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Institutional Arbitrageurs: The Role of Product Managers as a Locus of Change in Journalism
[journal article]
Abstract The modern news industry demands a continuous stream of products ready to meet audience needs; the emergent newsroom role of product manager serves to prioritize them by providing a holistic perspective on an organization’s goals. Product professionals bring in new skill sets and help to bridge the ... view more
The modern news industry demands a continuous stream of products ready to meet audience needs; the emergent newsroom role of product manager serves to prioritize them by providing a holistic perspective on an organization’s goals. Product professionals bring in new skill sets and help to bridge the divide and align the priorities among editorial, business, and technology functions, serving as a locus of change in journalism. This sets the stage for institutional complexity where actors struggle to make decisions due to competing logics, which are socially constructed rules created to normalize behavior. This article thus focuses on the dynamics of change in a complex environment by examining news product professionals as institutional arbitrageurs, which are actors who bring competing logics together to create value during a time of complexity. This framing raises questions regarding the locus of change in journalism and aims to further understand the tactics used by actors in a complex environment such as the field of journalism. A qualitative study using interviews with digital journalism’s product professionals is used to address this phenomenon, which allows for a theoretical contextualization of the dynamics of change in journalism and specifically, how product managers act as a locus of change using their roles to manage complexity by bringing incompatible logics together to leverage differences between them.... view less
Keywords
innovation; journalism; product management; institutional change
Classification
Communicator Research, Journalism
Free Keywords
institutional arbitrage; news product manager; news professional; product managers
Document language
English
Publication Year
2024
Journal
Media and Communication, 12 (2024)
Issue topic
Unpacking Innovation: Media and the Locus of Change
ISSN
2183-2439
Status
Published Version; peer reviewed