Media Innovation

Donors working around the world are concerned about the threat posed by closing space, including intensified threats against freedom of expression and information, and media freedom. This compounds the crisis that the field of journalism – a critical pillar of open, democratic societies – is already facing worldwide. At the same time, the technical and financial barriers to entry into the journalism field have never been lower, and the opportunities to innovate and have impact with journalism have in many ways never been greater. Against this backdrop, the journalism field is increasingly turning to philanthropy for support, including to human rights, social change and transparency donors.

An Introduction to Funding Media and Journalism, developed by Ariadne and the Transparency and Accountability Initiative and written by Sameer Padania, aims to help funders boost their understanding of the key issues, debates and approaches in funding journalism and media. We hope that this will help prepare funders focused on human rights, social justice or transparency and accountability to engage in the journalism and media field effectively and ethically, with a stronger shared understanding of why, when and how to do so.

El ecosistema periodístico afronta la aparición de tecnologías y plataformas disruptivas que dificultan su supervivencia en un escenario donde la producción, las audiencias y los modelos de negocio cambian constantemente. Existe el consenso de que la innovación es el recurso necesario para superar estos retos. En este artículo analizamos cómo se origina, se desarrolla y se implanta la innovación en los cibermedios desde la perspectiva de los periodistas. Metodología. La investigación se apoya en 26 entrevistas semiestructuradas a profesionales de una muestra de medios representativa, a lo largo de 2016. Resultados. Los resultados del trabajo de campo abordan el origen y el concepto de innovación, el tipo de innovaciones implementadas en los medios, la organización y los perfiles profesionales. Para los entrevistados, la innovación debe ser "nueva" y tener "éxito", obedece al deseo de "experimentar", debe aportar "algo diferente" en el entorno y proviene de la capacidad de "anticiparse a los retos". La tecnología ocupa un papel relevante y transversal. Los periodistas también valoran las competencias de tipo procedimental, cognoscitivo y actitudinal en la práctica innovadora. Conclusiones. Los profesionales son una fuente clave para conocer los cambios del sector periodístico, porque su visión ayuda a profundizar en áreas de la innovación que suelen quedarse al margen de la perspectiva académica.

Se analiza la innovación en la organización y en los procesos de trabajo de El confidencial.LAB, un laboratorio creado en 2013 en el seno del mismo periódico nativo digital. La investigación se ha desarrollado a lo largo de 16 meses, mediante observación no participante, entrevistas en profundidad con profesionales del laboratorio y un cuestionario cumplimentado por sus integrantes. Los resultados muestran el tipo de innovación generada por El confidencial.LAB en los productos, la organización interna, los flujos de producción, la experiencia de usuario y la comercialización. El trabajo con equipos interdisciplinares, la filosofía del ensayo y error, y del mínimo producto viable, contribuyen al éxito de los procesos productivos y a la rentabilidad económica del medio.

The emergence of digital media has brought on the disruption of industries in contemporary society. Rather than abate, evidences in the literature suggest the gale of disruption will only increase over time. For traditional industries like the printing industry, there have been transformations leading to changes of business models and strategies. This paper examines the effect of digital media on the printing industry in Nigeria and suggests the adoption of the Digital Business Strategy (DBS) as a means of transforming the nation's printing industry from a craft-based manufacturing industry to a communications service industry. It is argued that the digitization of print production workflows is not enough; printing companies in Nigeria need to develop their innovation capabilities through a workforce development scheme that places high premium on digital innovation and consumer innovation. Since workforce capabilities translate to firm's innovation performance and productivity, a focus on workforce development in Nigeria's printing industry from the standpoint of media innovation research is proposed.

La transferencia de conocimientos fluida es indispensable para la reproducción de las mejores prácticas y la potenciación de los resultados en las organizaciones. En la industria mediática, considerada de alto riesgo, el proceso es esencial, pues permite que la cultura de las compañías se impregne de carácter innovador y los trabajadores entiendan la necesidad de adaptarse al constante cambio. En este artículo se emplea la observación no participante y las entrevistas con los responsables de cuatro organizaciones periodísticas españolas —El Confidencial,Vocento, Civio y WeblogsSL— para explorar qué importancia conceden a la transferencia, qué métodos emplean para permitirla y qué obstáculos y potenciadores encuentran en el proceso. Se comprueba que, tanto los métodos como los condicionantes para la transferencia de los casos estudiados —como la carga de trabajo, la utilidad atribuida a los conocimientos y la confianza entre el emisor y el receptor— coinciden con los de otras industrias a nivel internacional.

This chapter concludes the book on cross-innovation between audiovisual media industries and three other sectors
education, health care and tourism. It emphasises, first, the importance of platformisation as a socioeconomic and technological process in framing all cross-innovation processes. It highlights how the rather full platformisation of tourism has negatively affected the interest of the tourism industry small and mediumsized enterprises to cooperate with local media and gaming industries in search of new solutions. Relatedly it proposes a generic conflict between platformisation of specific fields and the health of thematic local crossinnovation systems involving media and creative sectors. It then discusses that the inherent fragmentation of the health and education sectors has not allowed their international platformisation, but constitutes challenges to innovators interested in international scalability. It also discusses the reasons why two publicly coordinated cross-innovation processes one involving the use of virtual reality in health care and another using augmented reality
have given different results
one a relative success and the other not as of yet. At the end of the chapter final definitions of crossinnovation are offered and the operationalisation of the term and the associated conceptual approach are assessed.

This chapter summarises all the results of the section that studied crossinnovation processes between audiovisual media and tourism sectors. It relies first on the review of existing forms of cooperation and cross-innovation between sectors. Second, on the meso-level analysis of structural aspects that shape innovation processes in these sectors. Third, on a micro-level ethnography of a start-up company innovating at the intersections between the film and tourism industries. We learn that there are two core ‘rules’ that motivate sectoral cooperation
first, the broader platformisation of tourism and second, the emergence of augmented reality as a technique to augment experiences at locations. Regarding the second rule especially, we learned that the main innovator and innovation motivator in this area is currently the public sector, driven also by cultural policy goals. But local tourism sector small and medium-sized enterprises appear to not be particularly driven by innovation-orientated cooperation with other sectors.

The chapter concludes the section on cross-innovation and convergence processes between audiovisual media industries and the education sector. It addresses, first, that these processes are not driven by any specific technol- ogy, but by two broad and interdependent processes
individualisation that makes people in insecure careers search for personalised learning opportunities and the experience economy that produces expectations for learning experiences to be pleasurable and fun, that is, gamified. The chap- ter demonstrates the emergence of EdTech as a new dialogic subsector oper- ating between the publicly operating education sector and the private media and information and communication technology industries. It demonstrates the inherent institutional diversity in and around this subsector and discusses the nature of the dialogues constituting it. It, lastly, addresses the risks deriving from global platformisation to the education sector and demonstrates how Estonia’s government-run platforms, effectively cross- innovation systems linking teachers, learners and content providers in dynamic ways, could present feasible alternatives to the global platforms.

The chapter discusses the characteristics of audiovisual (AV) media sectors in the Baltic Sea region. Therein it focuses on the specifics of media indus- tries in small countries in the region as they are challenged in ways notably different from large countries with large domestic markets for media con- tent. It discusses the differences between the AV media industries in the Nordic and Baltic countries and suggests that while in the first case long- term welfare society policies and conscious policy-driven system building have conditioned growth and international success then also in the second case innovation policy rationales have facilitated recent growth and dynam- ics. It then discusses the specific challenges, especially platformisation to small media industries in contemporary globalising media markets, and suggests that opportunities to resist these challenges may be in local inter- sectoral cooperation, that is, in building cross-innovation systems.

This chapter establishes the conceptual and analytic framework for the book. It relates not only to much of the existing work in evolutionary and institutional economics, but also to work in cultural science and cultural semiotics domains as well as in media convergence and transmedia studies. The central concept it first deploys is ‘innovation systems’ as applied in national, regional, international and sectoral contexts. It then builds on the general theory of economic evolution by Kurt Dopfer and Jason Potts and reviews the tools this theory provides to carry out a meso-level analysis of industries co-innovating and converging. It then proposes a new concept
‘cross-innovation’
to refer to the emergence of new structures and ‘rules’ at the boundaries of existing industries.

This chapter presents the many premises of this book. It first discusses the book’s central questions and lays out the design of the large multi-national and multi-method study, carried out across Northern Europe. It also places the book at the interdisciplinary space between contemporary innovation economics and cultural and social theory. It then discusses the complex set of social processes that have conditioned the phenomena that the book studies
how and why are the contemporary audiovisual media industries co-innovating and converging with other sectors including education, tourism and health care? Within this framework, it discusses the effects of the broader individualisation and mediatisation processes, of media con- vergence, of the emergence of cross-media or transmedia strategies, of the evolution of the service and experience economies and of the emergence of creative industries policy frameworks.

This book combines economic studies of innovation systems with studies of mediatisation, media convergence, trans- and cross-media and with other approaches within media and culture studies. It elaborates on a new concept, cross-innovation, referring to co-innovation and convergence processes taking place between different sectors of digital service economies. The proposition is that digitisation and mediatisation processes are conditioning new inter-sector dialogues and the emergence of new cross-innovation systems at the borderlines of formerly distinct industries. 

The case study industries presented are, on the one hand, audiovisual media (film, television, videogames, etc.) and health care, education or tourism, on the other hand. The book builds on 2 years of empirical work across Nordic and Baltic countries, putting a special emphasis on the opportunities and challenges for small countries as they build the cross-innovation systems in the era of media globalisation and platformisation of services. The empirical research of 144 interviews with stakeholders (policy makers, entrepreneurs, managers, professionals) from all four sectors and of secondary data and documentary analysis. The findings tell of complex stories how global platformisation of tourism undermines the emergence of related cross-innovation systems in small countries; how fragmentation of local education and health care markets does not enable the scalability of innovations, but protects local innovation systems for being overtaken by global platform giants. The book has stories of successful facilitation of cross-innovation as well as failures to do so.

Euskarazko komunikabideek digitalizazio garaian dituzten desafioei erreparatzen die aurkezpen honek: hedabide horien audientziak ikertu dira lehenengo eta behin; ikus-entzunezko industrian gertatzen ari den paradigma-aldaketan sakondu da hurrena, eta digitalizazioa komunikazio munduari zelan eragiten ari zaion ere azaldu da. Kinka horretan, komunikazio munduan azken urteotan berrikuntza eta sormena
sustatzeko xedez jaio diren laborategi eta ikasketen oinarriak deskribatu dira, bide hori euskarazko sormen-ekosistema bat zurkaizteko aukera baliagarria izan daitekeelakoan; komunikabideak, unibertsitateak eta administrazio publikoa lirateke sormen-ekosistema horren hiru erpinak.

The second wave of Internet development (2000-2015) that enabled the app economy and mobile revolution is moving into the third wave of exponential connectivity era (2016- ) of Internet of Things, in which big data and algorithmic logic are taking the lead to help us deal with the uncertainty and our disoriented or “tribal” relationship to “truth seeking”.
Major legacy media such as the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, The Guardian and innovative journalism scaling up startups such as Quartz, Vox, ProPublica and BuzzFeed are investing in data-first, story-centric, computational journalism approaches, in search of providing more accuracy, more transparency and deeper engagement with the communities or audiences they aim to serve. Algorithms and automation are trusted to manage and correlate data, hard science facts and information, to provide context, understanding, to tell stories that matter. All embedded in big data.
In this paper we present our work in progress of an ethnographic qualitative research, taking as case studies two data-led newsrooms in the US, where there is a very strong and influential data journalism community of scholars and media professionals.
We aim to shed a close-up light on how the organizational context of data journalism production impacts the evolution of two data-led newsrooms, taking the cases of one leading legacy organization (MarketWatch) and one digital-native, data-led by design organization (Quartz), focusing on their data- driven news work-flows, collaborations and challenges between journalists and data editors to produce data storytelling, and possible newsroom redesigns to mirror new data-led priorities and role dynamics.
We conclude with presenting two different newsroom models and work-flows, one data- “centric” and one data-“remote” model followed by some suggestions for future research and some thoughts on the new challenges ahead in a rich interconnected data-immersed society and humanity.

Nowadays, new media generate new models of cultural production. In order to determine their potential and effectiveness, the issues of its innovation need to be taken into account. The aim of this article has been to look at the culture management through the prism of a cultural product, namely to capture the essence of innovation management
of a new media product. It is assumed that the cultural development results partly from the development of specific products. Culture exhibits commercial aspects, hence it is reasonable to consider the problems of its innovation. The problematic nature of the indicated permanent creativity of the cultural sector (especially the media sector), and
implicitly its innovation, shall be suspended on the assumption that innovation takes place when invention is being commercialised.
In the first place, based on the critical analysis of the existing findings, the specific nature of a cultural product and its specific example - media product - will be determined.
Then, product innovation, which stresses the so far overlooked product's performative  aspect, will be defined. Thanks to the analysis that assumes a gradual transition from the most general to the more and more detailed issues, the emphasis will be put on the complexity of the phenomenon and the numerous contexts that should be included in the research, in order to capture the innovative cultural mechanism. The
above-mentioned findings will allow the elements of the media product innovation model to be determined, which has been our methodological goal. As a result of metatheoretical analyses of the current interdisciplinary research achievements, located at the crossroads of various disciplines and areas of cultural practice, media product innovation matrix will be created.
New media will constitute the subject of our detailed research and simultaneously will serve as a test for the developed tool. For the pilot analysis, Kontakt24.pl and innovations introduced to the website during its redesign in 2014 were selected. The analysis was carried out in the context of the hybrid, technological and content nature of media
product.

Journalism studies is a relatively young field trying to make sense of a relatively fast-moving scholarly object – news. The matter of time is emerging as a particularly vexing challenge: When so much seems to be changing, and so quickly, how are journalism studies researchers to discern meaningful developments as opposed to short-term ephemera? This essay argues for 'temporal reflexivity', a way of fostering critical judgment about whether some phenomenon is indeed a break from what came before, a continuation of what has existed, or some middle-ground mutation. Such thinking reveals how temporality is embedded within journalism studies, driving assumptions and incentives about how and what to research – as well as what not to research. In particular, we apply the lens of temporal reflexivity to discuss issues of time and attention across three key areas of concern for journalism studies' development as a field: first, the need for an analytical approach that balances change and stasis; second, the need to address issues of scale in which it is difficult to discern passing fads from deeper shifts that may lead to new institutional forms; and third, the need to understand the complicated and circular role of journalism education, both in reinforcing discourses of 'crisis' and 'innovation' and in lending stability to the boundaries of journalism as professionalized practice. In all, this essay opens up ways of considering the taken-for-granted temporal implications of research questions and pedagogical practices in journalism studies.

Los chatbots construidos sobre plataformas de mensajería privada constituyen un instrumento sencillo, de comunicación
directa y personalizada con el público. Tienen numerosas ventajas gracias a la posibilidad de automatizar el proceso de producción
y distribución de contenidos, e incluso para seguir en vivo eventos o acontecimientos “noticiosos”. De forma paulatina,
los medios están adaptando sus estrategias al uso de estas herramientas. Esta investigación presenta los resultados de
un grupo de discusión con expertos profesionales de siete importantes medios españoles que tiene como objetivo conocer
el fenómeno bot en España. Los resultados revelan que los medios se encuentran en una fase inicial en la adopción de esta
tecnología, aunque cuentan con experiencias de éxito sobre temas puntuales o ligadas a acontecimientos concretos como
la cobertura de elecciones o eventos deportivos. El target de estos canales lo componen millennials de 25 a 35 años, muy
activos, que demandan contenidos específicos.