
coherent way (Brown, 1991; Fairhurst, 2011; Kanter, 1999; Kurpius & Fuqua, 2003;
Young & Post, 1993). “[N]ewspaper managers need to develop a clear vision about the
future role of professional journalism, since having that vision may be the first step in
convincing the newsroom’s rank-and-file of the necessity and value of change”
(Paulussen, 2011, p. 61). The staff must understand the vision and be convinced of the
import of that vision so they can share the mission of the organization and work toward a
common goal (Gade, 2004; Steyn & Steyn, 2010). “No organization can achieve its goals
and objectives if staff members are not aware of and committed towards this process,”
and sharing a common goal for the organization can also build trust among employees
(Morden, 1997; Steyn & Steyn, 2010, p. 78). Ryfe (2009a) discusses a news organization
in which the leader did not effectively share his goals and vision with the reporters and so
the reporters were not able to accomplish the leader’s goals; instead, they remained
frustrated by instructions that made no sense without context and often ignored those
instructions. “[A] lack of clarity on individual and organizational expectations can leave
staff feeling de-motivated and disloyal,” further highlighting how important it is for
organizational goals and missions to be communicated to staff (Steyn & Steyn, 2010, p.
78). The leader must also engage in dialogue with the staff, listen to the staff’s concerns,
and give personal attention to staff members (Bass, 1990; Young & Post, 1993). Also
important is the leader’s confidence in her staff and positive feedback to the staff (Bass,
56
1990; Kanter; 1984; Kanter, 1999; Kurpius & Fuqua, 2003). Inherent in these discussions
of vision and leadership is the necessity of good communication within the organization.
Young & Post (1993) even envision the “The Chief Executive as Communications
Champion.”
At DataNews.com, the lack of communication with the staff was especially
apparent as employees were not kept abreast of large changes within the company, but
part of that failure of communication can be tied to a lack of organizational structure and
routines that could have been set up as conduits for feedback. Routines are both
necessary and dangerous to an organization. “[R]outines are practical responses to the
needs of media organizations and workers” (Shoemaker & Reese, 1996, p. 104). They
minimize uncertainty and help an organization process information and run smoothly, but
routines can also “enable stasis and homogeneity” and reinforce the status quo (Lowrey,
2012, p. 219; Shoemaker & Reese, 1996). Inertia can form around organizational routines
and stymie change even when it is needed. News routines are often developed in response
to “three kinds of uncertainty: whether or how [the organization] will make a profit,
establish their legitimacy, and find timely information,” thus serving the purpose of
controlling uncertainty (Shoemaker & Reese, 1996; Sparrow, 1996, p. 145). One
common routine in most news organizations is the daily morning news meeting, which
can become a good venue for imparting a vision, enforcing values, and learning new
skills (Gravengaard & Rimstead, 2012). “These meetings are essential sites for the
building of the craft ethos and professional vision” (Gravengaard & Rimstead, 2012, p.
465). Even in new media projects, routines very closely resemble traditional newsroom
routines, but this was not the case at DataNews.com, where routines of any sort were
57
largely absent (Kurpius, 2003). What this meant in some cases was that the abilities to
impart a vision and build a community and communicate with one another were also
absent. At RadioOnline.com, news meetings were a place where new ideas were
discussed, positive feedback was given, and goals were imparted. These meetings were a
place for the leader to communicate with his staff. “[D]iscourse exists prior to
organizations because the properties of language and interaction produce organizing”
(Fairhurst & Putnam, 2004, p. 13). At RadioOnline.com, the discourse and framing that
happened at staff meetings produced an organization, but at DataNews.com, absent any
significant discourse or framing, an organization was not truly created.
Many of the organizational differences between RadioOnline.com and
DataNews.com can be understood through the lens of leadership, vision, and
communication, with a specific emphasis on framing opportunities. This chapter will
explore the structure and leadership at each organization individually, with a specific eye
toward the routines of the organizations, how effectual the leaders were, whether there
was a vision for the organization, and whether that vision was imparted to the staff. The
chapter will then discuss what the roots of these organizational situations were and how
that affected the organizations, their members, and their products.

2.1 DataNews.com
If news routines develop to address the uncertainty of finances, establishing
legitimacy, and finding news to cover, it seems that they would be especially useful to a
new organization like DataNews.com that had not yet established legitimacy, figured out
how it was going to make money, or even figured out what its coverage area was
58
(Sparrow 1996). And, yet, the organization had virtually no routines or structure to speak
of. When the CEO stepped down because the organization had inadequate funds to pay
him, the uncertainty under which the staff functioned became readily apparent. Past a
basic vision of data-driven journalism, the staff had not been given guidance about what
the goals of the organization were nor were they given guidance about when they should
come in to the office or what dress code was appropriate for the office. They also had not
been given feedback on the work they were doing and so had little conception of where
they stood or what they should be doing. This made DataNews.com a difficult place to
work, and the leaders of the organization were at least partially to blame.

Vision & Leadership
After the announcement at DataNews.com that the CEO was stepping down, the
discussion at that staff meeting immediately turned to what the staff should be doing
individually and what they were supposed to be doing as an organization. The CEO told
them to “do what you’ve been doing” and to “continue to publish good, quality public-
interest journalism,” but this offered little direction to the staff in terms of what
specifically they should be doing. The question of what goals the initial grant for
DataNews.com set out for the organization was brought up, but most of the staff members
had not seen the grant proposal and so did not know what the original conception of the
organization was. One web developer, who had seen the proposal, said that it was very
vague and did not offer much guidance about what the expectations were for the site.
Even the editor said, “We just need to know what the expectation really is,” indicating
that she did not, in fact, know what the expectations were for the site. And while one
59
reporter asked, “Shouldn’t we put together a strategy, which I thought we already had,”
the editor acknowledged that there had never been a strategy, saying that there was never
agreement about “what our editorial content should be trying to accomplish.” This
meeting, though filled with stress about the CEO’s resignation, highlighted what was
perhaps an even more serious problem at the news site: There was no cohesive vision or
strategy for the site (or, if there was one, it had not been shared with the staff) to the
extent that no one at the organization knew what was expected of him or her. This
confusion over what sort of work they should be doing highlighted that the employees at
DataNews.com were not quite sure what the vision and goals of their organization were,
making it ever more difficult for them to accomplish those goals. This, in turn, left the
staff feeling particularly vulnerable as their site faced uncertainty but had set them up for
failure even before the CEO’s resignation. Though “it may only be a change effort, a
crisis, or a perceived threat to the organization that causes individuals to reflect upon and
communicate about who they are and what they do,” it is the leader’s job to do that
framing for the staff before a crisis so that the staff has a conception of self and a mental
model of the organization (Fairhurst, Jordan & Neuwirth, 1997, p. 256).
During interviews, which were all done after the CEO’s resignation, many of the
staff members at DataNews.com wasted no time condemning both the CEO and the editor,
even focusing on the lack of vision at the news site. One of the web developers said that
DataNews.com was defined by “weak leadership” and was “missing direction,” and the
administrator said of the CEO that he “didn’t have a vision” and he had no themes of
what he wanted DataNews.com to do. A reporter said it was clear from the beginning of
the site that there had been no financial plan or editorial direction, but this was likely said
60
with hindsight since it would be hard to understand why she would have joined a site
without either a financial or editorial mission. Another web developer said that the CEO
never put out a vision and that it would have been “better to have a shitty vision than to
have nothing.” Still, this web developer placed some of the responsibility on the funders,
who, he said had a “half-baked idea” to begin with.
It certainly was easy for everyone to blame the outgoing CEO for the
organization’s problems, since he was, in fact, stepping down, and it was true that a clear
vision defined by a strategy were missing at DataNews.com. But there was some
definition at the site. The site itself spoke about data-driven journalism and had a section
for “data and tools,” and data was very much at the forefront of what they did. At staff
meetings, when stories were discussed, one of the first questions was always to find what
was the data element or “data angle”—and that was considered a necessary component of
any story. A graphic was pushed on an article about various community members
seemingly for the sole purpose of having a data visualization, even as the staff had a
difficult time figuring out how to create a graphic for the particular article. And
discussion of data they wanted to run highlighted the need for a “story vehicle” for the
data, which basically amounted to some text to post so they could publish the data. While
this conception of the site as a place for data journalism proved not to be enough of a
vision to inspire the staff and to sustain the organization, and may have been the “half-
baked idea” that the web developer suggested it was, it would be disingenuous to claim
there was no vision at all for the site. But the vision of a data-driven news site was not
enough, and the CEO and editor had been unable to impart a more detailed vision or goal
to their staff because of their lack of leadership and insufficient communication.
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If “authority comes from the bottom [and t]he subordinate makes a decision to
grant authority to the person above him or her,” then it is easy to see from actions and
comments at DataNews.com, that the staff did not grant authority to their CEO and editor
(Perrow, 1986 p. 71). Perhaps the greatest proof that the leadership was failing and that
the staff did not have respect for the leaders was that there were multiple times when staff
members spoke about a “coup” or “mutinizing.” Though, of course, these moments were
at least somewhat in jest, these discussions belied a deep unhappiness with the leadership
there. Happy and content staff members do not joke about staging a coup or mutiny
against their leaders, and these jokes indicated a significant lack of respect for those
leaders. The CEO and editor had different styles of leadership in many ways, but neither
was able to build trust and support among their staff. Part of that failure can be
understood as a lack of framing. Framing can generate enthusiasm, trust, and optimism
by creating shared values, but this did not happen at DataNews.com (Fairhurst, 2011).
The leadership responsibilities were split at DataNews.com between the CEO and
the editor. Though there were no actual job definitions, the daily workings of the office
indicated that the editor was more involved in the editing and news aspects of the
operation and the CEO was more involved both in the financial side and the technology
side. In order for leadership teams to be effective, they must share a vision and work in
concert, but there was no evidence that this was the case at DataNews.com (Dutkiewicz
& Duxbury, 2013). In fact, when the CEO stepped down, the editor repeatedly said that
she had never known what the strategy or goals of the organization were, making it clear
that she had not shared a vision with the CEO. Both the CEO and editor were maligned
by the staff, who made clear that they did not respect them. When one reporter told his
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colleagues he was leaving the company, he explained it by way of: “I’m leaving because
I hate [the editor and the CEO]. They drive me crazy.” The CEO and editor may both
have failed in some ways to lead their staff, but their failures were also distinct from one
another.
The CEO’s failure in leadership was tied to his inability to communicate and to
frame the environment for his staff. One web developer directly pointed to this, saying
“he’s one of the most incompetent people I’ve ever worked with … [he has the] least
ability to lead a meeting, talk with people, give feedback.” The CEO was especially
distant, rarely interacting with the staff in any way. The CEO was the only one in the
newsroom who had his own office, and he spent almost all of his time alone in this office.
This demonstrated an extreme lack of communication with his staff, which the staff was
acutely aware of. When one reporter asked if the CEO was gone for the day, another
reporter responded that you always know when he’s there because you can see his glasses
sticking up from his desk through the window to his office—unless he had a heart attack
and is lying on the floor. This statement was obviously a joke and everyone in the office
laughed in response, but the joke was that the CEO was always in his office—so much so
that he might have a heart attack in there and no one would know because he never
interacted with his staff. There was certainly truth in this joke. The CEO was so removed
from the goings-on in the office that even when everyone was agitated and excited, he did
not so much as look up from his desk to see what was going on. When the office
administrator found a hornet in the office, she and two of the web developers found a
broom and ran around the office trying to kill it. Everyone looked up from their desks to
figure out what was going on, but the CEO, ensconced in his office, did not take any
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notice that his staff was running around the office chasing a bug. His door was open and
he certainly could have heard and seen what was going on, but he deliberately ignored his
staff. The administrator also told me that when one of the reporters started yelling at the
editor, the CEO did not react from inside his office and did not get involved in any way,
though that was an instance when strong leadership was necessary. A web developer also
brought up this incident as an example of the CEO not reinforcing the hierarchy and not
controlling the staff. A prerequisite to framing is being able to connect with others so that
the leader can define the situation, but the CEO’s distance made him unable to connect
with his staff, which made him unable to frame the organization’s vision—or the
uncertainty that came with his resignation (Fairhurst, 2011).
The distance the CEO kept also resulted in a lack of feedback to staff. When a
reporter told the CEO, excitedly that he had found a venue for the forum he was hosting
for DataNews.com, the CEO merely responded, “OK, good,” and headed back to his
office. When two web developers asked the CEO about something they had been working
on, his response was, “works for me.” Though this was an acceptance of what the web
developers had been working on, it did not provide any guidance or even much
affirmation. There was no feedback in terms of any changes that needed to be made and
certainly no words of praise. It conveyed a level of disinterest with the work his staff
members were doing. Even when specifically asked for feedback, the CEO seemed
reluctant to give straight-out criticism. The editor asked the CEO what he thought about
presenting a story a certain way, and his response was “ummm...” until the editor said:
“Well, it’s just an idea. We’re just starting.” Though it was clear to the editor that the
CEO was not pleased with her idea and so she backed away from it, the CEO was
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unwilling to actually tell her that. This made the CEO difficult to get guidance from,
making everyone else’s job more difficult since their leader would not tell them what to
do or not to do. In the absence of any sort of direct guidance or feedback, the staff at
DataNews.com was left to interpret the CEO’s intentions from the little communication
he did provide—or to merely just do what they wanted
Newsrooms are places where the staff traditionally has a lot of autonomy, so the
CEO’s distance may have been an effort to allow his staff the freedom to pursue their
own ideas and choose their own projects, but the balance at DataNews.com skewed too
far toward autonomy without enough emphasis on leadership (Skovsgaard, 2014; Van
Dam, 2011). The administrator put it most poignantly when she said that in the CEO’s
attempt to let his employees be creative, the site became a “clusterfuck spewing of news
stories” without any direction or feedback. One of the reporters also emphasized that
while the DataNews.com staff were able to choose whatever stories they wanted, there
was no guidance from their leaders. Though some freedom may have been a positive
situation for reporters and web developers who got to choose what stories to cover—and
indeed how much work to do, with one web developer saying she basically did not have
to do very much at all since there was so little oversight—there was a need for feedback
and communication from their leaders that was not met. In a study of online magazine
Salon, which also demonstrated high levels of autonomy, Van Dam (2011) found that
“with this autonomy comes little camaraderie and sense of a news team. Obviously, these
people work together to create an end product, but there is little in the way of verbal
discussion and the newsrooms are very silent for large portions of the day” (p. 107). At
DataNews.com, too, the autonomy granted to the staff had negative consequences as the
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staff did not collaborate much and did not get guidance or feedback from each other or
their leaders.
Possibly because of the distance he kept or the lack of respect this caused, the
CEO did not exert strong authority in the newsroom. One of the times he did interact with
the staff was during the weekly staff meetings. The CEO would come out of his office
when the meetings were supposed to begin and head toward the meeting room, but no
one would follow him. When he would timidly tell the newsroom that it was time for the
meeting, staff members would slowly trickle toward the conference room, but there was
little sense that the CEO had any sort of authority over his staff even to compel them to
come to a weekly staff meeting. On one occasion as he was trying to gather the staff for
the meeting, the CEO called out, “I think this is as many people as we’re going to get
today, so when you have a chance, come on down.” This was not so much a command as
a plea, but considering that the staff did not immediately respond and come to the
meeting, it was unclear if he had the authority to compel his staff come to the meeting, as
opposed to just ask if they might attend. On a different Tuesday, the office administrator
started a phone call as the CEO was trying to gather the staff and a reporter headed to the
bathroom, neither showing a particular interest in attending the meeting on time, even as
the CEO requested their presence. At the end of one staff meeting, as the conversation
petered out, instead of dismissing everyone the CEO asked, “Are we good?” This was the
best he could do by way of closing the meeting and sending his staff back to work but
basically amounted to a cop-out—not quite a formal close to the meeting but also not a
real question asking for staff concerns or feedback. And nobody actually responded to the
question; staff members merely continued chatting amongst themselves, even as the CEO
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took his exit, indicating the CEO’s lack of authority over his staff.
The editor was the target of much resentment in the office, with one staff member
even going so far as to suggest throwing up on her desk, but this resentment did not stem
from her inability to communicate or distance from the staff. Unlike the CEO, she sat in
the same large open space with the other staff members and often made small talk with
them. A lot of the resentment toward the editor seemed to revolve around her discomfort
with technology, which was of obvious import to an online-only news site. The editor’s
inexperience with technology was evident in many ways. She announced to the
newsroom once, “I just got a Skype message saying that my computer security system...”
This spurred one of the web developers to jump at her, “No, no, don’t click it.” An
obvious scam was something she was not sure about. When the editor saw an ad about
Firefox, she asked the entire newsroom, “So does anyone know how Firefox is going to
change the world?” again indicating her lack of understanding of computers and
technology. One of the web developers took the time to explain the Firefox model to the
editor but there was a sense of exasperation as she did. When one of the web developers
set up an online conference call, the editor was impressed, saying that the very basic
technology was “so cool.” She was unfamiliar with relatively simple technology. The
editor readily admitted to her inexperience and even fear of technology. During a
discussion of a Skype chat room that the web developers had set up for storing useful
links, the editor said that she was “freaked out” by Skype, acknowledging, “I know that
makes me the worst dinosaur ever.” The editor knew that being wary of technology was
not a good thing, saying she was a “dinosaur” for not being comfortable with technology,
but this did not mitigate her discomfort. And telling her staff she was uncomfortable with
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technology could only make them respect her less. At an online-only venue, everyone
should be internet-savvy in a way that the editor was not. This was one of the factors in
the lack of respect for the editor and in her failure to lead. Though her job was not
inherently technologically oriented, as she was responsible for editorial content,
DataNews.com was a digital outfit where everything had an online component, and the
editor, time and time again, displayed a naïveté about technology.
The editor often also seemed unaware of what the staff members were working on.
At a staff meeting, one of the web developers had to explain in depth a data visualization
she was working on because the editor was unaware of the project and though the web
developer had mentioned the project at the past week’s meeting, the editor had not been
there. In the entire preceding week, the editor had not checked in with the web developer
to find out what she was working on. She certainly could not offer any sort of guidance if
she did not even know what her staff was working on. When the editor did assert
authority, there was sometimes blowback. When she tried to ask one of the web
developers to find something new from data they had, the web developer said it was
possible but they should just get the data visualization out and not worry about adding
anything new. The editor was forced to instead ask one of the reporters to get the desired
information from one of her sources since the web developer was so recalcitrant. She had
so little authority that even a direct request to her staff could go unanswered. One of the
web developers also told me in an interview that when the editor asked her to do
something she did not want to do, she just ignored it and did not do the task, hoping that
the editor would forget. It was common knowledge among the staff that when one
reporter was offered a job with a significant raise, he told the CEO he would stay if the
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editor was fired. Though the CEO refused and the reporter ended up staying at
DataNews.com, the lack of respect for the editor was made known in a public way that
the editor could not have been able to avoid. Respect is necessary for a leader to be able
to function in any capacity, and the editor did not have the trust of her staff, rendering her
incapable of doing her job.
Perhaps the biggest indicator of a leadership failure at DataNews.com was the
CEO’s decision to leave the news organization, but even in that decision and
announcement, the absence of communication with the staff was apparent. That the CEO
had to leave because he had not been able to raise enough money to justify his salary was
certainly a reflection of how he failed at his job as CEO, which was ultimately a job
about raising funds, but the way the organization dealt with this and how and when they
told the staff left the staff feeling upset, out of the loop, and confused. There was a failure
of leadership to even orchestrate the failed leader’s leaving. The staff had found out on
their own that the CEO was planning to step down and had been discussing it for a week,
unsure of what the future of the organization was and how they would fit into it, before
the editor gave them the news at a staff meeting. The staff meeting was replete with
confusion over who was in charge absent of the CEO and what they were supposed to be
doing to satisfy their funders, but the staff members seemed most upset at having been
kept in the dark for so long, even as the news began to circulate. One web developer said:
“We’re an investigative journalism organization. We were going to find out, so we found
out. It’s embarrassing that [the CEO] didn’t tell us.” Though the staff was obviously
upset by the news that the CEO was stepping down and confused about what it meant for
the organizations, part of their frustration was with the lack of communication in the
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organization. Young & Post (1993) note the importance of communicating with staff in a
timely manner in order to keep them abreast of organizational occurrences. That the staff
at DataNews.com found out about the CEO’s resignation through the grapevine and not
from their leaders was a profound failure in communication, which left them feeling
especially vulnerable at a time of great change and uncertainty in the organization. This
was exactly the sort of time when the staff needed strong leadership and communication,
and this was also the perfect opportunity for framing. Instead, the emotions of the staff
were overlooked. At times when emotions are high, framing can be especially useful and
leaders should recognize the role of emotions in the way leadership is perceived, but the
emotions of the staff and their response to the uncertainty were ignored by the CEO and
editor (Fairhurst, 2011).
Listening is also important amid framing, but the staff was not listened to at this
meeting, and their concerns were constantly downplayed or pushed aside by the editor
and the CEO, furthering the leadership failure (Fairhurst, 2011). The CEO deliberately
took himself out of the equation, saying that the staff members should push for a clear
line of communication with the board—they should push for it; he had nothing to do with
it, nothing to do with them. This was certainly understandable as it became clear that the
CEO may have been pushed out by the funders and was definitely surprised at the speed
at which they expected him to raise funds for the organization. But this distancing of
himself made the staff even more uncomfortable, with no one to turn to. They were told
that they should open lines of communication with people whom they had never met or
dealt with and were being offered no help from the person who had been their link to the
board. When asked directly by one of the reporters, “Who’s in charge now?” the CEO’s
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response was, “I wish I knew that.” When a reporter asked whether expenses or salaries
would be cut, the CEO’s answer was that he did not think so, but, then again, “pretty
much anything’s on the table.” These were particularly unhelpful answers to a staff that
was unsure to whom to turn. Even if the CEO felt wronged by the board and the funders
and bitter at leaving the organization, his abdicating leadership and ownership over the
problems his staff was facing was blatant, which was unsettling for the staff members
who still had jobs at DataNews.com. Again, when the staff expressed worry that this
news would break through a different news organization if DataNews.com did not
publish it soon, the CEO’s response amounted to a virtual shrug: “Maybe write
something up if you want to.” The CEO did not answer whether the board would approve
of this or whether he thought DataNews.com should do this. He basically provided a non-
answer. There was one point in the meeting—right before the CEO hung up—when he
did make a small show of leadership, telling his staff that if they had questions they did
not want to discuss in public, they could, “shoot me an e-mail.” This was certainly not a
major concession but at least was some acknowledgement that his staff was worried and a
declaration to be there for them to answer their questions. Still, much of this meeting
revolved around the CEO not adequately answering the staff’s questions, carrying on his
inability to communicate with them and furthering the uncertainty about the future of the
organization instead of framing. Fairhurst (2011) points to crucibles, which she defines as
challenges for leadership, as potential “framing opportunities,” in which leaders can
emerge by making sense of difficult situations, but none of the leaders took advantage of
this opportunity. The CEO removed himself by emphasizing that he did not have any
answers and was not even present at the meeting, instead calling in, further distancing
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himself from the situation instead of trying to make sense of the situation for his staff.
And the editor, too, removed herself instead of framing the events for her staff by saying,
“don’t shoot the messenger,” indicating that she had no part in the events and also
reiterating that she had no knowledge of what the board wanted or what was next for the
organization. Neither the editor nor the CEO had any control over the situation in which
DataNews.com found itself, but they could have framed the situation for their staff
instead of emphasizing their own lack of control.
Morden (1997) and Bennis & Nanus (1997) distinguish between a manager, who
offers more structured control of an organization, and a leader, who is more visionary. It
is unclear that DataNews.com had either sort of leader in its CEO or editor. Instead, they
had two ineffectual leaders, one of whom did not communicate with his staff and one of
whom was disrespected for not understanding the very basis of the site. And neither
leader was involved in the day-to-day actions of the staff. This left the staff with little
direction or feedback about the routine and mundane or the big picture. While much of
the confusion about the organization’s vision and direction surfaced when the CEO
stepped down, it pre-dated the CEO’s resignation and made it difficult for the
organization to succeed.

Office Routines and the ‘Bored Meeting’
In the conference room area at DataNews.com, there was a painting of an office
meeting, titled “Bored Meeting,” and though this wall hanging was obviously meant as a
joke of sorts, it indicated the leadership’s attitude toward meetings—and many other
standard office routines and structures. They were tiresome and a waste of time.
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DataNews.com did not start with a print product and the ingrained routines that come
with a long-standing organization. This allowed for the possibility of the online outfit to
be more innovative in creating routines instead of adapting already-existing practices that
may not have been as suited for an online-only news organization. Instead, though, the
result was that DataNews.com did not create these structures at all. This may have been a
result of the difficulty in creating these routines from scratch or it may have been a
concerted decision to not institute these typical organizational structures. In either case,
there were no routines or leadership in place at DataNews.com, again, making it difficult
for staff members to know what was expected of them and what they should be doing.
This led to a kind of inertia where little got done and the pace of work was slow.
Nowhere was this more obvious than in the lack of established deadlines, which freed
staff from a time crunch so much so that articles were rarely filed and there was rarely
new content on the website. Without the immediacy that characterized the traditional
newsroom and without any schedule to replace it with, little got done
Throughout the time I observed at DataNews.com, no one had a set schedule. People
came in at times ranging from 8:30 a.m. to 3 p.m. And throughout the day, people were
constantly in and out of the office. When I asked the CEO by e-mail when to come in on
my first day, he responded, “Someone is usually at the office by 9, so any time after that,”
indicating that there was not even a guarantee that anyone would be in the office by 9 a.m.
but that he could give me no better estimate than that. The editor on at least one occasion
left for lunch and came back two hours later with multiple shopping bags. People
regularly went out for snacks or coffee or non-descript breaks multiple times a day. The
editor would always go out for breakfast and coffee almost as soon as she got to work
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and would then also go out for lunch. One of the web developers sometimes came in later
than usual because she went to yoga. It was acceptable to work from home on one’s
birthday. There was little communication about where staff members were or if they were
off for the day. One day when the editor was not in, one of the web developers jokingly
asked if she had quit. The administrator explained that the editor was working from home,
but the rest of the staff had not known. There were days when none of the web developers
came in, which meant no one was there to work with reporters on data visualizations.
One reporter, specifically, did not seem to be on any schedule or follow any rules. When
I first started at DataNews,com, the CEO told me that this reporter was leaving to take
another reporting job, but soon thereafter, he decided to stay on, followed by another
decision to leave and then another decision to stay. He only came into the office
irregularly and when he came in, often came in late in the afternoon. When this reporter
was planning on leaving to start his new job, no one in the offic, had any idea when his
last day was. As staff members left the office, the reporter said, “So, that’s it?” explaining
that it was his last day and no one was even saying good-bye. Everyone expressed
surprise and confusion over the fact that it was his last day because there was no office-
wide schedule or calendar or even e-mail alias to inform them. It was most apparent that
there was no set schedule during a discussion of whether the office had off for the Fourth
of July. When a reporter asked about whether they had off for the holiday, which was the
next day, the editor responded with, “Tomorrow’s a holiday.” The reporter said, “I’m just
checking. Are we loyal Americans?” Though there was some joking inherent in this, too,
it was also obvious that no one was actually certain they had off for the national holiday
and no one had clarified this until the day before the holiday. There was no office
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calendar to tell the staff when they should come to work. This led to an overall lack of
certainty and clarity. Nothing was set or definite, not even when they should come to
work and when they had off. This lack of routine provided both less control over the staff
by the leaders and less certainty for the staff, making it a difficult place to work
(Shoemaker & Reese, 1996).
This lack of set schedules also had ramifications on the way people worked in the
office. Though the office was small—one single, open room where everyone but the CEO
worked and a small office at the back where the CEO sat—staff members were constantly
asking where other staff members were. Because people came and went on their own
schedules and without necessarily letting anyone know what their schedule or plans were
and no one knew if someone was off for the day or coming in late or gone for the day, it
was hard to find colleagues and hard to collaborate with one another. This was especially
difficult because the reporters and web developers were meant to collaborate with each
other on stories, with the reporters writing the article and the web developers building
data visualizations to go with the articles. The staff was set up as half reporters and half
web developers so that the two could collaborate equally to build story packages that had
article and data visualization components. This, however, was difficult to organize when
the two were not always present in the office at the same time. The lack of schedules was
also problematic with respect to the CEO and editor because when their leadership and
guidance were needed and they were nowhere to be found, the staff was confused about
what they should do. This happened when one of the reporters was planning a community
forum. He was out looking for a location in which to hold the event and was having a
difficult time. He called the office to speak to the editor, but she was not in the office and
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no one knew if she was gone for the day or not. This left no one to help the reporter make
difficult decisions about where to hold his forum.
The absence of ingrained routines also led to a lack of communication that
plagued the newsroom of DataNews.com. There was confusion among the staff about the
publishing of a major project that had been a joint effort of many staff members and of a
freelancer. After the project was done, initially, it was not published. Then, the web
developers found that the project had been published but had not been linked to the front
page of their website, where it should have been to gain some prominence and attract
readers. The web developers were unsure of the status of the project and asked the editor
if they could start tweeting about the project and sending links out to it. The editor said
no, that they had a campaign designed to draw traffic to the project, but the staff members
had not been made aware of this campaign nor did the editor explain it to them, so they
were left unsure of why the article was published but was not supposed to be publicized
yet. And because they were not told why this had been done, the staff members were not
convinced that there was a good reason behind it. This lack of communication
contributed to a lack of faith in the leaders since they did not explain their strategies to
their staff.
Nowhere was the lack of rules and lack of understanding among different staff
members at DataNews.com more apparent than when it came to dress code. When I e-
mailed the CEO of DataNews.com before starting there to ask what the dress code was,
he responded: “pretty casual. Think tech startup.” However, I discovered when I got there
on my first day that there was a broad spectrum of what staff members actually wore to
the office. The CEO who had told me that the dress code was casual tended to wear a
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button-down shirt and khakis. The editor wore dresses that were definitively more formal
than casual. One of the web developers biked to work but immediately changed out of his
shorts and T-shirt and into something akin to a polo shirt and khakis when he got to work,
though he still often wore sneakers around the office. Though staff members sometimes
wore jeans, even then, they would often wear a button-down shirt or blouse with them.
There was some divide between the web developers and reporters in this regard, too. The
web developers tended to dress more casually than the reporters, and, in fact, one of the
web developers even noted this. When an unexpected meeting with the board members
came up, one of the web developers said she had to go home to change into “not pal-ing-
around clothes,” saying she had “dressed like a web developer today.” This was both an
acknowledgement that the web developers dressed especially casually (she was wearing
shorts and a T-shirt) and that she could not dress like that for a meeting with the board
members, but she did feel comfortable dressing that way in the office when there was no
board meeting. There were also some days when the same web developer dressed
professionally—in a sheath dress and flats, for example—for no apparent reason. This
was true of the reporters, too, who sometimes showed up in suits and sometimes showed
up in more casual clothing, even if not as casual as the web developers. There did not
seem to be any rhyme or reason to when various staff members dressed more formally or
more casually, and there was no rule in place in terms of how one should dress, as
evidenced by the fact that the CEO thought it was a casual office even when some staff
members, including himself, did not dress especially casually. Though perhaps it was
convenient for staff members to feel comfortable in whatever they wanted to wear, this
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also meant that no one had any sense of what the office was supposed to be—and meant
quick runs home when unexpected meetings came up.
Staff meetings were one of the only set routines at DataNews.com. Daily news
meeting are an important way to teach the craft to new journalists and to reinforce news
values, but at DataNews.com these meetings could have achieved an even more basic
function by imparting the vision and goals of the organization, which were somewhat
nebulous, to all the staff (Gravengaard & Rimstead, 2012). Instead, meetings only took
place once a week at DataNews.com, were sparsely attended, and not treated very
seriously. This was at least partially due to the fact that the leaders of the organization did
not view the staff meeting as that important. In fact, in interviews I was told that the staff
had to specifically request the weekly meeting from the CEO and editor a few months
after the organization’s formation. Before this request, there had been no regular
meetings at the site. This meant the CEO and editor did not by themselves see a need for
them. Though it is true that DataNews.com was a small organization and the staff did sit
in close proximity to one another, the staff meetings still served as a useful way for staff
members to touch base with one another and find out what their colleagues were working
on. They did not discuss their individual projects with one another outside of the staff
meetings, even though, of course, they could have. The structure of the meeting provided
a forum to share projects with one another and even begin collaborations, with staff
members contributing ideas to others’ projects, suggesting resources, and offering help.
This was an important process that allowed staff members to create better projects. The
editor often asked a lot of questions, seeming to indicate that she was not on top of what
the staff was working on and this was the only forum in which she gathered that
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information. This made it even more disconcerting that these meetings were not treated as
particularly important and often did not happen. If a meeting was skipped, it meant a
week went by with the editor not knowing what her staff was up to. It is additionally
unclear how the editor could possibly lead her staff if she did not know what they were
working on and only checked in with them once a week. The meetings also provided a
forum for important organizational news to be disseminated and discussed. It is easy to
see why the staff felt that the meetings were necessary. It is harder to understand why the
leadership at DataNews.com did not think the meetings were necessary.
The leaders’ attitude toward the meetings as non-essential was demonstrated by
the lackadaisical attitude toward the meetings, and this, in turn, pointed to a lackadaisical
attitude at DataNews.com toward communication in general. On one Tuesday, one of the
reporters asked the administrator when the staff meeting was, and she said she thought 10.
Though this meeting was supposed to take place at the same time every week, staff
members were not even sure of when the meeting would take place. This was a
consequence of the fact that they were not treated as an important part of the schedule
and were often canceled or postponed in light of staff members’ scheduling needs. On
one Tuesday, shortly before 10, when the meeting should have started, the CEO came out
of his office to tell the staff that he had to “jump on a call” at 10, so the meeting would
have to be pushed to later. No new time for the meeting was specified, and two staff
members headed out of the office at 10:15, seemingly not anticipating the meeting
happening soon. One of the web developers also came in at 10:05 that morning—after the
staff meeting was to have started. This either indicated he was unconcerned about being
on time to the meeting or that it was very likely based on prior experience that the
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meeting would be postponed or canceled, which, in fact, it was. Even when the staff
meetings did happen, they often started late, with the CEO or editor waiting to see how
many staff members would trickle in to the office before starting. Meetings also rarely, if
ever, had the whole staff present. In fact, one week, the editor announced shortly before
10 that she wanted to start the meeting on time this week. A prompt start to the meeting
was so rare that it needed a special announcement.
As a new organization without any structures or routines in place, DataNews.com
needed to build its organization from the ground up. Though this appears to be a daunting
challenge, it also gave the site the opportunity to choose which routines and processes
worked best for it without any limitations and strictures placed on it from a pre-existing
organization. Once organizational structure is formed, it tends to remain in place with
little change, so the opportunity to choose routines that were best suited for digital
journalism was a serious advantage to an online-native publication like DataNews.com
(Stinchcombe, 1965). But evident in the site’s lack of routines and structure was a missed
opportunity. Autonomy gave way to a free-for-all in which too much freedom meant little
got done, and a failure to communicate and lead meant that staff members felt devalued
and not bound to listen to their leaders. DataNews.com became an organization with no
rules and no vision. While its newness may have made it more difficult to institute
routines where none existed at DataNews.com, its poor leadership was a driving factor in
its inability to function and may have been less related to the lack of routines than it was
to leaders who were ill-suited for the organization they headed. Of course, it is impossible
to parse the lack of routines from the lack of leadership and equally impossible to account
for exactly how much of the fault lay with the organization’s newness and how much lay
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with the particular organization and personalities since leadership and organizational
structure interact. But what is clear is that in the absence of good leadership and routines,
DataNews.com foundered.

2.2 RadioOnline.com: More Structure, More Communication
RadioOnline.com had a different challenge than did DataNews.com. Instead of
having to build structures and routines anew, RadioOnline.com had to figure out how to
place itself within its parent company, how to take advantage of the useful structure but
how to change the structure—and the culture—that were not appropriate for digital news.
It can be difficult for radio journalists to integrate online news production into an already
full routine of radio production, and the responsibility to create routines that worked both
for the online staff and for the radio staff fell to RadioOnline.com (Usher, 2011). But
finding routines that work can often skew too much toward the established way of doing
things, allowing the digital side less flexibility in creating structures that work in an
online environment. Van Dam (2011) found that at The L.A. Times, the Internet
publishing schedule mimicked the print schedule so that all parts of the newsroom would
have the same deadlines. While convenient, this ignored a vital advantage of digital
news—being able to publish anytime. So, the challenge RadioOnline.com faced was
building new routines within an already existing organization and finding a place for
itself within an already established structure.
RadioOnline.com had some advantage in this in that it had a separate staff and
was created to be distinct from the radio station of which it was a part. The most obvious
way to see this was in that RadioOnline.com’s name was different from the radio
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station’s and totally unconnected to the radio station’s name. The site recognized that
they were looking for an audience that was distinct from the radio station’s audience and
though they were affiliated with the radio station and used the radio station’s content,
they were also not synonymous with the radio station. They had their own staff of web
producers, who did the editing for the website, organized social media for the website,
and were also in charge of soliciting some content for the website. They had their own
boss in the director of online news. Even with the distinction from the radio product,
RadioOnline.com faced some challenges from its parent site. When the website was
launched, radio reporters were asked to begin creating an article version of their web
stories, the director of online news told me. This was a significant imposition in the form
of an added task, especially because online news articles take a considerably different
form than radio scripts. Though, by all accounts, the radio staff took this relatively well,
recognizing the importance of a strong news site, there were still some vestiges of an “us
vs. them” culture within the newsroom. This, however, is not unusual for online
counterparts of established media organizations (Colson & Heindercyckx, 2008). But
even as it disassociated with the radio station in some ways, because RadioOnline.com
was born out of an established radio station with ingrained structures, the website was
able to take some of those structures with it, even as it was able to modify them for better
use in its smaller, online news operation. This organization was not built from scratch and
was able to benefit from much of the organizational structure already in place.

The ‘Daily Party’ and Other Routines
While RadioOnline.com, like DataNews.com, was a rather casual workplace,
there were more routines in place and more structure to the workday. There were better-
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defined responsibilities and a staff that was kept in the loop. One large factor in this was
the daily staff meeting at RadioOnline.com. This daily staff meeting was likely a direct
result of the radio station’s daily staff meeting. The radio meeting, which was earlier than
the website’s daily meeting and which was attended by an alternating member of the
website, was designed to be the place where the news stories for the day would be
discussed and the editor could figure out how to fill the radio time. The website’s daily
meeting took on much the same form. The stories the radio station was going to run were
discussed, as were any new stories that the reporters or web producers were working on.
These discussions allowed the web staff to figure out what would be published when and
what would be promoted when, and it meant that all the staff members knew what the
plan was for the website on any given day. Each staff member’s daily tasks were also
clear, leaving less room for uncertainty in terms of expectations. Each staff member was
also responsible for a weekly report, delivered at the meeting, focusing on web traffic to a
specific section of the site, so that important metrics could be tracked and successful
stories could be assessed. These meetings also served as the first place to discuss any
significant policy issues that had come up or any controversy, and this, in turn, ensured
that all of the members of the staff were on the same page in terms of important issues
and also knew what everyone else was working on. These meetings became important
framing opportunities as discussions that defined the organization and its policies took
place.
One example of discussing and setting policy at these meetings was the
RadioOnline.com corrections policy, which was discussed after the site published an
article that included a quotation from someone providing incorrect information about
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where a movie had been filmed. Though the misinformation was in a quotation, a
correction needed to be published, so the intricacies of the policy were discussed at the
daily morning meeting. The director of online news told everyone what the policy was
and staff members asked some questions about what should happen in specific
circumstances—for instance, if the mistake is found after hours, should the correction
wait until the next business day? Could reporters make the corrections themselves or
should they go through the web staff? Unlike DataNews.com, which did not have a style
guide or a corrections policy of any sort, RadioOnline.com had policies in place for
typical newsroom issues, but the staff meeting also gave staff members the opportunity to
revisit some of the policies, to be reminded of policies they may have forgotten, and to
raise new problems. Having policies in place was partly a result of RadioOnline.com’s
parent radio station. Since the radio station was a decades-old news organization, some
policies already existed because journalism was already being done. But having policies
in place also did not mean that the newsroom was stuck with a pre-Internet approach to
journalism. Since RadioOnline.com was established as distinct from the radio station, it
was able to rework policies as it saw fit and to make policies that made more sense for
digital news. Policies evolved at RadioOnline.com as the Internet raised new questions—
like when to publish a correction in the presence of a 24-hour news cycle. Still, the pre-
existing structure allowed RadioOnline.com to adapt and change without having to start
from the beginning and create completely new policies, and the staff meetings provided a
good forum for discussion of problems that arose and figuring out what policy should be.
The director of online news once referred to the meeting as “our daily little party,” which
reflected the general attitude that while these meetings were a place where serious work
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got done, they were also a place to socialize and get to know one’s co-workers. This was
important because Fairhurst (2011) notes that in order to effectively frame, leaders must
know the discourse of their staff. These meetings allowed the director of online news to
learn that discourse.
Even at RadioOnline.com, the staff meetings were not always treated as important.
Though the meetings were at a set time each morning, they were occasionally moved
later and often got a late start as staff members meandered to the meeting place. On my
first day of observations at RadioOnline.com, the meeting was pushed about half an hour
late because the director of online news had missed his train and was late getting into the
office. On other occasions, staff members who sat downstairs among the radio staff (as
opposed to upstairs among the web staff) needed to be called to be asked to come up to
the staff meeting because others were there and ready to start the meeting. In at least one
instance, all the staff had gathered except for the director of online news, who ran the
meetings, and someone needed to call him to find out when he was coming. So that even
though there was a set time to the meeting, it was more of an approximate time than an
actual starting time, and sometimes schedules were ignored at RadioOnline.com. The
weekly reports by staff on traffic metrics, which were scheduled as a regular occurrence,
were occasionally not done. When the director of online news was on vacation for two
weeks, the reports fell to the wayside, and when the director of online news returned and
asked at the staff meeting that they start with reports, only some of the reports were done
and many were missing. When the director of online news was on vacation, the meetings
themselves were also more sporadic, even though the goals of keeping the staff aware of
what was going on and addressing any larger issues that came up were still applicable.
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Rules and structure were not always followed at RadioOnline.com, even though
they were in place. For instance, that RadioOnline.com had a style guide that dictated
how articles should be published was an institutional step that reflected a more traditional
newspaper and that could have ensured a uniform project—if the staff members had been
made aware of it and if the style were enforced. But an intern who had already been at
RadioOnline.com for at least two months when I got there had not been told there was a
style guide and did not have access to it, and the director of online news told me that
reporters were especially bad at following style rules since they were mostly radio
reporters and asked me if I could keep track of common mistakes. Though at least there
was an acknowledgement of the problem and a start to a solution, the institutional
structure by itself did not accomplish much without any sort of enforcement. The style
guide almost seemed like a symbolic gesture rather than actual instilled rules.
RadioOnline.com had a style guide because that’s what a news organization was
supposed to have, but not because they saw enough value in it to actually use it—or even
let staff members know it existed.
There were, though, efforts to both devise needed rules and structure and make
those policies known. When discussion of an article that had needed multiple changes
and adaptations based on readers’ comments came up, the director of online news said
that though the final correction on the article “May have ended up OK … it wasn’t
handled the way we want to handle these things.” There was a procedure that they wanted
to have in place at RadioOnline.com, even if it was not in place yet. The staff there knew
that having the procedure in place was important and that they should spend the time to
figure out what that procedure should be. The staff at RadioOnline.com saw value in this
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structure. In fact, the director of online news suggested that they should run a seminar
with the reporters about corrections policies and procedures. It was important to educate
the reporters to their procedures so that they were followed. When the director of online
news mentioned sending an e-mail note to the reporters about corrections policies, one of
the web staff members, said of notes like that: “I think they’re good. People need to know
that not anything flies.” If the reporters did not know the rules that were already in place
at RadioOnline.com, there was a remedy to this, and the staff members were willing to do
something about it. The structure may have been incomplete, but there were efforts to fix
that, and the flexibility in decision-making and change can also be seen as an advantage
for an organization that is facing an industry in flux (Fairhurst, 2011).
There were also instances of necessary rules and structure not being in place.
When RadioOnline.com’s main e-mail alias received an e-mail from a reader saying she
was abused and asking where to get help, the staff members started an e-mail exchange
trying to figure out how to respond to such e-mails. There was no specific individual
responsible for responding to e-mails on this alias and no one knew quite how to respond.
The best the staff members came up with was that the reader should “start somewhere but
not with us,” though this did spur some discussion on rules for e-mail—on who should be
responsible for responding and how—and there was a belated move to formalize some of
this. But, still, needed rules were not always in place. Rules about how to respond to e-
mails would not have been part of the original structure at RadioOnline.com’s parent
organization, so this was not something that could merely be copied but rather something
that needed to be created specifically for the site, and it was not. And improvisation was
necessary when no plan was put in place to cover local elections. On the morning of
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primary elections in one of their coverage areas, one of the web producers asked at the
staff meeting, “Is there a particular plan for that [elections] tonight or is it all on the air?”
Even the day of an important news event, there was no set plan about how the website
would cover it. This represented a radio-first approach to the news and showed that even
with a lot of structure in place, there were important things that were overlooked—like
scheduling how the website would cover these elections. Though the staff meeting did
provide a place to discuss this at the last minute and create a plan of sorts, it certainly
could have been scheduled in advance.
Daily news meetings and policies were proof positive that RadioOnline.com had
some structures in place and valued that structure in a way that DataNews.com did not.
But this structure did come at the price of autonomy, with more rules and routines
meaning the staff members had less time to work on their own projects or innovate. Some
of RadioOnline.com’s routines were borrowed directly from its parent company. Having
a parent company both made it easier to see what sorts of routines could work in an
organizational news setting and made it easier to transfer those routines. Once
organizational structures form, they are hard to change even as an organization changes
and an organization is likely to maintain the structures it had from its formation, but
because RadioOnline.com was set up as separate from its parent station, it was able to
avoid merely transferring routines and structure that may not have worked for digital
news (Stinchcombe, 1965). Still, there was some tension between the radio staff and the
web staff. The daily news meetings were often a place where conflict with the radio staff
was discussed: A reporter needed to be told multiple times that he could not use
photographs without attribution; a new project needed the support of the radio staff, who
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was unlikely to take it on due to the added work; a video would be a good addition to a
specific article, but they were unsure if the photographer would take the suggestion; the
radio did not run a clarification requested by the web staff; content producers complained
when their content did not reach the site in a timely manner. But there was also support
from the radio staff, who gave the website tips, and the director of online news told his
staff that when working on a difficult or sensitive headline, he always conferred with the
reporter, making sure to be accurate. Still, there was some tension. When talking about a
new project they were going to encourage the reporters to participate in, the director of
online news asked, “Are they going to start yelling at us? I feel like reporters have been
yelling at us a lot.” And a web producer said of one reporter that he was “one of those
people who doesn’t take well to being edited because if I’m questioning anything he says
I must be an idiot.” But this tension was not overwhelming and did not prevent the
website from working with the radio staff. Some tension was only to be expected as the
radio station and website figured out how to get along with one another.

Leadership, Feedback, and Vision

The daily staff meetings at RadioOnline.com also served as an opportunity for
feedback to the staff, something that was sorely missing at DataNews.com. The director
of online news would often comment on previous projects and articles at these daily
meetings. This was a convenient way to give feedback, both to the web editor who had
been responsible for the piece being addressed and also to the rest of the staff, so that
everyone would know what was considered good work and what was not (Gravengaard
& Rimstead, 2012). This was a convenient way to let the staff members know what was
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expected of them and what the site should look like (Gravengaard & Rimstead, 2012).
This approach to feedback may have been borne out of a culture of feedback at the radio
station. The editors at RadioOnline.com’s parent radio station constantly walked around
the newsroom, asking reporters questions about what they were working on, giving new
ideas and approaches to work being done, and assigning new articles. This made the
editors seem more invested in their reporters and what they were doing and more
available to address any problems or questions the reporters had. There was also a back-
and-forth, a trading of ideas when discussing articles in this way. When one of the top
editors came by to ask a reporter about a school budget story, she explained some of the
details and told him what she was planning and he was able to offer some suggestions.
The editors were engaged in the work that was being done in the newsroom, and this
carried over to the website, where feedback was also an integral part of the work process.
Young & Post (1993) discuss that employee communication should be viewed as a
“critical management process,” and this was the case at RadioOnline.com, where leaders
were constantly communicating with their staff
When the director of online news came back from a two-week vacation, he
commented that the traffic numbers for the site had remained steady while he was away.
He said, “I was hoping it would look shitty and make me look essential.” Though he did
not go so far as to say they did not need him, the director of online news made a point of
saying that the staff had done a good job keeping the site running—and maintaining an
audience—while he was away. This was important for the staff to hear. They knew when
they were doing a good job because their boss told them. Positive feedback also came by
way of e-mail. When good news or awards were given to RadioOnline.com, this news
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was sent out by an e-mail to the staff, commending the staff members on the good job
they did. “[O]nly two … grants are being given in this round, so for us to get one of them
is quite a token of respect,” the executive editor of news wrote in an e-mail announcing a
grant. Occasionally, if an article was garnering a lot of attention, that, too, would be sent
out in an e-mail, noting the success. One instance of this happening involved an article
about how to properly prepare chicken (specifically, not to wash it). The editor sent out
an e-mail to the whole staff titled “Chicken Big,” noting how much traffic it was getting
and others piped in with social media statistics for the article. Though these are relatively
small examples, they indicate a culture at RadioOnline.com of congratulating the staff
when they did well, of giving feedback as to what was working, and by doing so focusing
on important metrics of success, thus defining them for the staff.
Imparting a vision to the staff may have been less crucial at RadioOnline.com
than it was at DataNews.com since by virtue of its parent company RadioOnline.com did
have some set definition, but the feedback was able to set expectations for the staff and
let them know when they were doing well. The morning staff meetings often included
little pep talks from the director of online news, who would tell his staff things like: “We
as a team are creating a lot of traffic to the site. And what we’re not doing, our social
media efforts are.” This was specific praise for something his staff was doing, especially
pointing to the staff member responsible for social media efforts, and this let the staff
know that getting traffic was an important component of their jobs. The director of online
news specified that his staff was not only getting the reporters at RadioOnline.com to
produce good content but was also producing quality content on their own. This defined
the nuanced role the web staff held—as both web producers and content creators—and
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also let the staff know they were doing a good job with the content-production side,
which may have been outside the comfort zone for the web staff. The website at
RadioNews.com was framed as a collaborative effort, something “we as a team are
creating.” Framing can lead to collaboration in important ways, and the director of online
news was able to frame the site as collaborative, thus encouraging more collaboration and
investment from the staff (Fairhurst, 2011).
Missions and goals for the organization were also addressed more
straightforwardly with the staff during big-picture discussions about where the
organization was heading and what sort of projects the staff should be focusing on. These
discussions were framing opportunities that constructed and maintained the
organization’s identity (Fairhurst, 2011). The director of online news told the staff at a
morning meeting that he liked the direction they were going in—working on less web
production and more good, original content—saying that the web staff was “wasted on
just moving the deck chairs around and making typos on Facebook.” This told the staff
both that they should be focusing on content production and that their boss thought they
could do a good job at that. He told them they had value and skill that he was confident in
and also told them what he wanted them to be doing. These are important things for a
leader to impart to his or her staff (Bass, 1990; Kanter; 1984; Kanter, 1999; Kurpius &
Fuqua, 2003). The director of online news further added that creating good content
directly contributed to traffic, telling his staff exactly what the goal was—building a web
audience. One of the web developers agreed, saying that as a staff they had been moving
away from the “cheesy, gimmicky stuff” and another web developer chimed in that the
gimmicky content did not really provide any return for the site and that he was happy, too,
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to be moving into more of an op-ed model. These discussions with the staff not only told
the staff what they should be working on but also allowed them to voice their opinions on
the direction of the site. Two-way communication was built in to the site’s routines and
leadership in significant ways.

2.3 Traditional vs. Born-Online News
Communication as a ‘Critical Management Process’
In many ways, it seemed at the outset that the leaders at DataNews.com had an
easier job than the leaders at RadioOnline.com. At DataNews.com, the leaders were
granted the ability to build the structures and routines that they wanted and that would
work best for digital news into a completely new organization. They had a blank slate for
what the organization should be. RadioOnline.com had to fit itself into an already
existing organization with already existing routines and structures. This could prove
difficult, as it did in Ryfe’s (2009a, 2009b) case study of a media organization that did
not want to change. Once organizational structures are in place, they become increasingly
difficult to readjust and change, so that in changing times, an established organization can
often not make the necessary changes, and newsrooms are especially resistant to change
(Ryfe, 2009a; Ryfe, 2009b; Stinchcombe, 1965). DataNews.com, however, seemed
unable to take advantage of the ability to create new structure, instead creating few if any
new routines and structures. RadioOnline.com, by being distinct from its parent station
while still a part of the station, was able to both take advantage of the routines, structures,
and culture already in place but also institute new routines and structures. The routines,
structure, and workflow of an organization are interconnected with an organization’s
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culture in the way organizations make sense of their external environments (Weick, 1993;
Weick, 2005a). DataNews.com’s lack of routines and structure made it impossible for the
organization’s staff to form a cohesive culture, and, this, in turn, made it difficult for the
organization to make sense of a turbulent environment. A lack of cohesive culture, in turn,
made communication and leadership, through sensemaking and framing, all the more
necessary at DataNews.com in a vicious cycle.
Communication and leadership lay at the heart of the differences between the two
organizations. At DataNews.com, few routines combined with an especially distant CEO
meant there was little obvious opportunity for the leaders to communicate with their staff
and little obvious opportunity for framing. Though that did not preclude the leaders
taking the initiative to communicate and lead, it did necessitate that the initiative be taken,
and at DataNews.com, it was not. This meant that the leaders at DataNews.com did not
help the staff make sense of the organization and the environment in any meaningful
ways, which left the staff disjointed, lacking a clear sense of who they were or what they
were supposed to be doing. Leaders “can be transformative agents, but also passive
receptors of meaning,” and at DataNews.com, they were the latter, as they did not create
meaning for their staff (Fairhurst & Connaughton, 2014, p. 22). This was especially
apparent when the CEO stepped down, and the CEO and editor seemed to deliberately
fail to frame the situation for their staff. Change management is about managing the
people in an organization as they react to the change, and it was evident from the CEO’s
resignation that the CEO and editor were inept at managing their people in the face of
change, instead focusing on how little they knew (Moran & Brightman, 2000). But this
was partially an extension of the lack of structure, vision, and leadership that already
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existed at DataNews.com. If anything, its culture was defined by not having these
components of an organization and by not having anyone to make sense of the outside
environment or the internal organization. This meant feedback was not given, and a
vision for the company and expectations were not imparted to the staff, and since the staff
did not know what their goals were, they had no way of reaching those goals. Though the
lack of communication came to a head at DataNews.com when the CEO stepped down
and the staff was not immediately told, instead finding out through the grapevine, this
was merely a symptom of the lack of communication that already existed there, creating a
culture of autonomy that was plagued by uncertainty.
At RadioOnline.com, the structure and culture interacted with one another to
create a strong organization, where leaders communicated with staff, where sensemaking
and framing occurred. Daily meetings were an obvious time to discuss both feedback on
day-to-day operations and long-term goals for the organization. This meant that staff
members were continuously being told what they should be doing and what the grander
vision for the organization was, giving them a clarity that was not available at
DataNews.com. A consensus on mission, strategy, and goals—the components of an
organization’s culture—was formed and communicated at these meetings (Schein, 1985).
Another example of communication creating a strong culture at RadioOnline.com was
that the staff members were provided with information about data metrics and funding
and organizational decisions, thus creating an environment of trust and transparency in
place of secrecy (Fairhurst, Jordan & Neuwirth, 1997). Even the communication at
RadioOnline.com can be partially traced back to its parent company, which also had a
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strong culture of feedback, thus providing its website with a role model in a way, but it
also is a reflection of strong leaders.
The born-online DataNews.com had no role models in terms of structures,
routines, or communication, contributing to the “liability of newness” that makes it
difficult for new organizations to succeed (Stinchcombe, 1965). I had thought that in light
of the drastic changes taking place in the journalism industry—“revolutionary change,”
as Stinchcombe (1965) calls it—a born-online news organization might be able to
overcome the liability of newness and be better situated to incorporate the changes that
the digital world required. It may be true that a born-online publication can overcome the
liability of newness, but DataNews.com was not able to do this, and much of the fault lies
with its uncommunicative leader and lack of solid vision or feedback. Communication
and leadership are necessary for any organization to survive, with or without industry
changes, and DataNews.com’s failure to seek them out combined with its failure to set in
place routines, structures, and rules of any sort that also could have contributed to
stability and certainty created less of an organization than a bunch of people who worked
in the same space on whatever interested them at the moment without any culture to
speak of. RadioOnline.com, on the other hand, was given some structure from its parent
company but also some freedom to create its own routines. This enabled the organization
to make changes from traditional newsrooms and to focus on the Internet but without
having to create an entire organization. Instead of holding it back, RadioOnline.com’s
parent company offered it real advantages in a model of good leadership and routines. It
is unclear if RadioOnline.com’s situation can be generalized any more so than can
DataNews.com’s. Many of the advantages that RadioOnline.com saw only existed
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because its parent company had made a deliberate step to distinguish the website from the
established company, thus allowing it the freedom to create new structures even as it
relied on some of the old ones. If the site had been more tied to the radio station, change
may have likely been more elusive. This case study does, though, point to the importance
of communication, leadership, and vision, in any sort of organization. Being more or less
established cannot negate the need for a staff to be guided by its leaders, and routines are
important to creating an environment in which that can happen. This finding is especially
compelling with regard to news organizations. The literature on news organizations often
ignores the leaders because the staff of a newsroom is granted so much autonomy that it
seems the leaders are not as important to a newsroom’s continued functioning and
success (Boczkowski, 2004). This proved not to be the case in my ethnography. Good
leadership in the form of framing the external environment is essential in newsrooms, like
other organizations.

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Chapter 3: Two Different Approaches to the Nonprofit Business Model for News

Both DataNews.com and RadioOnline.com were nonprofit news organizations. As
the traditional business model for news founders, nonprofits have garnered attention as a
possible model for funding journalism. Strictly speaking, the term nonprofit refers merely
to a different tax status, and much of the idea behind the argument for allowing news
organizations to more easily obtain nonprofit tax status revolves around the assumption
that news organizations produce a valuable public service that the government should
take measures to protect (Browne, 2010; Gamse, 2011; Pew, 2013; Shaver, 2010). When
compared with for-profit magazines, nonprofit magazines grow more slowly and do not
make nearly as much revenue, but in some ways, that is an advantage (Maguire, 2009, p.
128). Part of the appeal of the nonprofit model is that news organizations could rely on
donations and worry less about the business of news and more about making news (Akst,
2005; Browne, 2010; Shaver, 2010). “[A] news organization that hopes only to break
even can focus less on what will sell and more on the kinds of coverage it believes
society needs” (Akst, 2005). Earnings expectations created pressure on news
organizations that forced them to cut resources and limit news productions in a way that
nonprofits would not need to (Shaver, 2010). And by not being as focused on profits and
numbers, newsrooms could give their reporters more autonomy and the ability to cover
less popular stories as well as stories from less advantaged neighborhoods, which are
often ignored by traditional news outlets because ads are less lucrative where people are
poorer (Browne, 2010). The question of how different the nonprofit business model is
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and where traditional journalism business practices fall in the nonprofit model becomes
pressing as the model gains popularity.
The business of news has been traditionally defined by a strict separation between
the editorial and business sides of the news organization in the form of the two staffs
being completely separate (Breed, 1955; Gans, 1979; Klinenberg, 2005; Schudson, 2003).
“[E]ditorial and business departments operate independently of each other. Business-
department officials would like to influence editorial decisions in order to increase
audience size and attract advertisers, but they … know that they cannot interfere,” Gans
(1979) found in his study of the newsroom (p. 214). Even Breed (1955), who was less
than convinced that this separation actually worked in practice, noted the “ethical taboo”
of publishers interfering with journalists or exerting any power over journalists. And
while the business side was supposed to refrain from influencing the journalists, the
journalists for their part were uninterested in any aspect of profits and revenues,
demonstrating no interest in making money, how to do so, or where the money came
from (Gans, 1979). This separation developed out of a concern that advertisers would be
able to influence the news coverage and thus eliminate the ability for the journalists to act
freely and independently (Gans, 1979; Schudson, 2003). The only way to have a truly
autonomous press that could function as a watchdog was to ensure that the press was free
from financial interests, and this was accomplished by severing the financial and editorial
goals of the organization (Deuze, 2007; Schudson, 2003).
This ethical separation, then, is directly tied to the business model for news that
was dependent on advertising—the concern was the pressure advertisers could place on
journalists. Absent advertisers, this separation makes little sense. It would not be
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unreasonable to assume that a different business model for news could also affect the
approach to the business of news within the organization so that perhaps where any
involvement of editorial side staff members in business was taboo in a traditional news
business model, that may not be the case in nonprofit news organization. This was the
case to some extent at RadioOnline.com, where editorial-side staff members, if not
necessarily involved in the financial side of the operation were at least aware of the
financial situation and the need to make money. However at DataNews.com, the
established separation of church and state persisted even absent the traditional business
model that made it necessary.
Though there has been some limited apprehension surrounding the influence
funding organizations could have on the news produced by nonprofits, that concern is at
once more limited and less severe than the concern about advertisers (Browne, 2010;
Overholser, 2006; Westphal, 2009). And even if this concern were more serious, it is
unclear that the traditional separation would efficiently prevent funders’ interests from
affecting news production in nonprofits since the mechanism is different, with a grant
being given as a one-time cash infusion and no future guaranteed funds from the same
organization, as opposed to advertising, in which relationships are cultivated with
advertisers and the goal is regular and repeated advertising. There is seemingly no reason
for nonprofit journalism outfits to enact the strict separation between business and
editorial functions. A different business model makes apparent different needs for the
organization.
This becomes even clearer as those walls of separation are coming down even in
traditional news organizations with the move to the Internet. Cook & Sirkkunen (2013)
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emphasize that the traditional separation is not practical online and point to “the need to
cross pollinate between editorial and business opportunities in order to survive” online (p.
76). As news moves online, the evolving ecosystem has begun to affect some of the
traditional practices that shaped the newsroom, and the deterioration of the separation of
church and state may be one of the largest such changes.
[T]he penetration of market principles and marketing projects into the editorial
divisions of news organizations is one of the most dramatic changes in the
journalistic field, and there is no question the mythical walls separating the
editorial and advertising are mostly down. (Klinenberg, 2005, p. 60)
If even traditional newsrooms are allowing more involvement between the editorial and
business sides as they try to figure out how to survive online, it is only reasonable that
non-traditional news outlets in which the separation does not necessarily even make sense
would let go of this artificial divide. So, it would be reasonable to assume that neither
DataNews.com nor RadioOnline.com would have a church-state divide. After all, both
were Internet nonprofits, making the separation less appropriate. But since
RadioOnline.com was part of a news organization that had been established pre-Internet,
it was more likely that it might reflect pre-Internet values and still have a strict separation
between news and business even if it was not as useful for a nonprofit, just as
Boczkowski (2004) found websites attached to print newspapers “repurposing print
processes” (p. 74). This would fall into Stinchcombe’s (1965) assertion that
“organizational forms and types have a history, and … this history determines some
aspects of the present structure of organizations of that type,” meaning organizations are
often a function of the technologies and practices that existed when they were first
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formed (p. 196). So that even while there may be some reason to believe that an older,
established organization like RadioOnline.com might reflect some of the logic of the
separation of church and state, it would not make sense for a new online-only nonprofit
like DataNews.com to reflect that ideology.
At first glance, however, DataNews.com and RadioOnline.com had similar
attitudes toward money that did, in fact, indicate the traditional separation: namely, that
financial issues were not discussed very much and were basically compartmentalized and
separated from any content production. But there were significant differences between
the two organizations’ approaches to money. Though neither organization discussed
business models or money-making very often, the two organizations differed
significantly from one another in terms of how they intended to make money and in how
far off the radar making money actually was. Though much of the literature suggests that
one of the advantages, of nonprofit status revolve around such an organization not having
to be concerned with funding, the reality seems to be more complicated. “The term ‘non-
profit’ for such initiatives can be confusing initially as it seems as if this kind of
journalism is freed from the pressures of capital flows and the requirements for
profitability,” but that is not the case (Requejo-Alemán & Lugo-Ocando, 2014, p. 2).
Pew’s report on nonprofit journalism found that respondents could not find the time to
focus on the business of their organizations and that this was a “major challenge to their
financial success” (2013, p. 14). Being a nonprofit does not remove the need for funds
nor does it remove the necessity of putting effort into getting those funds. Nonprofits, too,
require strategic thought behind how to raise money to sustain the organization even if
the focus is not on making profit. As journalism professor Edward Wasserman said,
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“Going to rich people periodically asking for money isn't a real business model”
(Trachtenberg, 2011). So, even as nonprofits do not have to worry about profits and
shareholders in the same way as for-profit companies, there is a necessity to formulate a
business plan and seek funds.
With regard to business models and funding, RadioOnline.com had a significant
advantage in that it was part of a larger organization, which had financial backing.
Though it was not entirely clear how much financial support RadioOnline.com received
from its parent radio station and the goal was to be self-sustainable, having a parent
company that could provide initial support was crucial. The institutional support meant
the website was less immediately pressed for cash and had some time to raise funds and
flesh out a business model. Even with some financial buffer, RadioOnline.com did have
grant funding and plans to build its own membership numbers in the works.
DataNews.com began with a large amount of seed funding but spent a lot of time
choosing staff and had few plans past continuing to be awarded large amounts of money.
Though it did have the seed funding, DataNews.com did not have the institutional support
that RadioOnline.com had, nor did it have a successful business model of a parent
company to model itself after. This contributed to a company that had few financial plans
past its initial funding, and thus when the money did not pour in as expected, the
organization was at a loss. Though neither organization had in place a complete,
successful, and sustainable business model at the time of my observations,
RadioOnline.com had done more planning and knew what their financial goals were.
DataNews.com had no real plans in place, which led to a financial crisis and its CEO
stepping down.
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The business model itself is also important as a means of framing the goals of the
organization, even aside from the actual funding it aims to procure (Teece, 2010). “In
essence, a business model embodies nothing less than the organizational and financial
‘architecture’ of a business … the notion refers in the first instance to a conceptual, rather
than a financial, model of a business” (Teece 2010, p. 173). To Teece the business model
is obviously important as the step toward creating a way to raise funds for an
organization, but it is also important conceptually. It is important for an organization to
evaluate what it hopes to offer the consumer, how it hopes to make money from its
venture, and what exactly it does (Teece, 2010). The business model is a way of
conceptualizing what exactly the organization is. Neither DataNews.com nor
RadioOnline.com had solidified sustainable business models, but one of the greatest
differences between the financial approaches of DataNews.com and RadioOnline.com
was whether they had begun to talk about what their business model would be and
whether any formulation thereof was available. The lack of any conception of a business
model past the initial funds at DataNews.com belied a lack of conception of what the
organization was and what they were aiming to do. There was a lack of vision for the
organization that was tied up in the lack of business plan. Though RadioOnline.com had
not figured out exactly what they wanted their final business model to look like, they
were consciously trying to figure it out by lobbing ideas back and forth and by talking
about monetizing. Though they had not solidified their plans, they did have some vision
of what their organization should be, how it should serve consumers, and in Teece’s
words, what its “architecture” was. This allowed RadioOnline.com to make finance-
related decisions and move forward on that front. This chapter explores the approach to
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finances and the business models of DataNews.com and RadioOnline.com in light of the
traditional ideological separation between the editorial and business functions of the
newsroom and in light of Teece’s assertion that a business model reflects a deeper
conception of the organization.

3.1 DataNews.com: The Grant-Funded Business Model
DataNews.com was created with initial funding of several million dollars. The
seed money preceded the hiring of a CEO or any true conception of what the organization
should look like beyond the very rudimentary goal of providing online news with some
public-interest component. The CEO was given freedom to create any sort of business
plan and any sort of organization. Little was dictated by the funders, however, the
organization was expected to become sustainable. The initial planning documents stated
that one of the goals for the then-unnamed project was sustainability and, more
specifically, to achieve that goal through multiple revenue streams. But even as
DataNews.com began to publish content, its financial side failed spectacularly as
evidenced by the CEO stepping down, citing inadequate funds as the reason for his
resignation less than a year after the organization began publishing. This failure may not
have been due to the instability and unsustainability of a nonprofit business model so
much as it was due to a lack of planning for the financial future on the part of the CEO—
and indeed a lack of any business model—an attitude toward the business of journalism
that was outdated, and a lack of communication between the funders and the staff.
When I met with the CEO on my first day there, he told me that he was beginning
to focus on the financial side of the operation. This was over a year after he had been
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hired at DataNews.com and six months after the site had begun publishing. And when the
CEO stepped down, after a year at the helm of DataNews.com, he still did not have an
actual business plan for the site. Though he had given thought to the business model, he
had done little beyond the conception phase. The CEO told me that his planned business
model would rely on large funders along with a few other, much smaller, revenue streams.
At our first meeting, the CEO told me he had done research into successful nonprofit
online news sites, trying to understand how they were able to make money. The CEO
said that he needed a $1 million annual budget to build the site to compare to more
successful sites like MinnPost, Texas Tribune, and Voice of San Diego. He had studied
how much their initial seed funding was and how large their staffs were, noting that in
order to be successful, it seemed these startups built up larger staffs faster than
DataNews.com did and were better-funded. But it was unclear what use this data was
since it was not spurring any action at DataNews.com. There was no obvious movement
to find these funds or hire more staff while I was there. So even while the CEO had done
enough research to ascertain what resources he thought would be needed to build the site
successfully, he was not working on finding those resources, and the fact that there was
no concrete business model in place pointed to a lack of deep thought about what exactly
the site would be, who would be the consumers, and thus who would be the likely funders.
Without any of those questions answered, the site occupied undefined territory where
little could get done because no one knew quite what they were supposed to be doing.
This attitude left the business side of the organization in limbo, even as the site
began to publish content. The CEO told me he was working with a marketing firm and a
consultant to strategize about whom to ask for money, but nobody had actually been
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approached for money past one appeal for more funds to the original funders, who had
told the CEO that he was asking for far too much money. The organization had applied
for nonprofit status but was still waiting to be granted that approval, which meant that it
was unable to fundraise as a nonprofit yet. The CEO said that this was taking longer than
expected, but it was unclear why the organization started hiring and publishing before it
had been granted this status that would help it raise funds, and, in fact, nonprofit status
often takes a long time to be granted, so this was a foreseeable circumstance (Pew, 2013).
The office administrator had been hired to do development work in addition to her
administrative duties but had not been utilized in that capacity yet and told me she was
unsure what was her responsibility and what was the consultant’s responsibility. That she
had not been called upon to do the development and fundraising work that was supposed
to be part of her job was “[b]ad planning on [the CEO]’s part and not enough talking up
on my part,” she said. Even though the administrator knew the CEO’s plan to wait to
begin fundraising was poor and that they should have begun the development work
earlier, she was not able to tell the CEO this. The CEO had claimed the fundraising as his
domain so completely that even the only other full-time staff member who had been hired
to do fundraising felt unable to do that work.
Though DataNews.com expected to get the majority of its funding from large
grants, it did also have some smaller money-making ideas. Both the CEO and the
administrator in the office mentioned a Kickstarter campaign that they envisioned could
raise money for a specific project, but not for the site as a whole. There were no plans in
place for the KickStarter campaign, nor had they begun the discussion about what type of
project should be chosen. The administrator told me at the beginning of my observations
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that DataNews.com was in “crunch time” because they wanted to launch the Kickstarter
campaign in the fall, but there was no reason given as to why the organization was
waiting until the fall to try to raise money in this new way. It was unusual for the staff of
DataNews.com to think about the audience, let alone to think about publishing articles in
which the audience would be so interested that they would donate their own money. Still,
there was at least a thought that DataNews.com could garner some smaller scale
donations from its audience to supplement its grant funding, but this, too, was not a
project that took any sort of immediate precedence, instead being something that they
would perhaps do in the future.
This lack of focus on finances was at least partially by design. Instead of being
concerned with money and business models and fundraising, the CEO had focused on
hiring talented reporters and web developers and on gathering data and creating content.
It was easy to see how the CEO could have thought that it would be difficult to raise
funding for an undefined project and how creating a quality website might help in raising
those funds. Perhaps the wait on the Kickstarter project was also about building the
content on the site and creating reputation and audience before launching the campaign.
Showing funders a polished news site would help convince them to donate by showing
them what their money would be going toward. The CEO said that he thought
DataNews.com must first build its reputation, impact, and value, and then people would
want to give the organization money. The administrator, too, said that the CEO’s plan
had been to let the quality journalism stand for itself before even the first stage of
development. DataNews.com was in pursuit of legitimacy before it was willing to attempt
any fundraising at all. This was not in itself unreasonable; media organizations need
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legitimacy to function (Lowrey, 2012). They need people to read and trust them as a
prerequisite to informing the public. So, it was not entirely hard to understand why the
CEO wanted to achieve some legitimacy before he asked funders for money as well.
It was not necessarily a poor plan, nor an original one, to first build content and
reputation before focusing more efforts on finances and fundraising. The Gotham Gazette
“initially focused on establishing itself and building up its coverage” and only later
started focusing on sustainability and finding other sources of revenue, but something
went wrong at DataNews.com (Akst, 2005). There were two problems in the CEO’s
approach at DataNews.com. The first problem was not so much in his basic plan to wait
on fundraising but in the lack of any further conception of what the business model
would be and what the organization would look like. It was an undefined plan at best,
with no organizational goals about content or what sort of audience they were trying to
attract or what sort of foundations and people they would eventually ask for funds. Even
if they had not begun fundraising any earlier, but the CEO had developed a business
model—and a vision for the organization—it is likely that the site would have been better
defined and would have been better suited to survival in a turbulent media environment.
The second problem with the CEO’s plan was a lack of communication and
understanding with the funders. The CEO resigned because the organization had
insufficient funds, which meant the funders did not have the patience the CEO had to
wait until a later date to begin bringing in funds. The problem here, though, may not have
been strategic so much as a failure of communication between the CEO and the funders
on how long they were willing to wait for other revenues or whether there was a need for
a more structured plan toward raising funds from other sources.
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There was also some form of organizational inertia at work. That the organization
was only starting to slowly focus on the business side six months after it had begun
publishing was telling. This may have been due to the initial funding, which was built in
to the organization. This large upfront sum of money may have given the CEO—and the
staff—a false sense of security since they knew they could rely on the several million
dollars. This, however, meant that they did not attempt to raise any other sources of
funding, focusing instead on content, which, in the end, worried the funders who gave
DataNews.com its seed money since there was no move toward sustainability. The
funding organization cited the inability to raise funds as one of the reasons the CEO
stepped down, but the CEO may not have done as much to raise funds quickly because he
had the backing of these funders. This reliance on the large sum of initial funding and the
underlying belief that the organization did not need to raise funds anytime soon may have
had other effects as well. When one of the reporters at DataNews.com almost left for a
new job, he said of the new organization he was considering: “They’re not good but
they’re trying to be good. I’ve been at too many places where they’re not trying to be
good—like maybe this job.” This reporter’s impression, at least, was that
DataNews.com’s staff was not trying to excel in any way. He specifically brought up the
Pulitzers, saying: “Like you’re not trying to win a Pulitzer? What’s the point of that?”
Perhaps some of the mediocrity the reporter saw in the organization was due to the fact
that they believed they had steady income from their funders. The staff members at
DataNews.com knew there was a significant amount of money behind the organization
and since they were not worried about getting future grants or raising other sorts of funds
and their leaders rarely gave any sort of feedback, they were not truly held accountable to
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anyone. There was no sense that they had to prove themselves any time soon, and this
bred a complacent attitude, and indeed a sort of inertia.
Even if the lackadaisical attitude toward money may have affected the staff in
terms of the quality of their content, the staff members aside from the CEO and
administrator were completely removed from the business of raising funds, which
reflected the traditional separation of church and state even in an organization where it
made little sense. When asked in interviews if they had any responsibilities in terms of
fundraising or even thought about the financials of the organization, the answer from staff
members was a resounding no. They were not involved with any sort of fundraising and
had not been aware that the site needed more funds anytime soon. The financial side of
the operation was completely divorced from the content side. The separation may have
been at least partially a result of the hiring process. The organization hired solely content
producers, not business people, and so these employees were never thought to be part of
the organization’s fundraising. This was, as previously noted, one strategy for building up
the site’s content before it worried about raising funds. This strict divide was even
evident in the leaders’ titles: The CEO was in charge of finances and the editor was in
charge of editorial functions, and there was no intended overlap between these functions.
But this separation seemed hardly necessary in an organization that had one large funder,
which was concerned with producing a site with quality journalism. There were no
nefarious interests of the advertisers to protect the reporters from. And in interviews, no
one explicitly mentioned the ethical rationale behind this separation; it was merely
understood that editorial staff should have no part in the business concerns of the
organization. This mimicry of traditional practices by a non-traditional news outlet is
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hard to understand practically. Since DataNews.com was a new organization without a
traditional established media counterpart, it was not copying practices that were in place
at its parent institution. Rather, it was copying general journalism guidelines, even as
those guidelines were changing at traditional newsrooms.
Though there did not seem to be an adherence to journalistic ethics at
DataNews.com even with the transfer of some traditional journalistic practices, there
were other ethical concerns at play. The web developers had some ethical reservations
regarding an application they had built. It had been suggested that the organization should
sell access to the data and the application for a fee instead of releasing it for free, but the
web developers responded negatively to this idea. One of the web developers spoke for
the group, saying, “It’s completely against everything in our principles not to make it
open source.” There was a strong ethical code at play at DataNews.com that prevented
asking for money for certain types of work product, but this ethical code was not about
journalism—it was about data and information and came from the web developers and
not the reporters. Thus there was a mix of disciplinary ethical approaches to not making
money at work in the organization.
The separation of editorial and business concerns was also evident in the complete
lack of any mention of money in the office before the CEO’s resignation. Even though
DataNews.com did not have a business side, its editorial side shied away from any talk of
money. Funding for the organization and figuring out a successful business model were
so far removed from the staff members’ identities, whose only job was to focus on
content, that it almost never came up in conversation in any form. One of the only times I
heard money mentioned in the office was when one reporter who was planning on
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leaving his job at DataNews.com told the editor that he was not sure if he would finish an
article by the last day there. “If I get it in after today, it’s on the house,” he told the editor.
This was one of the only times a staff member even touched on money, and it was meant
as a joke. The only other time money was mentioned by the staff at DataNews.com
before the CEO’s resignation was in relation to a freelancer. Though money and business
were only very rarely mentioned in any form by the staff members at DataNews.com
until the CEO stepped down, money was mentioned with reference to the freelancer who
worked for the site. This freelance reporter was working on a specific project about
school budgets for the website. The project required a lot of work from the web
developers who had to build an application and a special landing site for the project.
There was some resentment because the freelancer demanded so much of the web
developers’ time, but much of the resentment was tied to the amount this freelancer was
paid. When one of the web developers reported to the rest of the staff that she was
waiting on the freelancer to deliver some copy changes, the administrator said, “So she’s
going to bill us another 3K?” There was a belief among the staff that they were paying
the freelancer an obscene amount of money, with jokes that the freelancer had eaten up
the organization’s funds and that they should have used the freelance budget to take a trip
to Hawaii instead. The discourse around money related to the freelancer only highlighted
how little conversation about money actually happened at DataNews.com, but it did also
highlight at least some awareness that the organization had a finite budget and that it
should be more careful about how it was spending its money. This was an awareness
rarely shown by the DataNews.com staff.
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Some people in the office were at least thinking about money, though. At the
meeting when the CEO stepped down, two of the web developers said they had some
“money-making schemes that our particular skill set lend to and that help journalism.”
The two had been thinking about ways to raise money and had even put together a list of
possibilities, but they were so far removed from the business side of the organization that
they had never even brought up these ideas before. They said they had not been sure
when the correct time was or who had been the correct person to approach. The staff
members were separated from the financial side of the organization to such an extent that
even when they had ideas about finances, they did not know what to do with those ideas
and instead did nothing. The leaders of the organization talked about finances so rarely
that the web developers thought it might be inappropriate to bring up their money-making
ideas. This was a particularly strong separation between the business and editorial sides,
but it was unclear why this separation existed. Still, it was so ingrained in the staff that
they did not feel comfortable suggesting financial ideas that could help the organization.
The emphasis on editorial needs and not financial needs was also apparent in the
make-up of DataNews.com’s board, which included people whose only expertise was in
journalism, not in finance. “[C]ompanies select directors based on what resources the
company needs, believing that directors can help provide companies with access to
financial and informational resources that can help reduce environmental uncertainty”
(Simmons, 2012, p. 56). Having someone who was more adept at business on the board
may have helped spur DataNews.com toward more actions around raising money and
could have given the staff members more direction and guidance. Indeed, the CEO
mentioned at the beginning of my observations at DataNews.com that he was thinking
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about finding people who specialized in business and finance to sit on the board, but he
was not quite ready even for this. When the administrator suggested they attend a
networking event to find some new board members, the CEO said he first wanted to find
people with a lot of money and woo them. Only after that would he be interested in
fleshing out the board. Even the CEO’s ideas for building a business model were tied to
finding people to make big donations to the organization first. If the board’s make-up
pointed to the separation of editorial and business concerns at DataNews.com, the lack of
any financial experts on the board also pointed to the lack of any business model and
even business vision or goal going forward.
Even as the staff at DataNews.com only rarely discussed money and finances at
their own organization, they also almost never discussed the financial problems that
afflicted the journalism industry. There was one brief discussion about a newspaper’s
new paywall that took place between one of the reporters and a web developer. The
reporter said he thought the paywall was haphazard, without a method to what content
was accessible for free and what content required payment, and the web developer
responded that the paywall was really all about the advertisers, not the readers. But the
conversation ended there, with no discussion about how the paywall affected content or
how newspapers were struggling to make money online. It was as if, in a way, the staff at
DataNews.com saw themselves as removed from the financial struggles of the journalism
industry, even as they perpetuated features of the traditional business model. While other
newspapers had to figure out how to make money online, DataNews.com did not see that
as a problem. They did not worry about money. This, too, may have been a result of the
false security bred by the large initial grant on the part of the staff at DataNews.com. So
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long as they knew there was so much money in the bank, it was hard to relate to the
struggling industry. This also may have been a result of the nonprofit business model.
While DataNews.com was certainly not the only news outlet with such a model, the
business model was still less common than an ad-based or paywall model. This may have
made it harder to relate to other news organizations, which were struggling with very
different business models than the one that ultimately failed at DataNews.com. But at the
same time, it was confusing to see the separation of church and state facet of traditional
newsrooms translated to DataNews.com, even as they did not relate very much to other
journalism organizations in terms of finances.
Perhaps the most curious part of the CEO’s resignation and the actions of the staff
from there on out was that even after the CEO’s resignation, there was no focus on the
company’s business model or how to fix it. In fact, aside from the concern that the staff
members showed for their own jobs, there was no change at all in the actions of staff
members. It was as if they had so internalized the distinction between editorial and
business sides that even when they were told the business side of their organization was
broken, they were unwilling to touch anything regarding money. No editorial practices
were changed, but this is not hard to understand in light of all the reassurances given to
the staff that the site’s work was good. The reassurances the leaders at DataNews.com
gave their staff after the CEO’s resignation were also clear examples of the separation of
editorial and financial concerns. The staff members were continuously convinced by their
leaders that the only problem facing DataNews.com was financial and that the work they
had done was exemplary. The CEO told the staff that his “failure [was] in thinking we
had more money and time,” but that their journalism had been effective. “All the major
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pieces we’ve done are good work,” the CEO said, reassuring his staff that they were not
the problem. He pointed to an award nomination the site received the previous day as
well. He said the task for the future was merely to build other sources of revenue and to
find other funders, though he did not provide any ideas for how they were to accomplish
this. The editor also emphasized that the funders “like our journalism.” And one of the
reporters summarized DataNews.com as a good media outlet that just needs to figure out
how to “monetize.” The editor, too, took the time to assure the staff that “the problem is
with the business development … [and a] lack of strategic synergy between editorial and
business goals,” but the problem was not with the quality of the work put out by the staff.
And, in fact, the funders themselves in their statement about the CEO stepping down also
indicated that the journalism DataNews.com produced was good. The statement
commended the CEO for the meaningful and significant journalism that the site had
produced. This duality of emphasizing the quality of the journalism produced by
DataNews.com while also increasing concern over the lack of funds again reflected the
separation between editorial and business interests. That the organization could be
successful in the work it did while remaining financially unsustainable was an
acknowledgement that those two issues were not tied to one another in any way. The
editorial and financial sides of the organization were so separate that it could be
considered a journalistic success even as the CEO was forced to step down because the
funding for the organization was called into question.
The CEO’s resignation brought money to the forefront. At the meeting in which
the CEO told the staff he was leaving, the main topic of conversation was, unsurprisingly,
finances, and it became clear that the staff knew little about the finances of the
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organization, about what the funders had initially mandated about the organization, or
even where the money actually came from. Staff members asked questions about exactly
which organization the funding was coming from, how much money was left of the initial
seed money, and what sort of work the funders were looking for. They were told that the
money was coming from one organization but was administered through another
organization and there was also a board in place. These multiple layers of people in
charge of the money only added to the confusion at DataNews.com. At this meeting, one
of the reporters asked: “What are we doing and not doing? Are we worried what the
funders are saying about our projects?” The CEO answered, “That’s been the challenge
all along,” but, in fact, this was the first suggestion that the journalists at DataNews.com
should be producing the sort of content that the funders wanted to see as none of the staff
members were even sure what it was that the funders wanted to see. There was no built-in
conduit for the people associated with the grant to give feedback to the staff members and
tell them what sort of publication they were expected to become—the staff members did
not even know who the funders were. While the CEO said that the funders had pushed
some of the agenda of DataNews.com from the beginning, this was not reflected by a
staff who had the autonomy to work on the stories they most desired and who received
little if any feedback.
This highlighted a fundamental flaw in DataNews.com: no vision and no
communication of expectations. Without a business model, there was no plan for what
the organization would accomplish and when. There were no goals and no sense of what
consumer they were serving with what product. No one on staff knew what the funders
wanted to see in terms of journalism, so there was no common understanding of what the
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organization was supposed to be and no shared expectations. The editor said her
understanding of the idea behind the funding was to “demonstrate how can an online
news outfit be financially sustainable. Nobody really addressed the content,” but this was
conjecture and no one was actually sure what the funders wanted. As the funders became
more important and as money became a constant factor, not knowing what the funders
expected was a significant organizational and structural communication flaw. And in fact,
the editor told the staff that the funders had been “talking about [DataNews.com] as a
problem” for a long time, unbeknownst to the staff members who had no idea that their
funders were not pleased. Had the funders communicated their expectations of the
website or communicated their concern to the staff earlier, pre-emptive measures could
have been taken. And although the CEO was framing his stepping down as voluntary,
they were now told that the funders “were not happy” with the CEO. Again, though the
funders had been basically hands-off, they were now asserting their authority, even as
they remained a nameless, faceless entity to a staff who did not know what the funders
expected of them. The staff members also knew that the funders did not know them. As
the editor discussed what their strategy should be moving forward, she emphasized that
she wanted to make sure “we’re all counted,” explaining that the funders and the board
did not personally know the staff members and she wanted to make sure they understood
the staff’s capabilities. Though the editor spun this as an opportunity to introduce
themselves to the funders and sell themselves, that they were virtually unknown to the
funders certainly put them at a disadvantage.
The editor shifted much of the responsibility for the organization after the CEO’s
resignation to the funders. She said that they needed clarity from their board and from
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their funders—from their “fiscal sponsors.” The CEO, too, basically answered all the
questions the staff asked him by saying it was up to the funders. When asked by a
reporter about whether there would be salary cuts, the CEO said he did not think so, but
“pretty much anything’s on the table”—hardly a reassuring statement. This only
emphasized how much was still up in the air as the CEO resigned. The CEO told the staff
that the next questions facing DataNews.com were: “Who’s going to run this thing and
where’s it going,” and though it was clear that these were questions the funders would
need to answer, the staff at the website had no knowledge of the funders who were
responsible for the future of the organization. While in a traditional newsroom the
publisher might not know the individual reporters, this was a small organization with
fewer than 10 staff members and the funders shared the staff’s interest in producing good
journalism. That the funders remained so removed was not helpful or productive and that
they had not produced or insisted on any sort of business model to make their
expectations clear contributed to the lack of vision and conception of what
DataNews.com was supposed to be. Along with the failure of the CEO and the editor,
there was a failure of corporate governance on the part of the funders in not providing
any oversight or guidance.
This led to skepticism and even distrust of the board and the funders, which only
increased as time went on. One reporter said that the board had lots of “secret meetings”
in which they discussed the fate of DataNews.com without the involvement of any of the
staff. The editor said that even though they were being told by the board that the
rethinking of the website was an “open process,” it was not actually being treated as such.
One of the web developers said of the funders that he was “skeptical that they care” about
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the organization. The way the CEO’s resignation was handled and the way the funders
were re-examining the organization without keeping the staff informed led to a difficult
work environment in which the staff did not know what was happening and felt unsure of
themselves and their organization. The administrator said that everything the funders did
was “so cryptic,” indicating her confusion with regard to the funders. The staff also did
not know what sort of money the organization had or how long the organization had to
prove itself. Because the staff did not know the funders who were pulling the strings, it
was easy to lay the blame on them.
Some blame and responsibility was also laid on the board of directors, which can
be used as a significant resource by organizations. But at DataNews.com, the board, too,
was an anonymous entity which the staff did not know and even after the CEO’s
resignation was not called on for advice or help (Morris, et al., 2007; Simmons, 2012).
“[M]edia companies use their boards to gain access to resources, including financial
capital and industry knowledge, to deal with environmental change,” but at
DataNews.com, the board was not utilized in any way at all before or after the CEO’s
resignation (Simmons, 2012, p. 55). The board of directors can be especially helpful to
nonprofits, creating a common vision to guide the organization (Morris, et al., 2007). The
board may not have been able to prevent the CEO’s resignation or help DataNews.com
raise funds, but it might have been able to offer some guidance in terms of the creation of
a vision and goals. Since the CEO was the first leader of the company, he could not have
been groomed for the position in the way that Zhang & Rajagopalan (2006) suggest, but
their research does make clear that preparing a new CEO for the job can be crucial in the
leader’s success. The board never prepared the CEO for the job in any way, never even
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making clear what their expectations were for the CEO or what his job entailed. The
board had been mostly uninvolved before the CEO stepped down, offering no guidance
for the type of news to cover and no benchmarks for money to be raised or site visits to
be had or any other metric for success. So that when the CEO stepped down, talk turned
to how to please a board that had only been at the back of their minds up until that point
and who were basically unknown. Here again, was an instance of lack of basic
communication within the organization and of DataNews.com not taking advantage of
resources that were at its disposal.
Financial issues soon became a regular concern at DataNews.com. Fundraising
was suspended, although since little fundraising was occurring, this did not have much of
an effect on the organization. Still, staff members now worried about money more than
they had previously. The administrator said she spent the first weekend after the CEO’s
resignation applying for jobs, and there was constant worrying among the staff about
losing their jobs. The staff members analyzed whom they thought would get fired first
and who they thought had the best chance of keeping their jobs. One of the web
developers who had been laid off from his previous job shared that experience with the
staff, which seemed to reassure the staff that there was life after being fired. Even small
expenses at DataNews.com were called into question. When one of the web developers
wanted to upgrade a conference-calling program to which they were subscribing so that
more than five people could call in at once, the editor wondered out loud whether it was
“worth spending” the ten dollars to do so. Whereas before the CEO stepped down, money
was almost never discussed in the office, now every expenditure was questioned. When
trying to work out how to package a freelancer’s story, the freelancer suggested she write
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an article to frame the project, and the editor, put her financial concerns upfront: “A lot of
this has to do with money. We’ve already spent more money on this project than we
should have.” Now they had to cut budgets wherever they could. But even in this
transition to talking about financial concerns, there was a sense that there was nothing the
staff could do aside from continue to produce good journalism, which is what they were
constantly being told by the CEO, editor, and funders. Even after the CEO’s resignation,
the expectation was that the business and editorial parts of the newsroom should remain
wholly divided.
DataNews.com was, in a way, in the position of many traditional newspapers in
that it was scrambling for a new business model as the business plan it had been relying
on was showing signs of failure. The editor listed several possibilities for DataNews.com
that had been discussed at a board meeting: It could be collapsed into another news
organization and become an investigative arm of a different, already-existing news site; it
could be absorbed into an organization promoting good government; it could become an
incubator for individual journalists to build their own brands; or it could pick one topic
and become a narrow niche publication. Inherent in all these suggestions was the fact that,
alone, DataNews.com was just not sustainable. They were searching for a business model
that would work when at least part of their initial problem had been that they had no
business model at all. Had they had more of a business model, DataNews.com would
have had a better sense of what they were and what they should be doing. A business
model may also have been able to put into perspective the distinction between
DataNews.com and an advertiser-funded site so they would not have had to carry over
traditional practices that did not work for their organization. A business model may or
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may not have led to more funds in the short time given them by the funders before the
CEO resigned, but it would have put the organization’s goals into perspective in a way
that could have helped both the editorial and business sides of the organization function.
Though there were many unique factors to DataNews.com, its failure to raise
funds past its initial seed money was consistent with many nonprofits news organizations
that begin with a large sum of initial funding. Nonprofit journalism outfits often are
started by large grants, but those grants are generally not renewed, and these seed grants,
while useful to a startup, do not necessarily lead to sustainability in the long-term (Pew,
2013). In fact, foundation funding can often lead to instability, as funds run out or as
organizations are subject to the whims of their one funder (Shaver, 2010). Absent any
other funding sources or even any other plans for obtaining funding, as soon as the fund’s
board and funders became worried about money and were unwilling to be as generous,
the money was not available. Even as some of the problems at DataNews.com were
consistent with the problems other foundation-funded nonprofit news organizations have
faced, the story of DataNews.com may not be a story of the failure of the nonprofit
business model for news so much as it is a story of the failure of a leadership team
unsuited for what was essentially a start-up online news organization and the failure of
communication between the funders and the organization. This is not to say that a
nonprofit model cannot work for online news, only that the focus on very few sources of
funding for online news absent any stated expectations is unlikely to succeed. It puts all
the control in the hands of the funders and also does not provide any back-up plan if that
large initial funding should fall through. Additionally, because DataNews.com was a new
organization, it did not have any capital to fall back on. Indeed, Boschee (2001) warns
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nonprofit entrepreneurs that the “greatest danger is under-capitalization,” and that it is
easy to underestimate how much time and money a new organization will need in order
to reach its goals (p. 17). DataNews.com did not fail financially because it was a new
company, but the “liability of newness” that Stinchcombe (1965) talks about certainly
contributed to that failure by making it more difficult to put into place the plans necessary
to succeed. RadioOnline.com was able to find answers to some of these problems and to
build a nonprofit business model that was more stable.

3.2 RadioOnline.com: The Multiple-Revenue-Stream Nonprofit
Though RadioOnline.com staff members may have mentioned money slightly
more often than staff members at DataNews.com and though the organization did have a
conception of the business model they were developing, they clearly—and admittedly—
had not figured out how to be a self-sustaining online news publication. RadioOnline.com
set out with some planning around ways to embed funding into the site and borrowed
some ideas from its parent station’s model. Still, a lot of funding decisions were learned
on the fly. The executive editor for news and civic engagement explained that the site
was supposed to have been funded by an outside organization, and the intent was for the
organization to be much larger—at least 50 people in the first year. But when this funding
fell through, the radio station decided to continue with the site and had to pick up the
pieces from a different, much more grandiose plan. When the radio station decided to
stand by the project even without the large grant, the station made a decision to try it as
an experiment in the online business, the executive editor said. This provided a useful
mindset for the project as something experimental, something that was still being figured
out from the beginning. Sosna, et al., (2010) point to the “importance of trial-and-error
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learning for business model innovation,” in which new ideas are tried until a successful
mode of operation is found (p. 383). Teece (2010) emphasizes a similar point, saying, “It
is often the case that the right business model may not be apparent up front, and learning
and adjustments will be necessary: new business models represent provisional solutions”
(p. 187). But while it is OK, even laudatory, to experiment with business models until the
correct one is found—and “[t]he right business model is rarely apparent early on in
emerging industries”—it is still important to have a business model that defines the
organization’s product, consumer, and goals (Teece, 2010, p. 178). This approach was
evident at RadioOnline.com, where little was set in stone and new ideas for monetization
were often suggested and attempted. It was an environment in which it was clear that not
everything had been figured out but that they were trying. But the staff of the site also
knew from the beginning that they would need to figure out how to make money. The site
called itself an experiment in hyperlocal journalism, but the executive editor of news and
civic engagement also readily admitted that hyperlocal “doesn’t pay for itself.” So,
without the large grant that was pulled away, the staff knew that they would have to be
financially creative. They did not have a set and long-term business model, but they had
the conception of who they were and what they were attempting.
RadioOnline.com also had a significant advantage over DataNews.com in the
institutional support it got from its parent radio company. Because RadioOnline.com was
part of a much larger organization with more significant coffers and with an interest in
keeping the site alive, RadioOnline.com had a little bit longer to figure out its business
model and to secure more funding. The director of online news said that even if
RadioOnline.com’s grants could potentially run out, the radio station had “some skin in
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the game,” meaning the radio station had invested in the website and had an interest in its
success. Funding was, of course, a concern, but there was an extra layer of support in the
radio station. The director of online news also said that though the site’s funding was not
impressive when compared to many for-profit journalism outfits, RadioOnline.com was
being given a long time to prove itself. Its “runway,” he said, was at once more modest
and longer than any for-profit news site he had encountered. There was also, however, a
disadvantage to being part of a larger organization. The executive editor for news and
civic engagement pointed out that even as they had more infrastructure in place, the radio
station was incredibly expensive to maintain. This meant that much of the organization’s
revenue had to be set aside for the legacy departments, leaving only a small portion of the
funds for the website. Still, even if only a small amount of funds would be left for the
website, at least there was a guarantee of some funds. There was another disadvantage to
being part of a larger station when it came to membership drives: One web producer
pointed out that it was unclear why people would pay membership in the website over the
larger parent radio network. Because the website was a different entity than the radio
station, which had developed a large donor base over years and which had a larger
audience, but was still considered part of the radio station, the web producer thought that
it was more likely that people would donate to the radio station over the website. The
executive editor of news and civic engagement said the move to be branded separately
from the radio station was deliberate—it was a way to build the website that would work
best for RadioOnline.com as quickly as possible without having to sit through a year of
meetings deciding what exactly should be where on the homepage. So, even with the
support of the radio station, it was decided that the website should also be its own entity.
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Even though RadioOnline.com was a separate site in name and brand, it was still
able to make use of its parent site’s resources, most importantly its content, and it was
able to take advantage of the already existing structures that were in place. Hence, even
though it was its own entity in that it could make its own decisions and build its own site,
RadioOnline.com was able to avoid the “liability of newness” that a wholly new
organization cannot avoid (Stinchcombe, 1965). New organizations are more likely to fail,
but even though RadioOnline.com was in some ways a new organization, it was also part
of an established organization. In this way, RadioOnline.com was able to take advantage
of its parent company’s resources but avoid the inertia that does not allow established
companies to change their practices or structures (Stinchcome, 1965). While established
organizations are likely to reflect the organizational structures and practices put in place
when their organization was formed and changing those practices can prove especially
difficult, new organizations are often likely to fail, but in being both a separate entity and
a part of its parent company, RadioOnline.com may have been able to avoid both fates
(Stinchcombe, 1965).
RadioOnline.com had a much more proactive attitude toward monetizing their site
than did DataNews.com. The site hardly had everything figured out, but it did at least
have some plans in place. The executive editor for news and civic engagement said he
spent more than half his time on money and financial plans, though he would have loved
to spend more time on news. The financial side of things might not have been his interest,
but he recognized the necessity of focusing on a business plan for the site. Whereas the
leaders at DataNews.com were strictly defined as financial or editorial managers, at
RadioOnline.com, this was evidence that the traditional wall between editorial and
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business interests was coming down. The executive editor was part of both editorial and
financial decisions. Even as the arm of an established news organization,
RadioOnline.com was able to recognize that the traditional separation might not work as
well in an online environment and there needed to be at least some overlap between news
and finances.
RadioOnline.com’s business model was also more multi-faceted than
DataNews.com’s plan had been and had multiple components. The site was funded by
some large grants and multiple, smaller grants from a wide array of foundations, many of
which were specifically interested in health reporting. The director of online news said
that at the moment the site was 80% grant-funded, but that there was a five-year plan in
place, in which the grants would decrease each year. Grants were a good source of
funding but were not viewed by RadioOnline.com as a stable source of most of its
funding and so the goal was to decrease dependence on the grants. Even so, the director
of online news said they would always be part of the funding package for the site. Also
remarkable was the existence of a five-year plan for funding for RadioOnline.com, which
in and of itself pointed to a more comprehensive business model than was present at
DataNews.com. Over the course of my observations, a grant came through for the site,
and the executive editor for news and civic engagement shared it with the staff,
explaining the specific project for which the grant was directed. Grants were still sought
after and celebrated at RadioOnline.com, but they were not the only source of funding,
and the goal was to depend on them less and less. But perhaps even more striking was the
way this news was openly shared with the staff. When this grant was received, an e-mail
was sent to all of RadioOnline.com’s staff with some information about who the grant
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was from and what it was meant to fund. Inherent in this announcement was the
recognition that the editorial staff should also know where the money was coming from
and should be informed about the financial side of the organization.
There were many other revenue streams that were also part of RadioOnline.com’s
business model. As part of a public radio station, which garnered significant funds from
membership dues, underwriting and membership drives were part of RadioOnline.com’s
fundraising plan. This, however, was acknowledged to be more difficult in a digital world
with a different audience. One of the web developers pointed to online and social media
campaigns meant to promote membership in RadioOnline.com but said she did not think
these campaigns had been very successful in attracting members. The director of online
news, too, called these membership campaigns “modest.” The executive editor for news
and civic engagement acknowledged that the website attracted a “different generation of
audience with different habits and assumptions about content and where it comes from.”
The online audience expected content to be free, he said, and instead of realizing that
content costs money to produce, they think it is the result of a “content fairy or content
stork.” The director of online news mirrored the executive editor when he spoke of how
the idea of membership had to change and how teenagers do not understand that concept,
that they want to “give to get” and do not understand philanthropy. But the director of
online news emphasized that the site intended to hire a dedicated staff member in charge
of using the analytics to figure out whom their readership was and what they could do to
promote membership. The executive editor also expressed interest in finding out what
digital metrics indicated that someone was ready to convert to membership. They were
still trying to figure out who their membership should be and how to persuade people
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who expected news to be free online to donate to the site, but it was very much a part of
the plan. Even though they had not been successful in garnering significant contributions
this way, the editors at RadioOnline.com were not willing to forget about this line of
funds. And inherent in this plan was a sense of who their audience was and what they
were trying to sell to the audience—part of the business plan that Teece (2010) finds so
important.
There was a small amount of advertising on the RadioOnline.com site. Though the
site promised that the advertising would be unobtrusive and tasteful, it was not averse to
using advertising as some part of their business model. Events, too, became a part of the
business model, if nothing else, as a way to show off some of the work they were doing
and attract more philanthropy, the executive editor of news and civic engagement said.
The site also began to test a service that would allow for a portion of any booking on
Orbitz.com to be donated to the site. This was part of a larger charity drive through
Orbitz. Again, this was not expected to make millions for the site, but it was expected to
provide some funds at least—or at least the site was willing to try.
This experimentation with different business models was important because the
correct business model was not readily apparent and committing to a business model
without experimentation could have led to poor choices (Teece, 2010). What was
important, though, was that RadioOnline.com had some sort of plan for a business model
and ingrained in that plan was a conception of the organization. RadioOnline.com was an
organization that wanted to build up membership: This meant it aimed to have a direct
relationship with readers and aimed to be connected to what its readers wanted to read. It
was willing to use advertising, which meant it was not ideologically opposed to making
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money through selling access to its audience but also wanted to limit how obtrusive and
distracting the advertising would be. It was willing to try to access smaller funding
opportunities because it knew not to depend only on one type of funding or even on large
amounts of money. RadioOnline.com sought a stability that would come from multiple
sources of revenue. The business model, though still a work in progress, was able to
define the organization and enable it to take steps toward its goals.
RadioOnline.com also exhibited some signs of the typical divide between editorial
and business functions. In interviews with the staff at RadioOnline.com, the web
producers said that money was not really on their radar and was certainly not a regular
concern. Even the director of online news said financial concerns were not “front and
center” at the site. The web producer in charge of social media said, though, that the
leadership was candid with the news staff about financial issues. “I don’t think [the
executive editor] wants to scare people, but I think he wants to make sure people
understand,” she said. Still, she and the others interviewed emphasized that money was
not an upfront concern at the site, even as they knew it was important. This lack of
concern with financial matters seemed to mirror the pre-CEO-resignation attitude of the
staff at DataNews.com. But in reality, even if money was not an immediate concern at
RadioOnline.com, it was a topic that came up in daily meetings in various forms, even if
just in passing. For example, in a discussion of YouTube at a staff meeting, one of the
web producers said she did not think that the social media content needed to directly
correspond to what was on RadioOnline.com’s website, and the director of online news
agreed, with the caveat that “it needs to monetize itself eventually.” There was not a
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discussion at that meeting about how to monetize their social media content, but the
awareness that this was important was present.
Mentions of money were often to indicate that their capabilities were limited
because of the site’s limited resources. When I introduced myself to the staff and
mentioned that I would be doing some copy-editing, everyone was excited by the
prospect of having a copy editor on staff. Copy-editing was something they valued at
RadioOnline.com—but not enough to pay for it. On one of my last days in the office, the
director of online news asked, “Can you just stay forever and do this for free? … We love
that.” They wanted a copy editor at RadioOnline.com, but it was a question of resources.
They could only have a copy editor if it was free. A reporter mentioned a project she had
been doing that had ended because the funding had run out. This was not a decision about
the worth of the project but rather that even a journalistically worthwhile project needed
to be funded in order to be done. The interns at RadioOnline.com were not provided with
computers on which to work and were instead asked to bring in their own laptops.
Though this was hardly much of an imposition for the student interns who had laptops,
this was framed as a resources issue as well, with the director of online news asking me
to bring my own computer because the organization could not afford to provide
computers to interns, and with the staff expressing excitement that some grant money
coming in meant they could buy a new computer. There were also other resource
shortages. While there were some company cars available to reporters, they were often
taken, leaving reporters to have to borrow cars from other staff members to cover news
stories. When a reporter went to check if a car was available, she came back saying that
obviously there was no available car, and her editor responded, “what a surprise,”
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indicating that this was a usual occurrence. Money was tight, which meant that resources
were limited, and so the importance of figuring out how to make money was emphasized.
Fundraising and monetization may not have been the priority of the staff at
RadioOnline.com, but everyone knew it was a goal—and an incumbent goal. Even while
most staff members said that money was not something they were concerned about, one
web producer said of figuring out how to convert users to members, and thus make some
money from them: “It’s one of the biggest challenges. It’s always on our minds.” Even if
not an immediate concern, the financial side of things and trying to figure out a
combination of revenue streams that would create a sustainable product was very much
something that the staff members at least knew was important. Though the concern about
finances was downplayed and not something the editorial staff was directly responsible
for, the leaders were responsible for both financial and editorial issues, making clear that
the strict separation between the two had been broken. And even the editorial staff
members knew that money was an issue and at least were aware of the need to monetize.
Though they were not deeply involved in the business model, reflecting some hint of the
traditional separation, they were aware of where their funding was coming from and that
they needed to figure out other ways to monetize. The editorial and business roles were
not completely combined, but they were also not completely separate. And though
RadioOnline.com had not figured out what its complete business model would look like,
it had some plans in place and the staff members and leadership were definitely thinking
about what the business model should be. This indicated a greater conception of what the
organization intended to be and led to a shared goal and vision among staff.

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3.3 Online Only News vs. Traditional News
It is impossible to assess the success of the business models at either
DataNews.com or RadioOnline.com since both sites had been operating for only a short
period of time and neither had stabilized and solidified the way it intended to make
money. Neither site truly knew what their final business model would look like. This was
in part due to an evolving landscape in which no one is sure of what a successful business
model for online news will look like. But determining a metric by which to measure the
success of a nonprofit organization presents unique challenges in any situation (Sawhill
& Williamson, 2001). “Nonprofit organizational effectiveness is multidimensional and
will never be reducible to a single measure,” but organizational effectiveness at a
nonprofit must necessarily be about more than revenue and profit margins; it is about
mission impact and the way its goals are being reached (Herman & Renz, 1999, p. 107;
Sawhill & Williamson, 2001). Still, stability and sustainability are of obvious import, and
a “compelling mission, uplifting vision, clear goals, and innovative strategies” are crucial
(Sawhill & Williamson, 2001, p. 385). Having a business model from which to work off
of is indicative of at least beginning the process of creating a vision, goal, and mission,
and RadioOnline.com was far further along in this process, with at least some conception
of what its business model should be and what it was as an organization (Teece, 2010).
The business model requires that deep understanding of the organization, and
DataNews.com’s lack of a business model past its seed funding was indicative of a lack
of thought processes behind what the organization was (Teece, 2010).
Neither newsroom spent a lot of time discussing business models or money, even
as at RadioOnline.com, there were some attempts at monetization. This may have been a
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vestige of traditional journalism in which journalists were simply not responsible for the
financial side of things. Technology may be breaking down the walls between the
editorial and business sides of the newsroom, but there is some difficulty in
acknowledging that (Klinenberg, 2005). The line between advertising and news may be
slowly blurring, as journalists are constantly “crossing boundaries of demarcation that
would not be tolerated at a print newsroom,” but there may still be some reluctance to
cross what was once such an important part of the newsroom (Cawley, 2008, p. 48). So
even as the traditional separation makes little sense at a nonprofit and even less sense at a
new nonprofit that does not have ingrained practices, the separation still existed to some
extent in both newsrooms. “[T]he starting point for the online news and music markets is
the ‘traditional’ offline market,” meaning there is a great deal of mimicry from offline to
online, even when those practices may not be as practical or useful online (Swatman,
Krueger & van der Beek, 2006, p. 63). The church-state divide was so omnipresent at
DataNews.com that no staff members ever talked about money before the CEO’s
resignation and there had been no sense that there was any financial trouble or that
money was something to even worry about. This attitude, however traditional, may not
have a place in an online newsroom, where finances are more complicated and a
sustainable business model has proved elusive. “In the end, media managers cannot
expect to swap their existing business models for nonprofit ones without a fundamental
rethinking of their mission and goals,” and a fundamental rethinking of some of the
traditional journalism practices may also be necessary (Maguire, 2009, p. 131). This lack
of ability to talk about money and finances openly and freely does a disservice to the
organizations. At DataNews.com, the web developers had ideas for ways to make money
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but had not found a time to bring up those ideas. And even though money was not a
constant topic of discussion at RadioOnline.com, there was a sort of transparency with its
staff when it came to financial concerns and funding. Though the staff at neither
organization had a say in how money was spent, the staff at RadioOnline.com was
appraised of the way it was spent, of what sort of money the organization had, and of
what plans there were to raise more money. This provided a certain sense of security in
merely knowing what was being done about money—and that something was being done.
Another consequence of the lack of discussions about funding can be seen at
DataNews.com. The CEO’s resignation, which was explicitly due to a lack of funds, was
a sign that the site was financially foundering, but perhaps most disturbing was that no
one at the site, including the CEO, had seen it coming. The CEO initially titled his
column announcing his resignation “blindsided” and though he changed the title before
the column was published online, the web developers were able to find this version in the
content management system. The CEO had not, in his 20 months at the helm of the
organization, attracted any new funds and had not put in place any sort of business model
and yet was surprised when the board and funders expressed displeasure in his work.
RadioOnline.com, though, was rare among nonprofit news organizations in even having
the time and resources to focus on the business side of the operation. Overwhelmingly,
nonprofits know business and money are problems but do not know what to do about it
nor do they have the resources necessary to figure out what should be done (Pew, 2013).
DataNews.com also presented the difficulties of born-online news outlets in not
having any institutional backing behind them. It is true that this provided DataNews.com
freedom from any institutional expectations or practices, but, in reality, the lack of any
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support was more of a hindrance than a help. DataNews.com was not given enough time
to succeed because it did not have any institutional support and thus needed to prove
itself in such a short time. RadioOnline.com was able to try new types of fundraising and
experiment with different revenue streams precisely because it could rely on the support
of its radio station until it figured some of this out. Of course, this did not provide
RadioOnline.com with unlimited time or unlimited funds, but it did provide some help to
an organization just getting off the ground.
The importance of multiple revenue streams was also evident in the comparison
of these two organizations. DataNews.com’s reliance on initial funding from a single
source left it incredibly vulnerable. Funding can be uncertain for nonprofits, and “one
way these organizations are trying to build financial stability is by diversifying their
revenue streams. But revenue diversity is a work in progress” (Pew, 2013, p. 2). Jarvis
(2010) suggests multiple ways that news organizations could make up non-journalism
revenue streams, including conferences, sales and marketing training, local business
listings, SMS alerts, and coupons and deals. Other possibilities include more access to
customers for advertisers; micropayments; member-donors; and endowments (Shaver,
2010). The Tribune Company attempted to take advantage of non-newspaper revenues,
and the Washington Post Company did this by owning diverse companies, including
Kaplan (Auletta, 1998). Successfully financing nonprofits requires many different pieces
to work together and will likely be different for each organization (Maguire, 2009). But
this takes time to work out. Experimenting until the correct balance of revenue streams is
found can be trying, and business resources are necessary (Pew, 2013). Time and
business-side resources were two things that DataNews.com was lacking. Perhaps with
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more time, they would have started experimenting with other revenue sources and would
have become more sustainable. RadioOnline.com had multiple streams of revenue and
was constantly on the lookout for new ways to monetize content or attract members or
apply for new grants or create something that could be charged for. If one grant were to
be pulled or one fundraising idea were to fail, there would still be other money in their
hands and other ideas for how to continue to raise funds.
RadioOnline.com did not have their business model solidified, but they were at
least attempting to find a workable business model. And in that business model, they had
solidified a conception of their organization that allowed it to find new sources of funding
and new readers. The mere existence of a business model gave RadioOnline.com some
much-needed definition that DataNews.com lacked. The business plan allowed
RadioOnline.com to make further decisions about what to do to seek funding because
they knew what their goals were. Without the business-plan-shaped goals (or the goals-
shaped business plan), DataNews.com was unable to even begin to take the first steps
toward attaining more funding.
There are no easy answers to the question of what business model will provide
financial security for online news. Perhaps there is not a singular business model that will
provide stability. This ethnography certainly did not provide any magic answers to what
the business of online news will look like, but it did provide some guidance. It is clear
that there is little space for the traditional separation of business and editorial concerns in
online news, and the transfer of that divide to online nonprofit newsrooms is an example
of traditional practices unthinkingly being mimicked in venues where they make no sense.
Even if the editorial staff is not directly responsible for fundraising, a healthy awareness
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of the need to raise funds is helpful. This also means that leaders must be transparent with
their staffs about the financial concerns of the organization. Reliance on any one source
of revenue may lead to downfall. Multiple revenue streams mean more stability, and,
finally, institutional support is a huge help to online news. Though it is true that there are
disadvantages to being part of a larger and more traditional newsroom—both financially
and editorially—having the financial backing of a larger institution with more resources
can give an online news site the time it takes to experiment with different business
models and establish itself financially. This does not mean that being part of a larger
organization will alone determine the success of a digital news outfit and that a born-
online news website cannot succeed, only that there are advantages to having that support.
But beyond the actual steps toward a business model, the approach to finances and to
finding a business model, including communication with all involved parties to find
shared expectations and goals, can be as important as the money that is eventually made.
A successful business model is not created in a vacuum and not knowing how long the
organization has, how much money it can rely on, and what sort of news it should be
producing can only lead to organizational failure.

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Chapter 4: Social Media and Building an Audience

Digital journalism developed a “myth of interactivity” in which the expectation
was that journalism would become a bidirectional medium in which journalists and
readers would engage one another in a dialogue and journalists might even become part
of the reporting process (Boczkowski, 2004; Domingo, 2008a). This conception of online
news stood in stark contrast to the pre-Internet attitude to the audience (Robinson, 2011).
The traditional journalistic stance toward the audience has entailed little regard for the
audience, as journalists provide the public the news that the journalist assumes is
important (Gans, 1979). However, this was largely possible because journalists had no
way to know their audience and there was little competition in any individual market
(Gans, 1979; Schudson, 2003). With the transition to digital news, both of these factors
have changed. Journalists have powerful technological tools at their disposal that can
provide much information about who their audience is, and online, a reader can go
anywhere for news, not limited to the media located in their geographic location.
Journalists can find out who their audience is and what sort of news attracts that audience.
They can, then, of course, use that knowledge to produce news that will be most likely to
attract that audience.
But knowledge of the audience is only one tool that new technology provides.
Perhaps even more striking is the ability of the journalist and the reader to interact with
one another online. Boczkowski (2004) calls this “bidirectionality” in the news in which
audience members can communicate with journalists through comments sections and
social media. On paper, journalism has embraced the ability to interact with its audience
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as a way to connect with the reader and to build trust (Domingo, 2008a; Konieczna &
Robinson, 2013; Robinson, 2011). In mission statements and public comments,
newspapers maintain that interactivity is important to them and an important feature of
online news (Konieczna & Robinson, 2013). “Publishers and editors have publically
committed to incorporating interactivity, multimedia, social media, and other digital
cultural artifacts to create ‘better,’ more relevant news products” (Robinson, 2011, p.
1123). Building relationships with readers is often framed as a way to build trust in an
increasingly skeptical audience and as a way to get the audience involved in news
production (Konieczna & Robinson, 2013).
However, even as this opportunity to engage in a dialogue with readers and to
allow readers to contribute to the newsmaking is lauded by news organizations, the
translation of these tools into newsroom practices has been more complicated (Domingo,
2008a; Rebillard & Touboul, 2010). The interactivity myth has not necessarily translated
in meaningful ways to the newsroom (Domingo, 2008a). Newsrooms may voice
commitment to interactivity through mission statements and public comments, but
acknowledging the use and value of technological tools is different than using those tools
to effect dialogue or audience participation. Singer (2014) argues that “the dedication of
newsroom resources to maintaining these feeds suggests newspapers are not simply
facilitating but actively inviting users to publicly assess the value of the content” but this
may miss the point (Singer, 2014, p. 65). News organizations may even put their money
where their mouths are and contribute funds to creating some sort of interactivity, but the
real question becomes how that technology is used and what sort of relationship between
audience and journalist results. Even when interactivity is attempted, the result is often
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one-way interaction in which the reader interacts with the website or reacts to content
rather than a dialogue between reader and journalist (Hille & Bakker, 2013; Robinson,
2011). Social media often becomes to go-to tool for interactivity, but this, too, can lead to
something less than the fulfillment of the myth of interactivity. “Facebook is used as a
distribution channel by most media … and functions as a platform for quick (and
sometimes rude) opinion exchange for users. Contribution to reporting or the
interpretation of news is virtually non-existent” (Hille & Bakker, 2013, p. 678). Social
media, which may seem an ideal venue to enact more interaction between journalist and
the audience, does not necessarily need to be used that way. It becomes dependent on
how the news organizations choose to use the technology, and the overwhelming result
has not been full interactivity, despite the myth.
The reason the myth of interactivity has failed to be translated into reality in so
many news organizations is complex and is tied to ethics and routines that are embedded
into the practice of American journalism (Domingo, 2008a; Singer, 2014). Even as
journalists “embraced interactivity as a crucial feature of their work … the professional
culture … made them perceive audience participation as a problem to manage rather than
a benefit for the news product” (Domingo, 2008a, p. 689). The conception of the
journalist as the information-giver and gatekeeper is challenged if the audience becomes
a collaborator. The “ethical ideologies” that have become professional journalism are
well-suited for reporting and fact-finding but are not well-suited for other types of
communication—like communication with the audience (Singer, 2014). And because
many of the ideas of interactivity do not “fit in the standardized news production
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routines,” online newsrooms fail to develop them to a great extent (Domingo, 2008a).
The conflict between traditional news values and interactivity becomes a hurdle.
There is also a sort of turf war at play as journalists worry that too much
interactivity will allow “citizen journalists” to take their place. Some of the inertia
involved in the development of interactivity in newsrooms can be attributed to journalists
trying to demarcate clear boundaries between themselves—the professionals—and the
audience—the amateurs who cannot be trusted (Singer, 2014). “While theorists and
advocates of journalism 2.0 enthuse about user-generated content, there remains the
complex question of just how editorial territory is to be shared” (Rebillard & Touboul,
2010, p. 331). Will the journalists and audience work in concert? What will the value of
the journalist be if others are also contributing? Interactivity raises new questions for the
journalist that are difficult to address, and the way the introduction of interactivity calls
into question the journalist’s role can have real implications for the way the technology is
adopted and adapted by the news organization (Majchrzak, et al., 2000). “[R]edefining
the relationship between news consumer and news producer will take more than the
technological ability to improve two-way communication. It will take an organisational
and conceptual redefinition by the media as well” (King, 1998, p. 31). The availability of
the technology does not necessarily mean it will be taken advantage of to further interact
with the audience, and there are many different ways to use the technology to accomplish
different functions.
In order to make use of these technologies to interact with the audience, a
fundamental shift about how the audience is viewed and the journalist’s role is necessary.
But to say that technology is not being used to create interactivity is also too simplistic.
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Singer (2014) suggests we consider audience involvement as a “continuum of journalistic
control over content decisions.” This is a much more nuanced role than the
acknowledgement that digital media could be bi-directional. What is necessary is an
assessment of what features organizations take advantage of, how much audience input
they actually have, and how different news organizations have made different use of the
technology. And there are, in fact, myriad choices different news organizations can make
about using technology for interactivity. “There are substantial differences in how basic
Facebook features are used, even when media from the same publisher are compared”
(Hille & Bakker, 2013, p. 677). Though the same technology for interactivity is available
to newsrooms and though they even may have the same, or at least a similar, stated goal
of interactivity, structuration tells us that the outcome in different organizations can be
drastically different (Barley, 1986; DeSanctis & Poole, 199).
DataNews.com and RadioOnline.com had two different approaches to their
audiences, reflected in their different uses of the same social media technology.
DataNews.com, though an online-native publication, reflected a more traditional stance
toward the audience, in which it was not particularly interested in that audience, while
RadioOnline.com took a more progressive approach to audience, making a great effort to
attract and engage that audience. But what was perhaps even more interesting was that
DataNews.com did not subscribe to the myth of interactivity, presenting a step backward
even for a traditional news outfit. Inherent in the way each organization chose to use the
technology was its views on journalism as a profession, the role of the audience, and even
its opinion on technology use in general. This chapter will first discuss
RadioOnline.com’s approach to audience, then contrast it with the more traditional
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approach of DataNews.com and then explore why these two publications may have had
such different approaches to their audiences and to the technology of social media and
what the ramifications of those approaches may be.

4.1 RadioOnline.com: Focusing on the Audience—But to What End?
As a branch of a public radio station, RadioOnline.com was acutely focused on
building an audience. Since public radio gets much of its funding from individual donors,
there was a general awareness that building an audience that would be willing to become
members and donate was important to the long-term longevity of the outfit. Though in
interviews with staff members, it became clear that the site had not quite figured out how
to transform a reading audience into a donating audience, it was clear that they believed
the first step was to get readers and the second step was to monetize those readers. This
manifested itself in discussions of articles and whether they would attract readers and in
discussions of what social media approaches would work best for specific articles.
Additionally, a constant eye was kept on web metrics, so that success and failure of
different articles and features could be measured and so the site would know what was
most attractive to the audience. Though building an audience itself was important,
comments and social media engagement were also important to RadioOnline.com. On
paper, the site was definitely interested in reader engagement. The RadioOnline.com
website claimed that it was interested in readers’ questions, concerns, and feedback and
sought engagement and participation from that audience. The site even called itself a
“community.” This, by itself, of course is no proof that audience engagement was
actually important to the staff of RadioOnline.com in their daily interactions, but the
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discussion on how many comments and shares articles got and what drew readers to be
more interested in certain articles or features over others indicated a true concern with
audience engagement. It was unclear, however, that this interest in the audience was at all
tied to the myth of interactivity so much as it was tied toward money.
One example the executive editor for news and civic engagement pointed to as
proof that RadioOnline.com was concerned about the audience was that they had a web
producer who was specifically in charge of social media and that she was young but was
“ordering me around.” He said that though there were a lot of “old heads” on the staff
who had been in journalism for a long time, young people and a young perspective were
also important, and he emphasized that the producer in charge of social media was “one
of the most important people in the organization.” The hiring of a staff member to be in
charge of social media gave audience engagement a set place within RadioOnline.com. It
meant that engaging with the audience was not going to be haphazard but was meant to
take a central role in how they made news. This was a strategic decision to let the
audience have some effect on their newsmaking, and the structural decision within the
organization of creating a position for this ensured it would happen. Domingo (2008a)
found that it was difficult to fit interactivity into already existing newsroom routines and
so it often did not happen to a large extent. By creating a position for a staff member
whose responsibility was social media, it forced the issue into their routines.
The importance of the audience was also instilled into RadioOnline.com’s
routines in the form of weekly discussions of web metrics. Web metrics of how many
viewers and readers they had in various media were discussed weekly at the Monday
morning staff meeting, and there was discussion surrounding these metrics about what it
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was that attracted readers to specific articles and viewers to specific videos or photo
slideshows. Staff members were responsible for different reports at these meetings: One
staff member was responsible for talking about video and photo slideshows, one for
social media, and one for the op-eds. This was a concerted effort to track the audience in
multiple facets. RadioOnline.com’s staff wanted to publish articles that would be read
and that would attract an audience. The executive editor of news and civic engagement
emphasized how important these metrics were in understanding their audience. He told
me in an interview that the site did a lot of market research and was looking to hire a full-
time employee dedicated to analytics, which was “absolutely essential as far as we’re
concerned.”
Knowing the audience was incredibly important to RadioOnline.com, and they
took advantage of the web metrics technology to know what their audience liked to read.
But the reason these metrics were important seemed to be tied to gathering as large an
audience as possible. This was evident in congratulatory e-mails sent out to the staff
when a particular story attracted a particularly large number of readers and the praising of
articles with descriptions such as “a traffic-getter” or having “tremendous legs.”
Discussions of content often circled back to discussions that were truly about web traffic
and audience numbers. When the director of online news said he was worried about
losing all the writing interns at the end of the summer, he specifically said the loss of
content might lead to a loss of traffic. Content was directly tied to traffic and audience
numbers, and content from the interns was valued because it brought more traffic to the
site. A collaboration with another news site was also framed as particularly beneficial for
RadioOnline.com because it was leading more traffic to their site, not because it was
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providing more or better articles for their readers. What most measured success for
RadioOnline.com in many ways was attracting as many people as possible to its content.
Whereas subscription numbers were traditionally deliberately kept away from the
journalists and even web metrics were being kept away from journalists at some online
newspapers, here the journalists were concerned on a minute and detailed level with their
readership numbers (Lowrey, 2012).
The focus on audience and traffic also led the web producers to the conclusion
that they did not necessarily know what their audience wanted and were not particularly
good at predicting what the audience would want to read. The director of online news
remarked about how “counter-intuitive” it was to him that stories that were not as current
might be popular. Having come from traditional media, where the priority is put on
getting news out as fast as possible, he said, he would not have though that a weeks-old
story would get any readers but that maybe immediacy was less important online or at
least on their site. What this meant for the staff of RadioOnline.com was that they should
focus on new and different angles instead of speed in getting their articles published.
Another surprise was found in the report by a web developer that a feature they were
running as a collaboration with another site was getting a significant amount of traffic.
The director of online news said he was surprised about this, that he thought the specific
feature was esoteric and would not get much traffic, but it had exceeded his expectations.
One web producer responded, saying, “Things that I thought would do well, didn’t do
well, so I was kind of surprised.” One of the web producers pointed out a popular video
in a different meeting. He said that it was a terrible video, the “least interesting thing I
can imagine watching on the web,” and yet it was popular with RadioOnline.com’s
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audience. And when an article about bagels did not attract much audience interest, the
director of online news said he thought that was strange because he thought this was the
sort of article their audience liked, but then said he did not really know what the audience
liked. A lot of the conventional wisdom about the audience was, in fact, wrong, and
analyzing what actually attracted readers became ever more important. The metrics
became a crutch as their own confidence in knowing what the readers wanted—or what
journalism demanded—diminished. If the data RadioOnline.com collected could tell
them what articles their readers preferred and the goal was to attract more readers who
would eventually become members, then the natural step was to start publishing more of,
if not exclusively, the stories that readers were interested in.
This only further emphasized the importance of collecting the user data so as to
learn about the audience to analyze what attracted readers and to adjust accordingly. And
this data was used to change newsroom practices in order to create more popular content.
In one weekly report about YouTube numbers, a web producer reported that though
RadioOnline.com published fewer articles than normal in the past week, their video-
viewing numbers had held steady. A discussion ensued, suggesting that videos on the site
might have a “long tail,” and that this revelation should change the way videos were
assigned and produced for the site. If videos were known to be viewed well into the
future, then the web producers should look for videos that were more features and less
newsy, so that they would be relevant for longer. “When assigning videos, we really need
to think about the long-term evergreen stuff instead of the quick turnaround,” a web
producer said. Often there was a rush to get videos up as soon as possible, reflecting a
traditional need for immediacy in journalism, but perhaps the focus should be on quality,
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not speed, since what mattered was long-term viability, she said. And that, in turn, should
affect how videos were assigned, as well. The videos that get assigned should also be
ones that were less time-sensitive. The web producers at RadioOnline.com were able to
parlay the data they had on their audience to better understand what type of content they
should be producing to attract that audience.
Traditionally, journalists had assumed that their readers were like them and
reflected their own values and interests, but it became clear as user data was collected
that this was not the case at RadioOnline.com (Gans, 1979). When discussing whether to
publish a satirical piece about the Pope tweeting, the staff was worried that it might be
offensive to their audience. Though the staff itself agreed that the piece was funny and
whimsical and clearly just a joke, there was an extra check-in about it—an extra level of
sensitivity about whether the piece might offend any of their readers. They knew that
they had readers who were not exactly like them and might not exactly reflect their
values and they wanted to make sure not to offend those readers with content that they as
editors enjoyed. This was not the only time it was mentioned at RadioOnline.com that the
readers of the site might not quite resemble the staff at the outfit. When discussing an op-
ed they might publish on the issue of neighborhood schools, which had been an
especially contentious issue at that time, one of the web producers prefaced her remarks
on the op-ed by saying, “I’m not a city resident.” This was an indication that she was
uncomfortable judging an op-ed on the issue, since it was not an issue that impacted her
directly. Not being a city resident meant she was necessarily disconnected in at least one
way from the audience, and she was not sure she would have the same opinions as the
readers would.
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The director of online news emphasized that audience preference had not changed
with the availability of the data, rather now journalists were beginning to figure out what
had been their readers’ preferences all along. “A lot of what we’re discovering has been
true all along it’s just that nobody knew it,” he said. What RadioOnline.com was learning
about its audience was not new at all, but the Internet provided the tools to find out what
had always been true about the audience, which then allowed journalists to provide the
sort of content that readers wanted. This was a stark role reversal for an editor—instead
of deciding what the reader should want to read, he was letting the readers decide what
they wanted to read and then providing them with more of that sort of content. If
traditionally the journalist had been the gatekeeper, deciding what information the public
should receive, in this conception, the journalist was something else, merely giving the
people what the people wanted to know. This was not lost on the director of online news,
who told me in an interview that with the use of web metrics and traffic data, “We know
a lot more about what people are interested [in and the] ways in which people are drawn
in” to news articles, and noted that this knowledge “challenges a lot of things” about the
way news has traditionally been produced.
One of the most important aspects of RadioOnline.com’s audience strategy was
that it was, in fact, a formed strategy instead of a free-for-all with no guiding principles as
existed in other newsrooms (Hille & Bakker, 2013). This was especially clear in
RadioOnline.com’s approach to social media. Social media traffic was also tracked and
those numbers were also considered important. When RadioOnline.com reached 16,000
Facebook followers, the web producer in charge of social media was congratulated.
Multiple metrics were used to indicate success on social media. When the web producer
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in charge of social media gave her report on Facebook, her list of “most engaging
Facebook posts” listed articles that were shared, commented on, and liked,
acknowledging that all these things indicated audience interest. Each social media site
that was used by RadioOnline.com was discussed separately, listing what was popular on
the different sites. Inherent in this differentiation of the discussion based on each venue
was an acknowledgement that each social media site was distinct. For instance, one web
developer noted in her report that “the sex trade is super-popular on our Facebook.” And
another web developer noted that she had been tweaking the Twitter tags, trying to find
out how to use them best to maximize traffic. She knew a different approach would be
important for Twitter, since Twitter was a different tool than other forms of social media,
and she was working to maximize traffic specifically on that site. The discussion
surrounding social media was nuanced. It was not about throwing all their content up on
all the social media sites and seeing what would stick. It was about putting on each site
what would work best on that specific network and what would attract the audience of
those social networks. In an interview with the web producer in charge of social media,
she specifically said that RadioOnline.com chose to focus on Facebook, Twitter, and
YouTube in terms of social media because they felt that those were the social networks
best suited to their content and where RadioOnline.com’s “built-in audience” already was.
This was a decision made based on the content they produced and where they thought
they could attract the most readers. These were strategic decisions aimed toward
attracting the most readers and indicated an understanding of the technology involved.
But even as the journalists at RadioOnline.com tracked their audience to learn
more about what their readers wanted—and, importantly, made editorial decisions based
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on this information—this did not reflect any use of technology for the purposes of
interactivity or even concern with interactivity. While wanting to know the audience and
making editorial decisions based on that knowledge is a large step from traditional
newsrooms, it was still a long way from the bi-directionality heralded in the myth of
interactivity (Boczkowski, 2004; Domingo, 2008a). There was, however, some effort in
engaging the audience, though that effort was mostly geared toward engaging the
audience with one another and not with the reporters. This reflected Hille & Bakker’s
(2013) finding that “[a]udience participation—if present—has not yet become a dialogue
between media and the audience, but is generally limited to a one-way ride: audiences
react to media-produced content and in most cases the road ends there” (p. 666). Social
media may allow for interactivity, but the result is often uni-directional.
Comments both on social media and directly on their articles were tracked by
RadioOnline.com and were seen as important. In the rundown of the previous week,
“thoughtful comments” and controversial comments were mentioned. But analyzing these
comments was a way to know their readers and what got their readers interested and
engaged in the topics covered, not necessarily a way for the journalists to interact with
those readers. They wanted their readers engaged with one another, not engaged with the
journalists. When one web producer brought up some racist comments that the site had
been getting, the director of online news said that he found those comments “encouraging
in a perverse way” because it meant they were tapping into a new audience, distinct from
the radio station. He said those sorts of comments were not from the typical public radio
listener, which meant that they were attracting new readers. The comment was a way to
ascertain who was reading their site. The staff at RadioOnline.com also made clear that
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they wanted their articles to garner a lot of comments, not just traffic. An article about
adults celebrating birthdays would hopefully bring in a lot of comments, one web
producer said. And when another article was lauded as a “good talker piece,” it meant
that the potential to draw out comments and get a conversation going among readers was
viewed as something positive—but, again, not something that necessarily involved
dialogue with the journalists. There was at least some emphasis on “good” comments,
which made note that this was not merely a numbers game. One web producer said,
“Whenever you put ‘immigration’ in a headline, you’re asking people to comment
without reading,” indicating that inflammatory comments that were not related to the
article were not the sort of comments they wanted on their site. They wanted comments
that indicated reader engagement with their content, that furthered a conversation—but
that conversation was not necessarily with the reporter. This was engagement with other
readers more than interactivity between reporters and readers.
And, in fact, the goal of getting readers engaged might have had less to do with
the myth of interactivity than with attracting members. The editor in charge of social
media specifically said that her goal was to “get more people interacting [by making]
things as interesting as possible” but then to transfer them to RadioOnline.com members.
This also came up in discussions about bringing frequent commenters from Facebook to
their own site. One of the web producers said that RadioOnline.com had started to focus
on social media sites because the editors realized that there was a huge potential audience
there, but there was a low fulfillment rate from Facebook readers, the executive editor for
news and civic engagement said, and the goal was always to bring the audience from
social media back to RadioOnline.com. This, too, though was framed in terms of
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fulfillment, in terms of turning readers into members. Certainly getting people engaged in
conversations with one another and building the sort of “community” their mission
statement suggested could create some loyalty to the site, which could, in turn, translate
into membership numbers. But if this was the goal of audience engagement it had little to
do with the values of interactivity and everything to do with money.
This attitude toward the audience—but also toward converting the audience into
members—was evident in RadioOnline.com’s social media strategy as well. There was
always an awareness that even while social media was important and even while there
was a focus on social media, the audience could only be monetized on
RadioOnline.com’s own site. So, there was a constant pressure to figure out how to bring
the audience from social media to RadioOnline.com’s own site, and it was frustrating
when their social media presence seemed more popular than their own site. The public
radio model of building an audience that would be so loyal as to donate to the news site
and as to become a member of that site required an audience on the site, not on Facebook
or YouTube, and since RadioOnline.com had its roots in the form of its parent station in
public radio, there was an underlying awareness, even as they worked hard to build up an
engaged audience on social media, that eventually they would need to figure out a way to
turn that engaged social media audience into donating members.
Though these methods of audience engagement mostly involved one-directional
communication between journalist and audience—which merely perpetuated the standard
mode of operation for journalism, though using new technology to do so—there were
some minor instances of more dialogic interaction between reporters and readers at
RadioOnline.com. When a reporter was looking for a specific type of defunct radio player,
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another reporter suggested asking their audience on social media if anyone had the
product in question. The web producers were excited about the idea, saying it was a “fun
way to get people excited” about the eventual story that involved the record player.
Putting out good content was important, but so was getting their audience excited and
invested in their content, and they were happy to find new and creative ways to do that.
The web producers at RadioOnline.com also used their audience to check their own
accuracy. When a story about public schools in the city was published, the article got
many comments calling out errors and inaccuracies in the article. Though eventually, the
editors only found minor problems with the article, they used the comments to re-
examine the article and to ensure that the information therein was correct. This was
because the web producers at RadioOnline.com recognized that their audience might have
expertise and knowledge that the reporters did not and they were willing to use that
expertise to improve their own articles. The reporter who wrote the schools story also
wrote an article in which he explained his reporting on the article. This was one way a
reporter could respond to comments on his or her articles and also engage with readers
and explain how the newsmaking process worked. When reporters interacted with their
readers in the comments section, it was noted as a positive development, but it did not
happen very often, as proven by it being called out when it did happen. The web producer
who was in charge of the op-eds on RadioOnline.com was especially proactive in
engaging with readers in new ways. When the web developer saw especially prolific
commenters on the site, he personally contacted them to ask them to contribute articles to
“keep the conversation going,” in his words. This was a good way to solicit new content
for the site but also to let the readers know someone was reading their comments and that
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those contributions were valued. This web producer also followed up with reporters who
had a lot of comments on their articles and let the reporters know that he could get them
contact information for the readers, in a small way thus encouraging them to get in
contact with those readers. The staff at RadioOnline.com was slowly breaking some of
the barriers between journalist and audience, but this was still not quite taking advantage
of all the “bi-directionality” that the Internet affords.
Ironically, RadioOnline.com promoted more interactivity between journalist and
audience offline than online. The site occasionally ran forums or other events focused on
some of the most popular topics from the website. The executive editor for news and
civic engagement told me in an interview that with these forums, “My goal is to drive a
stake through the heart of the panel discussion,” emphasizing that he thought these
forums could encourage two-way dialogue between journalists and reporters and that he
did not want them to merely be the journalists lecturing the audience in real life. Another
way the staff at RadioOnline.com interacted with readers and attempted to engage with
them was through reporters and editors holding “office hours” for people who lived in
their coverage areas. When an editor moved to a different role at RadioOnline.com and
left her coverage area, a reader even mentioned these office hours in the comments to the
article announcing that she was leaving, saying she would miss the opportunity to talk
with the reporter. These office hours were a way to make the reporters available to the
communities they covered and to let the people in their coverage area know they cared.
It was obvious from the efforts I observed that RadioOnline.com was very much
interested in attracting an audience and in having that audience engage with their content
online. Still, there was always an underlying knowledge that the next step was to
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monetize these audience numbers in some way. Traffic was not by itself valuable if there
was not a way to convert these readers and viewers into dollars. This was most evident
with the site’s social media efforts, in which there was a constant pull to figure out how
to get them back to RadioOnline.com’s website. There was no way to monetize a
Facebook reader on Facebook, and so there was a push to figure out how to get that
audience and those comments on their own site. Past the need to attract as much traffic as
possible in order to eventually monetize that traffic, steps were taken at RadioOnline.com
to engage the audience, but the conversation still rarely involved the journalist and was
mostly about engaging the audience with one another. Even then, the efforts were geared,
ultimately, toward profit not toward an idealistic conversation that could take place
between reporter and reader. Though its website promoted the idea of interactivity, in
practice, it did not seem to be a priority, and the interactivity at RadioOnline.com did not
quite fit into the ideal model of journalist and reader in conversation. Still, the audience
was important at RadioOnline.com, and the use of technology and formation of routines
was proof that there was effort being put into the audience.

4.2 DataNews.com: If You Build It, They Will Come
Whereas RadioOnline.com had an audience and social media strategy, though
they did not seem to be exactly geared toward the myth of interactivity, DataNews.com
did not truly have a strategy about the media at all and did not in practice see any value in
interactivity with the audience, though if questioned, lip service was paid to audience
engagement. DataNews.com’s approach to garnering an audience was to produce good
journalism and hope that an audience would follow. Audience was almost never
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mentioned at the site, and there certainly was no general awareness that content was
being created with an audience in mind or to attract an audience. The content there was
being created in a vacuum, where the technology that was available to track and attract
the audience, such as web metrics and social media, were not used. This was almost as if
DataNews.com was reflecting the values and practices of a newsroom from a different,
pre-digital era, in which the audience could be wholly ignored. This was especially
surprising coming from an online-only publication, which did not have the excuse of
difficulty incorporating interactivity into its already existing routines (Domingo, 2008a).
DataNews.com created its routines when tools to engage the audience were available and
chose not to use them. The site had made a deliberate decision not to be interested in the
audience and not to engage with that audience despite the importance accorded to those
interactions in digital journalism (Domingo, 2008a).
DataNews.com’s website indicates, like most other online newspapers’ mission
statements, that they are trying to engage their audience, talking about the importance of
engagement with one’s community and holding government accountable (Konieczna &
Robinson, 2013, p. 2). But this may have been the only concern for the audience visible
anywhere at the site. When specifically asked if they thought audience engagement was
important, staff members would say they did, but this was not at all evident in practice.
Though the site had comment forums set up, both for individual articles and for specific
topics, there were no comments left on the topic forums and comments were rarely left on
individual articles. Social media was used sparsely and haphazardly at best. According to
information released when DataNews.com was first conceived, the main theme of the
initial planning process for DataNews.com was to promote civic engagement by
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increasing debate, but this initial conception of the site was not reflected in its daily
operations. Hille & Bakker (2013) found that many media organizations had rather
“passive strategies” toward social media, in which they used social media but were not
heavily involved in engaging the audience. Even this would be a generous description of
DataNews.com, which rarely used its social media accounts in any form. There was little
evidence of any formulated strategy toward the audience.
On my first day at DataNews.com, I asked the CEO who was the intended
audience for the site, and his first response was “people who give a shit,” though he did
go on to explain that the goal was to get people engaged with the news they covered and
to fill in “news deserts” of areas that do not get much coverage. But the CEO pondered
aloud how to go about actually doing that. He rhetorically asked how to get people
interested, how to get people engaged. The site had been in operation for six months and
the CEO was still wondering how to go about getting the audience engaged. There was
no plan involved, no strategy at work, though he did recognize it as a goal. If interactivity
and audience engagement were goals at DataNews.com, they were ones that were not
marked by any plan to achieve them.
DataNews.com did not track any sort of traffic metrics that would tell them how
many readers they had or where readers were coming from or what stories were
particularly interesting to the readers. Though these metrics do not by themselves build
an audience, of course, a necessary step to building an audience is keeping track of how
large your audience is and of who is being attracted to what and which articles are most
popular. It is hard to build an audience without that knowledge. Yet, when I asked staff
members, both web developers and reporters, in interviews who their audience was, they
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overwhelmingly did not have a sense. They said that they felt they had not engaged with
their readers, and they were not aware of any data about who was reading the site. It was
not that this information was impossible to track, but that DataNews.com chose not to
focus on this. The CEO at least knew the numbers for how much traffic the site got, as he
told me that a very popular story on DataNews.com would get about 1,000 views, so
some of this data was being tracked but was not readily shared with the staff. The CEO
told me in an interview that he viewed it as an advantage that DataNews.com “didn’t
have to be a slave” to a lot of the things corporate journalism must do, using the concern
about traffic and page views as a prime example, which may explain why these metrics
were never discussed. The CEO said he wanted to produce news that was in the public
interest, not drive traffic. It was not clear that the staff had any interest in these numbers,
even further indicating how little audience seemed to matter at the publication. The staff
members kept on producing content but with seemingly no interest in whom, if anyone,
was reading that content. This point of view about the audience reflected a more
traditional journalistic approach to audience, but an approach that existed before audience
data could be collected. At DataNews.com, they were ignoring readily available data,
which seemed all the more counter-intuitive considering they were a news outfit
dedicated to publishing and analyzing data.
But even without tracking the audience and thus not having any actual
information about what the audience looked like, there was an underlying assumption
that there was an audience and that they appreciated the work DataNews.com was
producing. At the meeting in which the CEO stepped down, the editor took some time to
thank the staff for the work they had done. She said: “What we’ve produced is great.
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People in the community would say it’s valuable.” There was no proof provided that
there even was a significant community audience for DataNews.com, let alone that the
audience found their work valuable, but nevertheless there was an assumption that they
were producing valuable work to a community audience that appreciated it. Another
example of this expectation was when one of the reporters had a question about what to
put in the caption of a photo because she knew the names of all but one of the individuals
in the photo, the CEO said to label the last person as “unidentified,” saying that it was
possible that one or two hours later, they could get someone writing in to identify him.
This was an instance of the CEO counting on an audience to contribute data to the site,
but the audience had hardly proved it was even there, let along engaged enough to supply
information. Crowd-sourcing information from users, especially in the realm of
corrections, for instance, has been proven to work for some journalism outfits, but this
simply cannot work without having a solid audience that is invested enough in the
publication to diligently read the site and provide information, and there was no
indication that DataNews.com had these things.
If anything, DataNews.com staff had evidence to the contrary in some interviews
that were done by one of the reporters and one of the web developers for an article on
transparency and open data in government, two of the topics that the website focused on.
When they came back from these interviewers, one of the other reporters asked how the
interviews went, and the web developer responded that mostly people “don’t give a shit.”
What they found in asking commuters in their city about the topic that spurred the
creation of DataNews.com was that the people did not seem to care very much about the
issue. This, of course, is not to say that DataNews.com did not have a ready audience of
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people in its city that did care about open data and government that the reporter and web
developer merely did not find in their interviews of commuters. But it was clear that they
had no intimate knowledge of this audience nor any initiative to find the people who did
give a shit and attract them to the site. They had no reason to believe they were being
widely read.
There were some extremely small-scale efforts at DataNews.com to attract an
audience, though neither revolved around substantive news. When one reporter was
working on an article about a young professionals group in the city in which they were
based, it became clear from her discussions with the editor that the goal of this article was
not to cover a newsworthy topic but to attempt to attract the attention of some of these
young professionals and to convince them to become involved somehow with
DataNews.com. This strategy placed a premium on a type of reader instead of on getting
as many readers as possible. DataNews.com’s business model was not ad-based nor
membership-based, so it did have the leeway to focus first on attracting high-profile
readers since traffic was not of utmost concern, but one of the metrics for success for
online news remains the number of readers so it seemed odd to be so deeply uninterested
in that. Wanting to attract high-profile readers, who can then get out the word about the
site to a lot more people is a strategy that could work, but focusing on producing content
that would pander to such a small demographic tied up the reporter in covering a story
that had very little appeal.
There was one other instance of extended conversation at DataNews.com of
attracting a large audience. Before the July Fourth holiday, some of the web developers
worked on a data visualization about the historical weather in the city on the holiday. One
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of the web developers explained to the editor that the visualization was “an easy thing
that gets passed around on social media.” This was content they were producing not
because there was any inherent news value in it but because it could attract an audience.
But even then, the focus was on having larger websites pick up the data visualization, as
opposed to attracting an audience on their own or to their own site. The editor said she
would work on having some larger websites pick up this content and later said the staff
should take bets on the odds of a specific website picking it up. This was an odd focus
because it almost viewed the audience as other news websites instead of readers. The
goal was to attract larger websites rather than attract readers themselves. There was no
concerted effort at DataNews.com to leverage their social media to attract readers on their
own, nor was there any discussion of how many readers they could attract—the bet was
about whether a larger site would link to their content.
Social media was used at DataNews.com but only sporadically and almost
completely utilized as a content distribution system, furthering technology’s use as a one-
way conduit instead of using technology for any sort of interactivity (Robinson, 2011).
Links to articles by DataNews.com were sometimes posted on Facebook and Twitter, and
Twitter was also used to send out links to articles from other venues that might be
interesting to their readers (or who they imagined their readers to be). In fact, the most
consistent use of Twitter was to send out links to non-DataNews.com articles in the
evenings. In interviews, many staff members brought this up as a poor use of technology
and laid the blame solidly on the editor, whose idea this feature was, but the feature
continued until the CEO’s resignation. Instead of promoting their own content, the
Twitter feature promoted outside content, thus not giving DataNews.com any benefit in
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terms of traffic from the feature, and tweeting this feature in the evening, as people were
leaving their offices indicated a fundamental misunderstanding of the audience.
Boczkowski (2010) found that as far as online consumption of news goes, people are
most likely to read the news at work and not at home. What this means, practically, is that
the online news cycle should change to meet that demand, providing new content
throughout the workday (Boczkowski, 2010). By tweeting content in the evening, as
people left their offices where they consume news, DataNews.com was almost
guaranteeing that the tweet would be ignored that day and then overshadowed by more
recent content by the time readers got to work the next morning. This feature—the only
regularly occurring social media content at DataNews.com—ignored the way the
audience consumes digital news, which may have been at least partially a result of not
having the web traffic numbers to know when the audience was most active online and
partially the result of not having a well thought-out strategy for social media.
The advantages afforded by technology were misunderstood by DataNews.com in
the way they viewed their news cycle, as well. The CEO told me in an interview that he
viewed being online-only as a “luxury” in that they did not have to publish an article until
they were ready and they could figure out the best way to tell a story. DataNews.com, he
said, had “no compulsion to rush something out because we had a deadline,” though he
noted that this was antithetical to the way many people viewed online news as immediate.
Though this seemed, on the surface, like using technology to serve the audience better,
the end result was that they were so unrushed that there were no deadlines and content
was rarely updated on the website. There was no publishing schedule. This meant readers
did not know when to check for new content—especially combined with the sporadic use
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of social media to tell readers when new content was available. Domingo (2008c) also
noted that immediacy was one of the most heralded facets of online news, calling it an
online journalism “utopia,” an ideal of the new journalism. “[I]mmediacy displaced the
ideal of in-depth reporting from the daily routines” (Domingo, 2008c, p. 118).
DataNews.com, though, did not only not live up to the ideal but did not value the ideal,
further aligning itself with pre-Internet print media.
Just as there was no initiative at DataNews.com to attract an audience, there was
also no focus on getting readers engaged with the site or on promoting any sort of
interactivity. I never heard any discussion there about getting more user comments,
getting more people to retweet their articles, or to talk about the site on Facebook.
Though the CEO had said they were looking for an audience of people who cared, there
was little focus on doing anything to find those people or to get them engaged in
conversation on the site. There were few comments left on DataNews.com’s own site,
and comments on their social media accounts were also rare. The staff at DataNews.com
sometimes used their own social media accounts to promote articles or data visualizations
that DataNews.com had published, but this, too, was mostly one-directional and just
geared at getting the stories out, not encouraging any sort of discussion surrounding the
content (Robinson, 2011). Despite the lack of action on social media, in interviews the
staff told me that the only engagement with readers they had felt at DataNews.com was
on social media. One of the web developers told me that he had some interaction with
readers on Twitter, when they would ask for specific features in the apps the web
developers had created or ask about the data that the web developers had used.
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It was unclear if the lack of engagement on social media was because engaging
readers was not a priority or because it was something they had not figured out how to do
at DataNews.com. When two of the web developers had a conversation about a news
story on a different news website that had gotten 40 comments, they were in awe of the
way this story had garnered so many comments. They discussed for a few minutes how
an article could get so many comments, but the discussion was short-lived and there was
never any discussion about how DataNews.com could produce a news article with that
many comments. Though the web developers thought that getting 40 comments on an
article was impressive and they at least expressed minor interest in how to do that, there
was nothing more to the discussion than that—no sense that they should try something to
get that many comments or even that there was anything they could do to get that many
comments. At best, having an engaged audience that leaves comments on articles was
seen as something well out of the reach of DataNews.com. At worst, it was not even seen
as a goal for the site, even as there was acknowledgement among staff members at
DataNews.com that reader engagement was supposed to be a goal. When I asked one of
the reporters if she felt engaged with her readers, she responded that there had not been
the engagement with the public that was supposed to happen. Reader engagement was
supposed to happen at DataNews.com but no one knew how to reach that goal—and no
one was trying particularly hard.
Another factor in the poor use of social media to encourage engagement was in
the lack of strategy or any sort of guidance for social media, specifically. DataNews.com
had a Facebook account and a Twitter account, and though both were used sporadically,
there was no social media strategy in place nor was anyone specific in charge of social
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media. Articles were sometimes posted on these venues, but sometimes they were not,
and there was no method involved. In this, they resembled many other online newspapers.
“Media do not seem to have a clear strategy on using Facebook, which leads to an
underperformance on the social media platform with low participation and minimal
interaction,” which is more akin to content distribution than participation of any sort
(Hille & Bakker, 2013, p. 663). One of the reporters told me in an interview that the CEO
and editor were the ones doing most of the tweeting, but anyone on staff could tweet
under the DataNews.com account. This was difficult because no one felt individually
responsible for the tweeting, which meant it often fell by the wayside. This lack of
responsibility was also reflected in comments by one of the web developers who told me
in an interview that there was not enough of a focus at DataNews.com on social media,
but that it was “not my job.” She said she had encouraged the CEO to hire a dedicated
social media editor. The CEO’s thinking about social media, she said, was more
consistent with an older approach to the Internet and digital news. His attitude was, “I can
be on Twitter,” and that was not enough. He was uninterested in hiring someone to be in
charge of social media and since it was not her responsibility, she dropped the topic.
Even as there seemed to be little if any effort to engage an online audience or
even attract an online audience, one of the reporters spent a large amount of time
engaging a real-life audience. The senior reporter at DataNews.com organized
community forums that focused on pressing issues in the city. He spent time finding a
venue, finding speakers, finding a television partner, and setting up for the event. In my
first few weeks at DataNews.com, it seemed that most of his time was devoted to the
forum, which took priority over his own reporting and writing. This event was publicized
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via Twitter and Facebook and paper flyers in the neighborhood that was the topic of the
forum. On the day of the event, the senior reporter barely spent any time in the office,
instead spending his time attending to last-minute forum details. Though the senior
reporter, like the rest of DataNews.com, seemed relatively uninterested in their online
audience, he was certainly interested in attracting a crowd to this event. And in the days
leading up to the event, the organizing reporter worried in the office about how many
would come to the event, obsessing over making sure they would fill the room, and when
the Facebook sign-up for the event was not working, he went out of his way to consult
with the CEO and to fix it as soon as possible. Additionally, it was clear that this event
revolved around an engaged audience. It was a forum meant for an engaged audience and
to engage a greater audience. The event also included a long question-and-answer period
where the audience could engage with the speakers. Attracting a large, engaged audience
to this event was definitely seen as a priority; transferring this real-life audience to an
online audience, however, was not even discussed by the staff at DataNews.com. At the
event, a few mentions were made of the site and a banner with the site’s name was hung
behind the dais of speakers, but that was basically the only mention of the site. There was
no promotion of the site among an audience that did, to use the CEO’s words, “give a
shit.” And, in fact, when I asked one of the web developers in an interview about reader
engagement at DataNews.com, he pointed to the forums as the only true instance of
reader engagement at the site. The people who made an effort to come to an event about
their community in the evening were most definitely the sort of people who could be an
engaged audience of people who cared about the city, but there seemed to be no effort of
transforming the forum audience into a web audience.
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When I asked the CEO about DataNews.com’s audience after his resignation, he
said that had they been given more time, they could have built more reader engagement.
He said reader engagement was the “hardest piece of all of this” and something that
builds over time. Getting readers engaged, he said, takes time and requires
experimentation and rethinking. While this may be true, there was not any
experimentation in the realm of user engagement while I was at DataNews.com. Instead,
despite a mission statement to the contrary, the staff had a tacit understanding that the
audience was not important, so there was no tracking the audience, no use of web metrics
to understand how many site visits they were getting or which articles were most popular,
and certainly no effort to get the audience engaged online in any way. It was a passive
strategy of creating content and assuming that the content alone would attract the readers
without having to do much else. This may have worked in the pre-Internet era when
competition and the availability of news were much more limited, but it was wishful
thinking at best in digital news. While the myth of interactivity may not have been fully
realized at many online news sites, the myth did not even exist here. DataNews.com
reflected traditional print values of not giving any regard to the audience, which was
especially surprising for an online-native publication; these views and practices were not
perpetuated by an old organization with old routines in place, but DataNews.com chose
not to take advantage of the available technology to attract, track, and engage an audience.
The role shift that is necessary for online journalists had not even been approached at
DataNews.com (King, 1998).

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4.3 Traditional vs. Born-Online News
DataNews.com and RadioOnline.com had different approaches to their audience,
which resulted in different uses of the same technology. While Domingo (2008a) found
that “Surveys of online journalists clearly show that they strongly adhere to the myth of
interactivity,” DataNews.com did not seem to adhere to this myth in anything past its
mission statement, and RadioOnline.com journalists did subscribe to the myth, but their
goal, in the end, was more about monetizing the audience than actively engaging to better
inform citizens. That the myth of interactivity has not been fully realized is not
necessarily surprising, but what may be surprising is that RadioOnline.com, which was
the arm of traditional radio station, proved more committed to that relatively newfangled
myth that came into being with the Internet than did DataNews.com, an online-native
publication, which reflected a basically pre-Internet approach to the audience. Where
RadioOnline.com obsessively collected data about the audience and used it to intimately
know the audience and to learn what attracted readers on its own site and on various
types of social media, DataNews.com showed little if any interest in learning who its
audience was. It was a born-online publication with the technology of tracking its traffic
and knowing its audience readily available, but it made an active choice to create news
without that knowledge. RadioOnline.com kept track of their audience numbers,
discussed them regularly, and changed their content accordingly. The audience was
important to the news outfit and was regularly considered.
RadioOnline.com built a concern for the audience into its routines and
organizational structures. Whereas RadioOnline.com deliberately placed the reporting of
traffic numbers into its weekly meetings and had a staff member specifically assigned to
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social media, there was no one assigned these roles at DataNews.com. There was no
infrastructure set up to track these numbers. The jobs at DataNews.com were narrowly
defined as reporter and web developer. These jobs did not assign anyone the
responsibility to track user data. The roles at the website were completely built around
producing content, not leaving room for anyone to be concerned with audience numbers,
which meant no one took on that responsibility in any meaningful way. The lack of
responsibility was also clear in DataNews.com’s haphazard approach to social media.
Sometimes articles got tweeted and posted to Facebook, sometimes not; sometimes they
got posted right away, sometimes days later. No one was in charge, which meant it was
that much more difficult to build an audience of any sort, but when a web developer
suggested that the CEO hire someone to be responsible for social media, he was
uninterested, instead leaving the focus on content.
In this respect, RadioOnline.com started with a built-in advantage in that it
received much of its content from its parent radio station, which already had a large staff
of reporters. The staff of RadioOnline.com could focus on the audience because they
already had a base of content. This is one major advantage of the traditional news site
that moves online as opposed to the born-online news site. Some of the infrastructure,
some of the content, already exists. While my interviews with many of the staff members
at RadioOnline.com made it clear that they did not expect their audience to transfer from
the radio station to the website, they were able to transfer much of the content (though it
should be noted that there was a challenge involved in turning radio content into web
content). This meant they could focus on audience since they already had a clear source
of content. DataNews.com had to focus both on building a website with quality content
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and on attracting an audience to that content. Their mistake may have been in how they
balanced those two or perhaps they truly did need more time. DataNews.com had to start
from the beginning and build an entirely new organization in a way that RadioOnline.com
did not. Still, this is only a partial explanation. If it explains some of the practical
applications to how the audience was approached, it does not answer the underlying
assumptions about the import of the audience (or lack thereof) in this approach. In
reverting to a pre-Internet approach to the audience, DataNews.com ignored many recent
changes in journalism and ignored the shifting of roles and routines that was happening in
many other news organizations.
One significant difference between the two sites was in the use of technology.
RadioOnline.com heavily relied upon web metric data, which DataNews.com chose not to
use at all. And DataNews.com used social media almost exclusively for content
management, while RadioOnline.com chose to attempt more engagement on these same
platforms, trying to encourage conversation. These were examples of the way the same
technology can be adopted differently by different institutions (Barley, 1986). The way
social media should be used by journalism was not clear, and so while one site
appropriated it merely as a way to get content out to more people, the other used it to
attempt to get a conversation going among readers. These different appropriations of the
technology reflected different approaches to journalism in general, in which
RadioOnline.com emphasized the importance of the audience while DataNews.com
emphasized the importance of the content exclusively.
Another explanation for this difference in emphasis may have been financially
motivated. While DataNews.com expected to be funded by large funders,
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RadioOnline.com took its model from its parent radio station and expected membership
to make up at least part of its funding. Because DataNews.com’s funding was not at all
dependent on the audience, there was less reason to worry about the audience. So that
while producing content for an absent audience may be folly, it was not as clear to the
staff at DataNews.com that a large, engaged audience was a necessary factor in their
continued survival. At RadioOnline.com because the website was part of a network that
got much of its funding from donors, the importance of building an interested audience
was part of the organization’s mentality. Though it was not immediately necessary to
make money off of the audience, it was apparent to the staff members that they would
eventually need to convince their audience to donate to the website, which meant having
an audience that was interested and engaged enough to actually contribute was of the
utmost importance. The need to eventually monetize the audience did come up at
RadioOnline.com, and in at least some instances, it seemed that it might be the primary
goal in engaging with the audience.
Both sites in some ways were better at engaging with readers offline, as if using
the new technology for that purpose was more difficult than reverting to traditional
events to engage with the audience. Both sites held forums where readers and reporters
could engage with one another over important issues. This may have been partially a
function of not fully building engagement into their routines, even at RadioOnline.com.
While making time on a daily basis for engaging with the audience may have been
difficult, making time for rare events was easier and did not necessitate a reworking of
the entire daily routine of journalism. Still, these events showed a concern with audience
engagement that was not translated back into the digital presence of either organization,
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but especially not of DataNews.com. This may be proof that while the roles of journalists
are changing and interactivity or some involvement with the audience is developing at
many news sites, there is still reluctance to completely embrace the myth of interactivity.
An even greater question revolves around the utility of the myth of interactivity.
Despite the emphasis on engagement, interactivity, and bidirectionality, these may not be
all positive to journalism. “Audience participation competes with the desire to inform,”
forcing newspapers to choose content or audience, when what the audience wants is not
the content the news outfit wants to produce (MacGregor, 2007, p. 295). In fact, this
notion of engagement and interactivity contradicts some journalistic values.
“Participatory ideals do not mesh well with set notions of professional distance in
journalism; notions which tend to exclude rather than to include,” and journalists have
been convinced that this division is what creates good news (Deuze, Bruns & Neuberger,
2007, p.335). If knowing what the audience wants to read means a news site publishes
more entertainment news than serious news, the end result is surely not better journalism.
As one of the reporters at RadioOnline.com said: “Stories that are really good, well-
researched, and bummers don’t do well. … I’m not saying we shouldn’t do them …
they’re important.” This is to say that the myth of interactivity, which has in many senses
become the standard for online news—so much so that DataNews.com is an outlier in not
emphasizing audience engagement—may have a downside as well. Too much knowledge
about the audience and too much emphasis on the audience may come at the cost of
higher-quality journalism. Of course, there may be a happy compromise in which
journalists and the audience can interact without a negative impact on the news produced,
but that has not necessarily been found yet, and knowing all the traffic data may make it
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hard for editors to justify funding expensive stories that they think are important but that
are less likely to attract the audience. These worries, however, are also not an excuse for
completely ignoring useful technology as in the case of DataNews.com. Structuration
tells us that just because technology exists does not mean that its use is predetermined.
The myth of interactivity was one interpretation of the effect that new technology could
have on journalism. It need not be a mandate for how online journalism should look.

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Chapter 5: A Survey on Online Journalism, the Audience, and Financial Health

While the previous chapters discuss detailed ethnographic research into two
online news organizations, this chapter focuses on a survey of online journalists. The
ethnographic data is able to provide an in-depth look into the ways two online
publications are doing digital journalism and how various practices are succeeding or
failing. Ethnographic data are deep, however, this survey gives a broader look at the
practice of online news and the ways online journalists approach their audiences. It is
meant to complement the ethnographic data, addressing some of the questions that were
raised by my field research at DataNews.com and RadioOnline.com. Some of the larger
questions that came up in my ethnographic work concerned the ways online reporters
approach their audiences, the business model possibilities for the future of journalism,
and, of course, the increasing use of technology and the resulting clashes between old and
new journalistic practices. These are the broad areas in which digital newsmaking differs
most from traditional journalism, or, at the very least, where there may be the opportunity
for great change.
The first part of the survey was interested in how journalists think of their
audience and in how they engage—or do not engage—with that audience. Online
journalism deviates significantly from traditional journalism in that the reporter can
actually engage with the audience. The reporter can comment, Facebook, tweet, blog, e-
mail—and the reporter can access all this feedback and respond. What was once a
unidirectional medium, with the reporter providing news to a public, is now bidirectional,
as the audience has gained the ability to talk back (Boczkowski, 2004). The web
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producers at RadioOnline.com, for example, did make use of some of the technological
applications that allow them to engage with readers on multiple different social media
platforms and this was an important part of their daily duties. But this stood in stark
contrast to the situation at DataNews.com, where social media was irregularly updated
and web metrics were ignored. Whether or not online news has truly become an
interactive medium and whether that means that the journalist actually engages with the
audience just because he or she can is unclear. The first part of the survey was designed
to find out whether a broader swath of journalists regularly take advantage of the ability
to communicate and engage with readers.
While it may be relatively obvious why audience members must trust their
journalistic sources in order for a news organization to do a good job of informing its
audience, Tsfati (2003) puts forth a strong argument as to why it is also important for
journalists to know that their audience trusts them. “[F]eeling trusted matters for those
receiving trust,” (p. 274) he argues, pointing out that, in fact, having a trusting audience is
central to the job journalists do. “[A]udience trust plays a vital role in the occupational
culture of journalists. This trust is an aim, an important tool, an asset, and the rationale
behind most professional credos” (Tsfati, 2003, p. 276). After all, if the audience does not
trust the information that reporters put forth, there is no worth to that information and the
journalist is unable to inform the public. The very job a journalist does is thus dependent
on audience trust. An important question, then, is whether online journalists think their
readers trust them even as they recognize the growing importance of their audience in the
production of journalism.
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RQ1: Is the audience more important to online journalists than the trust of that
audience?
Though traditional journalism dictated that journalists needed to care about and
build their audience’s trust in them, it paradoxically also included a lack of desire to
know much about the audience or to engage with the audience in any meaningful way. Of
course, these attitudes originated at a time when it was impossible for the journalist to
engage with more than a very small number of the individuals in their audience. With the
new tools available, do journalists actually make use of them to engage with their
audience or does online news remain a basically unidirectional medium, with journalists
providing information to an audience with whom they do not really converse? The
questions here are about business practices as well as an attitudinal shift in the way
journalists view their audience. The attitudinal shift acknowledges that there is also value
and importance in engaging with that audience. That comments, Facebook, Twitter, and
blogs are an important part of journalism is certainly something that is talked about and
emphasized within journalism circles, but whether online journalists have actually
internalized the importance of engagement is unclear (Bowman & Willis, 2003).
RQ2: Do online journalists acknowledge the importance of the audience to a
greater extent than the importance of engaging with that audience?
Acknowledging the importance of the audience is simply the first step—digital
journalists must actually then engage with the audience. While journalists may indicate
that engagement with their audience is important to them, they may not actually engage
with their audience in meaningful ways. It is perhaps more difficult to actually make
those changes in order to interact with the audience because making those changes
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requires both an attitudinal shift and a shift in practices. And in an age in which online
journalists are expected to be their own reporters, editors, photographers, and
videographers, interacting with the audience may get lost in the shuffle of activities
produced by a twenty-four-seven news hole.
RQ2.1: Will online journalists acknowledge the importance of their audience and
of engaging with that audience but not actually do much to engage with that audience?
Digital tools provide the ability to track many different kids of metrics: for
example, the number of people click on a given headline, how much time readers spend
on a specific article, and what sorts of articles attract the most readers. Though journalists
have to some extent been slow to use these tools, it is easy to see both the value and
danger in such tools, which could allow a reporter or a news outfit to cater the news to
exactly what the reader wants to see, even if that is sensationalism and celebrity gossip
(Jarvis, 2009). But these tools can also allow for a deeper understanding and knowledge
of the audience, which can, in turn, lead to better, more nuanced engagement with the
audience. Indeed, one of the uses for data on website metrics is to engage with users, to
understand what the readers are reading on which medium. Still, using the data also
requires a shift in thinking. The journalist must think: Not only is the audience important
and not only do I know things about the audience I could not have known previously but
I can use that data to engage with my audience. I hypothesize that even among online
journalists who track these metrics and know the data, audience engagement is low. Use
of those metrics is, again, another step, and having the data does not mean using it.
RQ2.2: Is journalist awareness of user metrics and data greater than their
engagement with the audience.
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The ethnographic data discussed in previous chapters explored the awareness by
the online journalists of financial problems and issues at their organizations and found
that many online journalists were not immediately concerned with their organizations’
financial situations, or, at the very least, spent little office time discussing finances.
Though, traditionally, journalists have left the financial side of the newsmaking operation
to the advertising staff, online news operations, specifically small ones with very few
staff members, may not have the luxury of ignoring how the operation remains
financially viable. Still, my fieldwork found that, to different extents, both newsrooms
displayed some sense of the traditional separation between newsmaking and the
moneymaking that accompanies it. It was somewhat surprising that so little discussion of
finances took place in these newsrooms as financial issues loom large for the journalism
industry as a whole and thus the question of business models and financial solvency
become ever more pressing. This survey sought to examine whether finances were
discussed among online journalists and whether they were confident in the financial
sustainability of their own organizations and of the industry as a whole.
For online journalists who occupy a tenuous space in an industry in transition, it
may be difficult to ignore the financial woes that journalism is facing. Still, it may be
easier to separate the problems of the industry from the problems within one’s own
organization. In my fieldwork, in fact, I once observed staff members at DataNews.com
talking about the construction and features of different paywalls and the ways newspapers
were just trying to figure out how to make money on an online product. Though these
staff members were in fact employed by an organization that was to some extent trying to
figure out how to make money on an online product, there was no comparison to their
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own workplace, nor was the discussion brought back to any of the financial woes at their
own organization. Perhaps even as journalists are able to talk about financial issues in
journalism in the abstract, bringing the discussion home to their own organization is still
taboo.
RQ3: Do online journalists discuss financial issues in the journalism industry as
a whole more than financial issues at their own organizations?
One can also ask how journalists feel about the financial health of their
organizations and of journalism as a whole. Are journalists confident in the future of
journalism? Do they think that the industry is financially viable in the long term? This
survey sought to find out how confident online journalists are in the financial future of
their industry.
RQ4: How confident are online journalists in the future financial sustainability of
their industry?
One of the focuses of this research project is to discover whether online
journalism is distinct from more traditional journalism. Journalism has traditionally had a
strict code of ethics and a structured understanding of professionalism. In other words,
journalism had specific standards, mostly revolving around accuracy. With the new
opportunities that are available in a digital world, other values have been added, such as
engaging in dialogue with the public over news. As these other values are added, digital
journalists must decide how to balance the different concerns, and much of the criticism
of online news revolves around lower standards of accuracy in the online product as
journalists try to attract more audience members and more comments. Online journalists,
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the critics would suggest, have chosen to focus on the audience over the more traditional
news values.
RQ5: Do online journalists put more emphasis on the new journalistic values
related to conversing with the public than the old journalistic values related to accuracy?

Method
This survey, which can be seen in Appendix A, was made up of three different
scales. The first scale was related to audience trust and audience engagement. The
audience trust items were adapted from Tsfati’s (2004) work on journalists and their
audience. His audience trust factor included two items that made up a “joint perceived
trust measure.” This measure included an item on the audience’s general trust of
journalism and on the audience’s particular trust of the journalism outfit the journalist
belonged to, which were moderately correlated (r=.29, p<.001). A third item was added
to indicate whether the journalist thought the audience was important. The audience
engagement items were based on possible ways in which journalists could interact with
their readers. It also included a write-in section to ask for any other ways in which
engagement with the audience occurred. There were few other means of engagement
listed, indicating that the survey questions captured the bulk of the ways in which online
journalists engage with their audience. The different means of engagement and
interactivity—Facebook, Twitter, comments sections, offline dialogue with readers—
reflected different conceptions of what engagement could mean.
The second scale focused on the financial health of the industry and of the
organization. Questions were taken from the Pew report on nonprofit journalists (2013).
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That survey focused solely on nonprofit journalists, but these questions could apply to a
broader cross-section of organizations. Questions focused both on whether financial
health was discussed and on whether the journalists were confident in the financial
solvency of their organization and of journalism in general. The original statistical data
for that survey was not available.
The third scale tested online journalists’ commitment to traditional journalistic
values, mostly surrounding accuracy. The questions were adapted from the Society of
Professional Journalists’ Code of Ethics (2010). Since these items were not taken from a
previously tested survey, a pilot was conducted. Sixteen journalists, five of whom
identified as print and online journalists and the rest of whom identified as print
journalists, took the pilot survey. Participants came from many sections of the paper,
including arts and entertainment, copy-editing, news, and sports. This meant a diverse
cross-section of journalists was obtained. Though the initial Cronbach’s alpha was
above .9, any items with correlation under .8 were also eliminated since the high
Cronbach’s alpha indicated that the survey could be shortened. This left Cronbach’s
alpha at .984. Factor analysis was then conducted to analyze the validity of the scale.
Three factors with eigenvalues above one were extracted, but it was clear from the scree
plot that the first factor explained most of the variance and the other two factors were not
cohesive. So only the first factor, which clearly measured journalistic ethics, was used.
All three scales, then, were developed with previous research in mind, and
piloting was conducted when items were not taken from previously tested scales. The
data were cleaned to eliminate any obvious outliers. And the Cronbach’s Alpha values, as
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listed in the results section, for all three scales were within the recommended values to
deem the scales reliable.
Demographic data were also collected, and respondents were asked for their role
in their organization. Questions were all presented with a 7-point Likert scale and a N/A
option.
This study sought to survey online-only journalists. For the purposes of this study,
I used Jones’ (2009) definition of journalism referring to an “iron core” of news in the
public interest. Online journalists were identified by e-mailing the managers at the online
startups listed by the Columbia Journalism Review (Columbia Journalism Review, 2014).
This is a comprehensive list of online news startups and, so, was a good place to find
online-only journalists. Journalism outfits that had some public-interest bent were chosen,
however, niche publications that focused on areas such as sports or entertainment were
excluded from this study. Publications with only one employee on staff were also
excluded because the study was meant for at least a small group of core staff and would
not be applicable to a single founder/manager. But the staffs of most of these publications
were small, listed by the Columbia Journalism Review site as having 2-5 people on staff.
The sites contacted ranged from hyperlocal to student-run publications to slightly larger
investigative outfits. Publications that had any sort of non-online news product were also
excluded as the goal here was to survey online-only journalists. Anonymity was
guaranteed and no identifying information about the organization or the respondent was
collected.
The actual response rate can only be estimated because it is not known how many
of the managers actually sent the e-mail to their staff members and how many staff
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members the survey link actually went to. E-mails requesting participation were sent to
130 organizations. The Columbia Journalism Review database (2013) indicated that the
vast majority of these organizations had 2-5 staff members, so an average of 3.5 staff
members was assumed, providing an estimate of a possible 455 people who could have
received the link to the survey. One-hundred-ninety-two surveys were begun, putting the
response rate at approximately 43%. Since the Pew (2013) nonprofit survey targeted a
similar population and used similar methods, its 54% response rate was used as a baseline
expected rate. The 43% response rate is lower than Pew’s rate but this can be explained
by the fact that it is unknown how many of the e-mails were actually forwarded to the
staff members and by the fact that Pew’s name recognition may garner it some added
attention. Out of the 192 surveys that were begun, there were 138 usable surveys, for a
completion rate of approximately 71%. Nonetheless, by social science standards of
organizational surveys, the response and completion rates are quite good.
The manager—editor-in-chief, managing editor, or publisher in most cases—was
contacted at each chosen outfit by e-mail. The e-mail explained a bit about the research
and asked the manager to forward the link to the survey to the staff members of the given
organization. Follow-up e-mails were also sent, again requesting that the manager again
send the link to his or her staff members. In some cases, where an e-mail address for a
manager could not be found, a general site alias was used. Contact forms on an
organization’s website were not used.
Descriptive statistics were collected. The data were not normally distributed, as
the responses were heavily weighted toward the high ends of the scales, so Wilcoxon
tests were run to test the research questions where applicable.
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Results
The average age of the respondents, all of whom worked at online-only news
startups, was 41. The sample was 57.36% male and 42.64% female. The sample was
drastically skewed in terms of race as 89.76% of the respondents who provided their race
were white. Four-years of college was the highest level of education completed by
55.97% of the respondents, and 29.85% of respondents had a Master’s degree.
Because this survey included new items based on the qualitative data, exploratory
factor analysis was used to analyze its structure. Factors were extracted from each scale
using principal component analysis and were then rotated using Varimax rotation. Factor
loadings can be seen in Table 1.

Table 1
Correlations among Audience Factors and Audience Items

Factors Items
1 2 3 4
1. Engagement with the Audience
Items

I regularly respond to comments on my
articles.
.634 .398 -.273 .294
I regularly correspond with my readers
over e-mail.
.806 .102 .121 .084
I regularly correspond with my readers
on Facebook.

.697 .314 .026 .258
I regularly correspond with my readers
on Twitter.
.722 .097 .103 -.043
I regularly engage with my readers at
events.
.785 -.066 .144 .199

2. Awareness of Metrics Items
I know how many page views my
articles get.
.021 .892 .064 -.001
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I know how many links my articles get. .130 .774 .107 .127
I know page-view statistics for my
news site as a whole.
.055 .844 .065 .046
I regularly read the comments on my
articles.
.329 .624 -.139 .018

3. Audience Trust Items
My audience is very trusting of the
journalistic work of the news
organization I work for.
.113 .050 .885 .094
My audience is very trusting of my
journalistic work.
.107 .058 .897 .128

4. Audience Importance Items
My audience is important to me. .093 -.029 .223 .886
Engaging with my audience is
important to me.
.263 .183 .024 .855

The Kaiser-Guttman rule was applied, so factors were extracted if eigenvalues
were over 1 and four factors were extracted from the first questionnaire. Those factors
were: importance of audience (Cronbach’s Alpha = .801, eigenvalue = 1.19), audience
trust (Cronbach’s Alpha = .832, eigenvalue = 1.66), engagement with the audience
(Cronbach’s Alpha = .824, eigenvalue = 4.34), and awareness of traffic metrics
(Cronbach’s Alpha = .798, eigenvalue = 2.10). This structure is in line with the initial
composition of the survey items. Means and standard deviations for the factors on the
first scale can be seen in Table 2.

Table 2
Means and Standard Deviations for Audience Factors

Factor Mean Standard
Deviation

Scale 1: Audience
Engagement with Audience 4.09 1.61
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Awareness of Audience Metrics 5.10 1.58
Audience Trust 5.80 1.05
Audience Importance 6.28 1.02
All factors were measured on 7-point Likert scales, so all values are out of seven.

To answer RQ1, a Wilcoxon test was conducted to evaluate whether online
journalists showed greater concern for the importance of their audience or their
audience’s trust in them. The results indicated a significant difference, z = -4.52, p < .01.
The mean of the ranks in favor of audience trust was 43.43, while the mean of the ranks
in favor of audience importance was 43.76. This meant that even while online reporters
recognized the value in the audience trusting them, they thought the audience was more
important than was that trust.
RQ2 asked whether there was a difference between how important online
journalists felt the audience was versus engaging with that audience. A Wilcoxon test was
conducted and the results indicated a significant difference, z = -8.90, p < .01. The mean
of the ranks in favor of audience importance was 56.96, while the mean of the ranks in
favor of audience engagement was 16.88. This meant that even as online journalists value
their audience, they were far less concerned with engaging with that audience.
I explored in RQ2.1 whether those who stated that the audience was important
also reported that they actively engaged with the audience. The Wilcoxon test indicated
there was a significant difference, z = -8.66, p < .01. The mean of the ranks in favor of
acknowledging the importance of audience engagement was 56.90, while the mean of the
ranks in favor of taking actions to engage with the audience was 22.33. Thus an
acknowledgement of the importance of audience engagement was not the same as
actually engaging with that audience.
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RQ2.2 explored whether the journalists reported that tracking audience data and
possessing a large amount of knowledge about the audience was perceived to be more
important than would actual engagement with that audience. The Wilcoxon test indicated
there was a significant difference, z = -5.00, p < .01. The mean of the ranks in favor of
knowledge of audience metrics was 59.59, while the mean of the ranks that indicated
audience engagement was 48.07. Obtaining knowledge about the audience was perceived
as more important than engaging with the audience.
In order to answer RQ3 and RQ4, a scale focusing on financial issues in
newsrooms was used and two factors were extracted. The factor loadings can be seen in
Table 3.

Table 3
Correlations among Finance Items and Finance Factors

Factors
Items Confidence Discussion
1. Confidence in the Financial Future Items
I am confident in the financial solvency of my news
organization.
.907 .039
I am confident that my news organization will be
financially solvent in five years.
.944 .050
I am confident that I will have a job in journalism in
five years.
.810 .177

2. Discussion of Finances Items
This news organization’s financial health is
discussed.
.055 .837
The financial health of the journalism industry as a
whole is discussed at my place of work.
.109 .822

The factors extracted were: discussion of financial issues (Cronbach’s Alpha
= .591, eigenvalue = 1.29) and confidence in the journalistic future (Cronbach’s Alpha
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= .847, eigenvalue = 2.50). This scale was not as robust as the others, so the results from
these measures should be interpreted cautiously. Means and standard deviations for the
factors on the second scale can be seen in Table 4.

Table 4
Means and Standard Deviations for Audience Factors

Factor Mean Standard
Deviation
Scale 2: Finances
Confidence in the Financial Future 4.85 1.47
Discussion of Finance 5.45 1.40
All factors were measured on 7-point Likert scales, so all values are out of seven.

A Wilcoxon test was conducted to address RQ3 and evaluate whether online
journalists discussed the financial health of their own organizations more or the financial
health of the journalism industry as a whole. The results indicated a significant difference,
z = -3.75, p < .01. The mean of the ranks in favor of discussing the journalism industry as
a whole was 33.75, while the mean of the ranks in favor of discussing the financial health
of the individual journalist’s news organization was 38.23. Thus this sample of online
journalists perceive that they were more likely to talk about the financial health of their
own organizations than of the journalism industry as a whole.
RQ4 asked how confident online journalists were in the future sustainability of
their industry. The mean for the confidence in financial sustainability factor was 4.85,
with a standard deviation of 1.47 on a 7-point Likert scale. This indicated cautious
optimism in the continued financial success of the journalism industry.
Two factors were extracted from the third scale, and one item did not load well on
either factor and was eliminated. Additionally, one of the two factors that did load with
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an eigenvalue over 1 did not make theoretical sense and did not seem to be cohesive. So,
only one factor from this scale was used. This factor measured traditional journalistic
values, mostly related to accuracy (Cronbach’s Alpha = .679, eigenvalue = 3.23). The
mean for the factor on the seven-point Likert scale was 6.50 with a standard deviation of
0.72. With this level of reliability, this scale is usable however its results should be
interpreted somewhat cautiously. The factor loadings for this scale can be seen in Table 5.

Table 5
Correlations among Traditional Journalism Items and Factors

Factors Items
Traditional Journalism Other
Traditional Journalism Items
Testing the accuracy of information from all
sources and exercising care to avoid inadvertent
error.
.613 .457
Distinguishing between advocacy and news
reporting.
.657 .266
Distinguishing news from advertising. .795 -.087
Avoiding conflicts of interest. .763 .214

Other
Never distorting the content of news photos or
video.
.345 .649
Informing the public. .256 .676
Inviting dialogue with the public over the news. -.125 .781

Complexly Determined Item
Supporting the open exchange of views, even
views you find repugnant.
.392 .431

RQ5, sought to examine the values of online journalists by comparing the
emphasis on new journalistic values related to interacting with the public with the
traditional journalistic values related to issues of accuracy. A Wilcoxon test indicated a
significant difference, z = -2.15, p < .05. The mean of the ranks in favor of traditional
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journalistic values was 46.07, while the mean of the ranks in favor of audience
importance was 35.36, indicating concern for traditional journalistic values over the
audience.
In order to analyze the demographic data, a two-way contingency table analysis
was conducted to evaluate whether managers were more concerned with audience
engagement. The two variables were whether the respondent was a manager and
importance of audience engagement with two levels (unimportant was below the mean of
4 and important was above the mean of 4). Manager and engagement were found to be
significantly related, Pearson’s 𝛘 2(1, N = 115) = 10.65, p = .001, Cramér’s V = .30.
Managers were more concerned about audience engagement than non-managers,
indicating that managers have embraced some of the digital changes more than non-
managers.

Discussion
The results of this survey provided some surprising information about online-only
journalists—both in how they are differentiating themselves from traditional journalists
and in how they resemble those traditional journalists. First, the demographic data is
telling. The average age of online journalists in this survey was 41. While there is a great
deal of hype about the younger generation being most engaged in and most adept at
digital media, they are certainly not the only ones involved in the future of digital news.
In this study, in fact, the average online journalist was middle-aged, much as one would
expect to find among traditional journalists. This is not, of course, to say that younger
journalists are not also involved in digital journalism, but online journalism is certainly
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not the sole domain of the young. Additionally, if mid-career traditional journalists are
moving to an online platform, they clearly carry some of their traditional journalism
baggage with them in terms of their approach to news and newsmaking. This is not
necessarily a bad thing. Bringing more experience from traditional news to the online
enterprise can be of great service to online-only enterprises, but it can also mean that
online news enterprises may be making news in a more traditional way with less use of
the capabilities of new technology.
The sample was also astonishingly skewed in terms of race. Of the respondents
who provided their race, 89.76% were white. This may be at least somewhat reflective of
a much larger problem of diversifying the newsroom with which journalism has struggled.
That journalism is a field dominated by white men has been a long-time complaint
against the profession, and this study indicates that even when it comes to digital startups,
the profession is still hardly diverse. The news may have moved to a new medium, but it
may have taken its lack of diversity with it. It is unclear what this means for the
journalism industry in general or online journalism specifically, but it is unfortunate to
see that online-only news lacks a diversity that could be an aid in telling more stories and
bringing more news to the public.
Engagement with they audience and interactivity can mean many things to online
journalists. The factor measuring audience engagement included five different types of
interactivity—responding to comments, corresponding with readers over e-mail,
Facebook, and Twitter, and engaging with readers at events. And an additional factor
included different ways the online journalists could know their audience using online
metrics. This is to say that interactivity and relationships with the audience are much
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more complex than they once were. Different modes of engagement reflect different
conceptions of what interactivity means: Does it mean actually talking with readers or
merely knowing who the readers are? Does it mean face-to-face communication or online
communication? In my ethnographic work at RadioOnline.com, the journalists were even
interested in the quality of the comments posted by readers and sought to encourage
comments that were more substantive. The survey data herein is just a preliminary
exploration of what engagement means to online journalists and what sort of interactivity
they are interested in. The survey data also cannot explain why online journalists are
interested in specific types of interaction. Different activities have both different
ramifications and may be the result of different attitudes toward the audience. The survey
data could be supplemented by interview data of online journalists to better understand
what type of interactivity they seek and what this means about their larger conceptions of
the audience and of the audience’s role in digital journalism.
In terms of their audiences, the survey indicated in response to RQ1 that even
while online journalists recognize the importance of their audience, they are less
convinced that their audience trusts them. This represents a flip from the traditional
conception of the audience in which the journalist has very little concern for the audience
itself and who that audience is but does believe that audience trust is the very foundation
of news-giving. After all, if the audience does not trust the journalism that the journalist
provides, what has been accomplished? The online journalists surveyed acknowledge that
their audience is important to them, which may in and of itself be a result of the inability
to ignore the audience in what has become more of a bi-directional medium than
journalism once was. But these journalists did not think their audiences trusted them as
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much as they were important. Perhaps this is reflective of the ability of readers to tell the
journalist in comments that they are distrustful or skeptical. What does it mean for the
journalist that the audience does not trust him or her? How does this affect the journalism
that is presented? Are the journalists interested in regaining the audience trust? How
would journalists go about doing so? Further research on the question of audience trust
and the online journalist’s conception of the audience could illuminate some of the
factors in how online news is produced.
The results of RQ2 found that even as journalists recognize that the audience
matters, engaging with the audience matters less. It is unclear what exactly this means
although it is possible this is merely reflective of a time constraint that does not allow for
engagement with the audience on top of the other responsibilities of online journalism.
This conundrum was also reflected in the findings for RQ2.1 Those findings suggested
that online journalists believed that tracking the metrics about their audience was more
important than choosing to engage with that audience. So, online journalists are
collecting facts about their audiences and possess a large amount of data as to who their
audience is and what their audience likes to read, but they are not using that information
to engage with the audience. What, then, are they using this information to do? What
does a deep understanding of the audience contribute to if not to engaging with that
audience? Part of the answer to these questions may be that online journalists are still
trying to parse what to do with an audience that can respond. Even as online journalists
know that the audience is important and want to know as much as they can about that
audience, they are not quite sure what to do with that data. Knowing audience preferences
may change the way they write articles or headlines or may change what articles they
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write, but they are not quite sure how to use that knowledge to interact with the audience.
Online journalists know that the audience is important in the abstract but are unsure what
to practically do with that information.
Even more specifically, online journalists who thought engagement was important
were not necessarily engaging with their audience, according to RQ2.2. This, of course,
may not be surprising. It is far easier to say that engaging with the audience is important
than to actually engage with the audience, but this still may be disheartening—or it may
be that the evolution to engaging with the audience is a slow one. Reporters may have
recognized its importance but not quite moved on to actually engaging. This may be a
slow process on which online journalists are still working.
This set of results points to a fundamental issue inherent in the move to digital
journalism. That move was not merely a platform shift that changed how the news was
accessed; the move to digital news requires rethinking of some of the traditional ways of
doing journalism, and that rethinking may take time. Even online-only journalists may
still need some period of readjustment to changes in the way online journalism is done.
So, even as these journalists know that engaging with the audience is part of their job
now and even as they have started collecting the data on their audience, they may not
know quite how to engage yet or structure their very busy jobs to create the time for
engagement.
One of the largest concerns as journalism has moved online has been the question
of a business model for online journalism. And, in fact, in response to RQ3, it was found
that online journalists rated their confidence in the financial future of journalism at 4.85
out of 7, reflecting concerns about the finances. This concern, in and of itself, is a
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reversal from the strict separation between editorial and business concerns in the
traditional newsroom as financial concerns would not be at the forefront for the journalist.
But the results also indicated a cautious optimism regarding the financial sustainability of
their industry. This may be surprising as talk of the industry’s financial collapse abound.
These journalists were not convinced of the financial failure of journalism. And the mean
for the question of how confident they were that they would have a job in journalism in
five years was 4.71 on a 7-point Likert scale. And, in fact, the findings for RQ4 found
that journalists were more likely to talk about the financial health of their own
organization rather than of the industry as a whole, so the financial concerns of their own
organizations were certainly something that was on the radar of online journalists in a
way it may not have been in a more traditional newsroom. The small size, the startup
nature, and the lack of separate “business side” and “editorial side” in these online
organizations indicates that discussing the financial concerns of a journalist’s news
organization is no longer taboo.
That online-only journalists are in the middle of traditional journalism and a
digital ethos even though they are not attached to legacy products was also evident in that
RQ5 found that these journalists thought traditional journalistic values were more
important than the audience. Online journalists acknowledge that their audience is
important to them, that engaging with that audience is a part of what they should be doing,
but they are still more committed to the values of accuracy that have long been a
fundamental part of journalism. Moving online does not mean that journalism has
stopped being committed to the values of accuracy and informing the public that were
always part of the profession, even if moving online does mean expanding the role of the
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journalist to also be concerned with other factors, such as the audience. Journalists are
embracing some of the changes technology has wrought by assuming new values while
still holding onto the old professional values. They are willing to acknowledge the
importance of engaging with the audience (even if they have not quite figured out how to
engage), but they also hold steadfastly to their old traditional journalistic values. This was
especially highlighted by the non-normal distribution of this data, in which the
overwhelming number of respondents were toward the high ends of the scale both for
audience importance and traditional values, with almost no responses at the lower ends of
those scales.
This survey specifically targeted online-only journalists, who are especially
interesting for a study of digital journalism. Startup organizations are not attached to
legacy journalism products that have years of specific processes and ethos. Online-only
journalism outfits are freer of those strictures since they are not part of pre-existing
organizations, and the literature suggests that they would have moved away from some of
the values of traditional newsmaking. And certainly the data collected in this survey
indicates that there has been some attitudinal shift in the way online-only journalists think
about journalism. They think the audience is important and they think that engaging with
the audience is important. They collect data about their audience even if they are not
quite sure how to use that data. They talk about finances. Still, these online-only
journalists also distinctly resemble traditional journalists and quite a few are old enough
to have had 20 years of experience in traditional news organizations. They think audience
trust is important. They think accuracy is important. They do not actually engage with the
audience very much. Online-only journalists have retained core elements of their
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identities and are different from traditional journalists but not wholly so (Domingo,
2008b; Spyridou, et al, 2013). Digital journalism is more cognizant of the metrics that
drive online organizations but much of the culture remains from years of practice or from
having studied with those who had years of practice. In fact, 43.51% of respondents had
formally studied journalism, and thus, online journalists are still very much embedded in
the values of the larger system of traditional journalism, even as managers more quickly
embrace these changes than non-managers.

Limitations
The first limitation of the survey data is the sample size. It is difficult to convince
very hard-working online journalists to take time from their extremely busy days to start
a survey much less complete a survey (about 50 people started but did not finish the
survey). Though this study presents compelling conclusions about online journalists,
those findings would be more conclusive if compared to similar data from traditional
journalists. While this study relied on the plethora of previous research on traditional
journalism, journalists, and newsmaking, that does not completely stand in for data from
the same survey. Administering this survey to traditional journalists could prove difficult,
however, because it would be difficult to find a comparable group of traditional
journalists, but perhaps a future study could look at small print news organizations and
survey the journalists responsible for the online component of their product. Still, the
sample for this survey consisted mostly of journalists who work for small outfits with
fewer than five staff members and it would be hard to find a comparable sample of
traditional news. Of course, online-only news organizations can be smaller than print,
201
radio, or broadcast because much of the back-end production needs (like printing)
become non-existent or trivial in the online environment.
This study also raises many new questions about online-only journalists that
cannot be answered by a survey. Interviews could find out what the journalists are doing
with the data they collect about their audiences, why they are less confident in the trust of
their audience (perhaps because they have better data), why they are more convinced of
the importance of the audience than of engaging with that audience. There is much more
to know about online-only journalists that could be better answered with a larger survey
sample size and a larger set of qualitative methods.

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Chapter 6: Conclusions
The Advantages of Structure, the Digital Myth, and the Inertia of Newness

I began this research project with the expectation that online-only newsrooms
would be better at innovating and changing traditional journalism practices than the
online counterparts of established media organizations. The freedom from the extant
practices of a journalism organization that had developed those practices without digital
newsmaking in mind, I thought, would allow online-only news outfits to create practices
that worked better in digital news, that took better advantage of technology, and that
encouraged innovation. Instead, I found that RadioOnline.com, the online counterpart of
a news radio station was more able than the born-online DataNews.com to make use of
new technology and innovate within journalism. Simply put, RadioOnline.com was better
able to make digital news, and this was at least partially tied to its formation as part of an
extant company. As a result of having built-in structures and expectations,
RadioOnline.com was able to focus on news, without having to build an organization
from the ground up. DataNews.com, instead, was struck by inertia when faced with the
monumental task of creating a wholly new publication and was unable to build the
culture, routines, and, ultimately, organization that it needed to function. This further
hindered an organization that was already burdened by poor management and lack of
guidance. Even while the freedom from outdated structures may seem like an advantage
for an online-native publication, the absence of any rules, routines, or model turned out,
in this study of two organizations, to be a greater disadvantage.
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Journalists at both RadioOnline.com and DataNews.com reflected many of the
traditional values associated with journalism to varying extents. The professional
practices that have developed over years are not necessarily easy to change, even as news
organizations do change how they do what they do. The stubbornness of these traditional
practices seemed to have less to do with when the organization was formed or with what
its primary medium was than it had to do with the overall American ideal of what
journalism should be. The separation between editorial and financial interests and the
lack of interest in the audience were more present at DataNews.com than at
RadioOnline.com, even though DataNews.com was not borne out of a traditional news
outlet with traditional values. No discussion of journalistic ethics ever took place at
DataNews.com while I was observing, nor were these professional standards mentioned
in interviews, but they still existed in the organization, even though the journalists almost
never mentioned money and in which the audience was not taken into account, much like
more traditional newsrooms. But it was unclear why exactly DataNews.com should be so
committed to these values. They were committed to some of the practices of professional
journalism even without the ethical reasoning behind those practices, and these practices
held them back in serious ways, leaving them unwilling or unable to use technology to
their advantage or even to change the traditional ways of making news. The cognitive
inertia that many researchers discuss as a reason for failure to take full advantage of the
capabilities of new technology is rooted in a deep commitment to the professional
ideology of journalism, which sets specific limits and standards to which journalists must
adhere (Domingo, 2008b; Spyridou, et al, 2013). This mental model was certainly present
at DataNews.com and seemed to be rooted if not in the actual journalistic professional
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ideals at least in the practices that resulted from those ideals. While RadioOnline.com did
have some commitment to professional journalistic ideals, as evidenced by some of their
discussions of corrections policies and the like, they were also much more flexible in
their approach to traditional journalistic practices, fully embracing, for instance, the need
to care about the audience—and they took advantage of digital tools to do this in
innovative ways.
Even though DataNews.com had been “born online” in that it never existed in
another medium, it had not adopted many of the newsroom tendencies that became
trademarks of making online news. For instance, the sense of immediacy and the need to
publish as quickly as possible as a result of the 24-hour news cycle that the Internet has
created was not at all present at DataNews.com, where content was published
sporadically and there was never any sense of urgency (Cawley, 2008; Domingo, 2008c;
Klinenberg, 2008). While that sense of immediacy can often lead to a battle over
accuracy, as articles are published as soon as possible before facts can be fully checked,
the lack of immediacy at DataNews.com was also disconcerting (Hoyt, 2009). That
DataNews.com was not able to instill a routine that led to constant publication was not
unusual for nonprofit news organizations. In the Pew (2013) study on nonprofit
journalism outfits, “roughly half of the outlets produced 10 or fewer pieces of original
content in the two-week period studied” (p. 1). But if DataNews.com hung on to the
traditional journalistic ideals and did not take advantage of new technology, it was
unclear that it was anything but a traditional newspaper in the online space. In this way,
RadioOnline.com took more advantage of the new technology, as it published throughout
the day, ensuring new content was up on the site frequently and not conforming to its
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parent station’s deadlines. Van Dam (2011) found that for a while at The L.A. Times, the
Internet publishing schedule mimicked the print schedule so that all parts of the
newsroom would have the same deadlines. While convenient, this ignored a vital
advantage of digital news—being able to publish anytime—and indeed mimicking offline
practices has been the focus of much research on online media. The online news and
music markets “have evolved from the offline markets and their value chains,” so that
mimicking the traditional in the online is common, even when the offline is not
immediately transferable to the online (Swatman, Krueger & van der Beek, 2006).
“[T]hese organizations were born from mainstream media themselves and thus mirror
those long-established structures,” which can sometimes be to the severe detriment of the
organization, sticking them in the past and making it difficult for them to innovate
(Konieczna & Robinson, 2013, p. 2). Since RadioOnline.com was part of a traditional
radio station but also a separate entity, they were able to avoid mimicking established
practices that would not work while still maintaining some sense of routines and
borrowing from the practices that would work even in the online environment. While
“online papers are still very dependent on their most immediate referent, their print
counterparts,” for RadioOnline.com, this was an advantage and did not hold them back
from making necessary changes (Garcia, 2008, p. 65).
In relation to business models, RadioOnline.com was also able to use its parent
company as a referent in a positive way. Neither news organization was financially
sustainable yet, but there were vast differences in their approach to finances and finding a
business model. While RadioOnline.com was focused on monetizing its audience and this
was an underlying goal, DataNews.com assumed that its large amount of seed funding
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gave it time to build its reporting before it even thought about fundraising. This was a
problem associated with newness and linked to the need for legitimacy. Trying to raise
money before building a brand would be difficult but ignoring any efforts at funding
indefinitely was also a poor plan. Millions in initial funding gave DataNews.com a false
sense of security and allowed the leadership to ignore money because it was not ingrained
in their mindset in any way. RadioOnline.com once again was able to benefit from its
parent company’s structure and modify the membership business model that worked for
the radio station. Though RadioOnline.com was attempting to monetize in other ways as
well, having a model to copy was a significant advantage. The other attempts at
monetization, manifested in advertising placements and grants as well as discussions
about audience visits and in what ways this new generation could be persuaded to pay for
news. DataNews.com’s reliance on a single foundation set it up for failure when those
funders expected more than the site had delivered and there were no other funds to fall
back on.
The approach to finances, especially at DataNews.com, again highlighted the lack
of distance from traditional journalistic values. At DataNews.com, the staff members felt
uncomfortable talking about money and it was completely removed from their collective
psyche until the CEO’s resignation. While this editorial-business divide may have
worked for journalism in the past, there is much evidence that this will not work in the
digital world, so it was especially strange to see a born-online publication clinging to this
ideal (Klinenberg, 2005). In this way, DataNews.com was almost moving backwards in
both not taking advantage of new technology and adopting journalistic ideals that even
traditional news outlets had been questioning in the digital age. Vobic (2013) delineates
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the stages that online news has gone through, but DataNews.com instead of reflecting the
later stage in which it was created seemed to almost pre-date the Internet in many ways. I
had thought the advantage to a born-online news site would be that it could re-evaluate
the digital environment and take better advantage of the new opportunities being
provided. While RadioOnline.com was being pushed to approach technology in new
ways and had the structure in place to be able to do this, DataNews.com foundered, with
no direction and no guidance.
Both newsrooms struggled with how to use technology, especially social media.
That the technology existed was little help in figuring out how to make it applicable to
journalism. This was reflected as well in the survey of online journalists. Even as
journalists acknowledged the importance of engaging with their audience (something that
DataNews.com did not do), they were not sure how to make use of social media to
accomplish that goal, and even as traffic metrics were tracked, it was not immediately
apparent how those metrics were being used. Hille & Bakker (2013) found that “media
often introduced platforms without being active themselves on these new platforms,
hoping that new opportunities would automatically lead to audience activities” and
indeed this may explain some of this approach (p. 677). Journalists recognized social
media as important to journalism—or at least useful to journalism—so they introduced it,
hoping that along the way they would figure out how best to use it. The survey also
indicated, though, that even when journalists said they thought their audience and
audience engagement were important, that did not necessarily mean efforts were being
expended into audience engagement. This lack of effort toward audience engagement,
even with the recognition of its importance, can be tied to media norms about the
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importance of the audience as well as time constraints for the online journalist. “[T]he
professional culture of traditional journalism has a strong inertia in the online newsrooms
that prevents them from developing most of the ideals of interactivity, as they do not fit
in the standardized news production routines” (Domingo, 2008b, p. 680). Traditionally,
the audience was viewed as completely irrelevant to the newsroom and wholly ignored
by journalists, who merely produced the news in which they were interested. So, even
while the Internet was heralded as a place where the audience and the journalist could
interact and engage in conversation, the move toward creating that environment was a lot
slower (Boczkowski, 2004). Part of this slowness in figuring out how to engage and
interact with the audience is tied up in trying to figure out where exactly the audience’s
role in online journalism lies and what the relationship between journalist and audience
should look like.
Domingo (2008a) points to interactivity as an example of a “myth” of online
journalism. As digital technology developed, journalism developed “utopias” or “myths”
of how technology would drastically change journalism for the better but absent actual
developed strategies and vision for how to use the technology to make journalism better
and how to adapt to the technology to pre-existing journalism norms, these myths rarely
come to fruition (Domingo, 2008c). This is not so very different from a more general
“utopian tendency to hail a new communication technology as an inherently positive,
decentralizing, and democratic force” (Bar, Richards & Sandvig, 2000). This “leads to
fallacious expectations about the impact of technology,” which does not necessarily have
positive results (Bar, Richards & Sandvig, 2000). This, of course, does not mean that
technology cannot have positive effects or that these myths or utopias cannot be realized,
209
but the expectation that technology will have drastic and positive effects merely by
existing is misguided and certainly affected journalism as it moved online. When online
journalists are surveyed, they are convinced that they are a completely new breed of
journalist, distinct from what the profession was before, but, in fact, journalism has
changed less with the advent of technology than some would believe (Paterson, 2008).
“Certainly, there are some specific ‘new’ qualities of journalistic work in online
newsrooms, but overall, the basic orientation pattern is traditional (print/news agency)
journalism” (Quandt, 2008, p. 95). Pereira (2013) claims that so little has changed with
the move online that all that is evident in journalism is “micro-innovations.”
Autonomy was more apparent at DataNews.com, where the staff members were
basically left completely to their own devices in terms of what projects to take on. At
RadioOnline.com, the website had the advantage of a whole arm of reporters producing
content, but they also had to negotiate interactions with this whole other staff and had to
transform radio broadcasts into online articles. The change in journalism prompted by
technology is a slow, subtle change that quietly has asked journalists to re-evaluate some
of their professional ideals and most basic assumptions abut their craft. And as evidenced
by DataNews.com, a born-online publication that did not have to accept any of the
traditional assumptions about news but still did, those professional ideals will only
change slowly. And that is not necessarily a bad thing. Journalism evolved for over 100
years in America before it became what it is now; it should not change overnight
(Schudson, 1978). Rather, change may be necessarily slow, choosing which traditional
practices to transfer to online news and what ways to use new technology to further the
goals of journalism.
210
RadioOnline.com was able to both embrace the pre-digital practices that existed at
its parent company while shunning, or at least modifying, some of its less useful practices,
but there were advantages and disadvantages that the organization faced as part of a
larger, established news organization. A large advantage was having built-in structures
and a role model for leadership. These enabled RadioOnline.com to create a fully
functioning organization without having to build from the ground up. Another advantage
was having name recognition and a reputation, which enabled it to get better access to
sources and news (Cawley, 2008). DataNews.com had difficulty gaining access, and
reporters and web developers often complained about sources not returning phone calls
and not recognizing their organization. The pursuit of legitimacy can be a hindrance to
innovation, and at DataNews.com by virtue of being a new organization, much effort
needed to be donated to legitimacy, perhaps at the expense of innovation—or at least that
was the choice the CEO made (Lowrey, 2012). But with the advantage of having a
reputation on which to rely came the disadvantage for RadioOnline.com of having to find
its place within a larger organization. RadioOnline.com staff members had to convince
radio reporters to build online routines into their already full day, and this can be a
difficult and constant challenge, as Usher (2011) found in her study of Marketplace, with
tensions flaring up when radio reporters did not recognize the differences in online
journalism. The online staff was dispersed on multiple floors at RadioOnline.com in a
spatial representation of an approach that attempted to put the technology wherever it fit
without any sort of strategy (Robinson, 2011). This did not make it impossible for
RadioOnline.com to create a more cohesive digital strategy to do online news; rather, it
forced it to do so, making it clear that without proactive steps in that direction there
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would be no strategy. There was nothing to force DataNews.com to create that strategy,
and without a push in that direction, no strategy or vision was developed.
This was one theme of my findings: Not everything needed to be planned in
minute detail or figured out for an organization’s success, but it was important for both
leaders and staff to be thinking about the organization’s future and to have some plans in
place. “Strategic thinking” was necessary for an organization’s success (Liedtka, 1998).
Strategic thinking entails both creative processes and data-driven analysis of a company
in order to create a concept of the organization’s future, and a culture that encourages this
sort of thinking and dialogue about it is crucial (Casey & Goldman, 2010; Liedtka, 1998).
This was something that was present at RadioOnline.com, where a future was discussed
and staff members were given ample opportunity to talk about what the organization’s
future entailed. At DataNews.com these types of discussion and planning were noticeably
absent. Day-to-day operations were not enough, in the end, to sustain DataNews.com in
the absence of any vision or plans for where the organization was going. The need for
vision was highlighted at DataNews.com, where staff members were uncertain about
what their jobs entailed and what they should be doing in the absence of a clear,
communicated vision. The goal of strategic thinking is “‘an integrated perspective of the
enterprise,’” and this never existed at DataNews.com, where there never was a clear
conception of the organization (Liedtka, 1998, p. 121). Merely being an online news
organization is not a definition of the mission in and of itself, even as it presents unique
challenges. A clearly defined mission is crucial for attracting an audience but perhaps
even more crucial for giving staff the necessary tools to succeed. At RadioOnline.com,
the staff members had enough of a conception of their site to know what tasks they
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should be doing. With no guidance and no conception of what their site was supposed to
be, the staff of DataNews.com were at a loss for what their jobs entailed and what they
should be doing. This led to a frustrated staff who were not sure where their organization
was headed or what that meant for them individually. Though the stress of this
uncertainty came to a head after the CEO’s resignation when it became clear that the
organization was in crisis, the uncertainty had caused problems for the organization even
before the resignation, with a staff that was demoralized because they had no idea what
they should be doing or if what they were doing was right. Once this uncertainty became
even more emphasized with the CEO’s departure, though, there was even less of a chance
for DataNews.com to act innovatively. In times of uncertainty, organizations reflexively
preserve the institutional order, limiting the changes that need to be made (Sparrow,
2006). This meant that DataNews.com was further entrenched in an inertia that made it
almost impossible for the born-online publication to innovate and distinguish its practices
from those of traditional journalism. DataNews.com’s inertia was in direct contrast with
RadioOnline.com, which because of its support by traditional media was better able to
make changes and make use of technology. None of this is to say that born-online
publications cannot succeed, but these publications do face significant challenges in their
newness. Their lack of clear mission and lack of institutional resources combined with a
lack of routines and structure can hold them back. All of this can be overcome, of course,
but a large part of that equation is leadership and communication—two things that
DataNews.com was particularly short on.
This has implications for digital newsmaking as a whole. Effort must be expended
to create a new vision of what online journalism looks like, and communicating that
213
vision effectively to the staff is as important as its conception. Leadership and
communication are just as important in new news organizations, even as journalists thrive
on autonomy. It is easy to embrace the traditional values of journalism even absent
existing structures and routines for doing so, and even while doing online-only news. To
separate from those traditional values—or at least re-evaluate, reconsider, and modify
them—takes real, directed effort. Technology has not changed journalism just by existing
and when journalism chooses to use technology, each organization and journalist can
choose how to use that technology. In short, it is each organization that must make
specific decisions about how to use technology and how it should do journalism. The
ethnographic study undertaken in this paper was only of two organizations, and it is
obviously impossible to generalize from there to journalism as a whole. The survey
findings, too, only offer a basic glance into how online journalists approach their
audiences. And, of course, what we know about online journalism is changing quickly, as
online journalism continues to evolve. There is value in tracking that evolution, though,
in studying what is tried, what fails, and what succeeds. The online journalism I studied
for this dissertation is different than the online journalism that existed ten, five, or even
one year ago, and it is also different than what online journalism will look like in the
future. (And by future, I mean, anything further than a few days or weeks from now.)
What online journalism looks like now, however, will shape what it becomes and can
inform us on how journalism is changing. The findings herein are a beginning to
understanding how the new news organization makes news and the unique—and non-
unique—challenges it faces.
214

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234
Appendix A

Thank you for taking this survey. You have been selected to participate because you are
an online journalist. This study will ask you about your audience, your organization’s
financial health, journalistic practices, and then some basic demographic information. It
should take about 15 minutes to complete. Your name and publication will not be
recorded and there will be no way to trace that information, so your anonymity is
guaranteed. If you have any questions, please contact Elisheva Weiss Klagsbrun at
weisse@usc.edu or 917.853.3933. Thank you!

First, we are interested in your audience. Please indicate the extent to which you agree
with each of the following statements:

1 —
totally
disagree
2 3 4 5 6 7 —
totally
agree
1. My audience is very trusting
of the journalistic work of
the news organization I
work for.

2. My audience is very trusting
of my journalistic work.

3. My audience is important to
me.

4. Engaging with my audience
is important to me.

5. I know how many page
views my articles get.

6. I know how many links my
articles get.

7. I know page-view statistics
for my news site as a whole.

8. I regularly read the
comments on my articles.

9. I regularly respond to
comments on my articles.

10. I regularly correspond with
my readers over e-mail.

11. I regularly correspond with
my readers on Facebook.

12. I regularly correspond with
my readers on Twitter.

13. I regularly engage with my
readers at events.

235

14. I engage with my readers in some other way.

Yes No
If yes, please describe:

Now, we are interested in your organization’s financial health. Please indicate the
extent to which you agree with each of the following statements:

1 —
totally
disagree
2 3 4 5 6 7 —
totally
agree
1. This news organization’s
financial health is discussed.

2. The financial health of the
journalism industry as a
whole is discussed at my
place of work

3. I am confident in the
financial solvency of my
news organization.

4. I am confident that my news
organization will be
financially solvent in five
years.

5. I am confident that I will
have a job in journalism in
five years.

Now, we are interested in journalistic practices and your role as a journalist. Please
indicate how important you think each of the following is in journalism:

1 —
not at
all
impor
tant
2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 —
very
impor
tant
NA
1. Testing the accuracy
of information from
all sources and
exercising care to
avoid inadvertent

236
error.
2. Never distorting the
content of news
photos or video.

3. Supporting the open
exchange of views,
even views you find
repugnant.

4. Distinguishing
between advocacy
and news reporting.

5. Distinguishing news
from advertising.

6. Avoiding conflicts of
interest.

7. Informing the public.
8. Inviting dialogue with
the public over the
news.

We’d like to end the survey by asking you some questions about you.
Age:__

Sex: M F

What is your race/ethnicity?
____ White
____ Black or African-American
____ Hispanic or Latino/a
____ Asian or Asian-American
____ Native American or Indian
____ Other

What is the highest level of education you have completed?
____ Less than high school
____ Some high school
____ High school
____ Some college
____ Two-year college degree
____ Four-year college degree (BA, BS)
____ Masters Degree
____ Doctoral Degree
____ Professional Degree (MD, JD)

237
Did you formally study journalism? N Y

What is your position at your news organization? _________

Are you a manager? N Y

Thank you for taking the time to fill out the survey!

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Asset Metadata

Creator Klagsbrun, Elisheva Weiss (author)

Core Title The new news: vision, structure, and the digital myth in online journalism

School Annenberg School for Communication

Degree Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Program Communication

Publication Date 07/28/2014

Defense Date 05/28/2014

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag digital media,journalism,OAI-PMH Harvest,online news

Format application/pdf (imt)

Language English

Contributor Electronically uploaded by the author (provenance)

Advisor Riley, Patricia (committee chair), Bar, François (committee member), Rajagopalan, Nandini (committee member)

Creator Email elisheva.klagsbrun@gmail.com,weisse@usc.edu

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-c3-450695

Unique identifier UC11287000

Identifier etd-KlagsbrunE-2751.pdf (filename),usctheses-c3-450695 (legacy record id)

Legacy Identifier etd-KlagsbrunE-2751-0.pdf

Dmrecord 450695

Document Type Dissertation

Format application/pdf (imt)

Rights Klagsbrun, Elisheva Weiss

Type texts

Source University of Southern California (contributing entity), University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses (collection)

Access Conditions The author retains rights to his/her dissertation, thesis or other graduate work according to U.S. copyright law. Electronic access is being provided by the USC Libraries in agreement with the a...

Repository Name University of Southern California Digital Library

Repository Location USC Digital Library, University of Southern California, University Park Campus MC 2810, 3434 South Grand Avenue, 2nd Floor, Los Angeles, California 90089-2810, USA