Rapid institutional change, professional journalists and the rise of the news nerd
Creators: name: Salomone, Allie Kosterich
Publisher: name: No Publisher Supplied
Year: 2017

description: Over the past several years, scholars and professionals alike have attended to the impact of digital transformation, and specifically to the increased role and relevance of data, analytics, and platforms. Due in part to the spread of networked devices, the proliferation of data, and the growing ubiquity of mobile Internet and computational capabilities, organizational transformation occurs at a rapid pace. In the U.S. news industry, for example, a new form of professional journalist is developing as news organizations increasingly hire programmers, coders, and data specialists and create teams dedicated solely to producing content for social media platforms and news applications.  While there is a long history of journalism studies that examine digital transformation, few have focused on the particular change processes related to shifting conceptions of the professional journalist. As the nature of the news industry continues to evolve at a rapid pace, more work is indeed required.  Institutional theory has a long-standing focus on how external social, economic, and technological forces impact taken-for-granted organizational structures and routines. Much of this work, however, takes a long-term perspective and does little to interrogate potential outcomes of the process of institutional change other than the expected institutionalization of something new as a taken-for-granted structure or failure of something new as a fad. In this time of constant and accelerated change, these perspectives may no longer be sufficient.  This research addresses these theoretical gaps by investigating the process of institutional change when it occurs in a rapid timeframe. To do so, this study focuses on a case study of recent transformation in the U.S. news industry—past the shift of print news organizations to the Web and the emergence of digital native news organizations, and towards a focus on changes related to the development of data, analytics, and mobile and social platforms. Of specific interest is change in the journalist profession from 2011 to 2016 and the development of news nerds—a new form of professional journalist at the intersection of news and data, analytics, and social and mobile platforms.  The results of this study support an alternative model of rapid institutional change and an unanticipated outcome of the process—institutional augmentation, which represents a process in which neither institutionalization nor failure occur. In other words, a new institutional structure has not displaced the existing institutional structure; instead, the existing institutional structure has augmented to allow for the coexistence of both. The findings regarding professional journalists suggest that institutional augmentation is a powerful explanatory mechanism for understanding the outcome of rapid institutional change.  An investigation into the factors that contribute to the likelihood that a journalist is a news nerd and that a news organization is a leader in news nerds further interrogates the process of rapid institutional change at both the actor level and the organizational level. As such, this study furthers understanding of the process, drivers, and outcomes of institutional change in a rapid time frame. In general, the findings of this research support an alternative model of rapid institutional change and an unanticipated outcome of the process, yielding crucial insight into the scholarship on institutional theory and journalism studies, as well as for the practical management of rapid change in a wide variety of industries.