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The purpose of this paper is to investigate what role particular new management devices play in the development of the news profession in an organizational setting shifting to new technologies.

This is studied through of observations of work practices in the newsroom and through documentary research and qualitative interviews with managers, editors, and other professionals.

It is shown that management devices such as the news table and the news concept are central to the reorganization of news work, as they realize managers’ strategies, just like they produce new practices and power relationships. It is shown that the devices produce increased collaboration among journalists and interaction between managers and output journalists, that mundane work and power is delegated to technological devices and that news products are increasingly standardized.

The wider implications of these findings seem to be a change in the journalistic profession: TV news journalism is becoming less individualistic and more collective and professionalism becomes a matter of understanding and realizing the news organization’s strategy, rather than following a more individual agenda.

The paper’s originality lies in showing that profession and management are not opposed to each other, but can be seen as a continuum on which journalistic and managerial tasks become intertwined. This is in contrast to previous research on news work. Furthermore, the paper’s focus on devices opens up for conceptualizing power in the newsroom as distributed across a network of people and things, rather executed by managers alone.

Online collaboration software (OCS), such as Slack and Microsoft Teams, has become widespread among news organizations as these tools help news workers collaborate across different locations and make communication more efficient inside newsrooms. While such technologies are increasingly employed as teamwork productivity boosters, the authors’ knowledge of their potential role in shaping control mechanisms and power dynamics within news work is limited. This paper addresses how different types of control may emerge within virtual newsrooms being operated by OCS. The purpose of this paper is to address this issue.

The paper employs an interview-based qualitative method and provides evidence gathered from 20 interviews with digital journalists and media managers representing 11 online news media in Switzerland.

The findings reveal how OCS could lead to various control mechanisms in the workplace by directing, evaluating and disciplining journalists in specific ways. This study suggests that while OCS can be valuable in boosting collaborations among news staff, it might create a situation where journalists are less able to focus on their work and creative activities. Most importantly, OCS bolsters an “always-on” work culture in news media and removes obstacles for employers and managers to invade journalists' space, time and mind.

By focusing on three aspects of control mechanisms, including direction, evaluation and discipline, this paper contributes to a better understanding of the role of OCS in shaping control and power dynamics within news media organizations.

Tracing audience preferences via audience analytics software has become a vital strategy for many news organizations to ensure their competitiveness in media markets. Extant research also confirms the growing presence of these tools in digital news work in recent years across many local and international news media. However, little is understood about the analytics-driven tensions emerging among journalists and media managers. This paper aims to address this gap by drawing on the labor process theory, which critically analyzes labor and workplace transformations under capitalism.

The present study employs an interview-based qualitative methodology to deeply understand the factors at the base of the emerging tensions between news workers and managers brought about by audience metrics tools.

Results show how some perceptions, activities and contextual triggers related to analytics could make relationships between workers and managers problematic. The pressures felt by some journalists stemmed from the way their media managers introduced, interpreted, communicated and applied analytics in the workplace, which were not tied to the quality and learning goals related to journalists’ aspirations. As our evidence suggests, the analytics-induced tensions among news workers were rather an outcome of managerial deficits than of systematic plans to exploit journalists.

By identifying the nature of fundamental analytics-driven tensions in newsrooms, this paper contributes to our understanding of how media managers can embrace more effective approaches toward audience analytics, workforce and organizational performance.

Labs are meant for the creation of new products and services or to overcome innovation challenges (Carstensen & Bason, 2012). Media labs, besides the name, go beyond the media industry concepts to respond to technology, communication, and economic changes (Bisso Nunes & Mills, 2021). For that, they integrate public spaces, media, arts, and tech. In short, media labs are organizational structures that allow for experimentation and development, and facilitate open innovation and individual and organizational learning. Many media labs are focused on accelerating media involvement in functional and experimental innovations and rise in a context unrelated to the temporality of media content production, on a systematic innovation approach. But media labs also represent great diversity. In this chapter, we explore key elements of the media lab phenomenon: history, definition, evolution and appearance globally and in Latin America, emergence beyond the media industry, and, by the end, final thoughts about media labs' roles amid future organizational and technological transformations.

Improving digital work experience is critical for the job performance of individuals and the competitiveness of organizations due to their increasing use. This paper investigates how organization support affects the digital work experience of individuals differently depending on their levels of information technology (IT) identity.

Drawing upon the IT identity literature and the conservation of resources (COR) theory, a conceptual model is developed, tested and validated using the data collected in Australia through an experimental design in which IT identity is manipulated.

This study reveals a nuanced impact of organization support on shaping digital work experience. Specifically, it finds that technical support is more effective in improving the digital work experience of individuals with a high level of IT identity, whereas well-being support is more effective in enhancing the digital work experience of individuals with a low level of IT identity.

This research contributes to the IT identity literature by introducing a novel experimental design to manipulate IT identity in the digital work context. It also contributes to the digital work literature by introducing a resource perspective for identifying well-being support, technical support and IT identity as the key resources in shaping digital work experience and calling for attention to IT identity as a boundary condition on the effectiveness of organization support. The findings can help organizations formulate better strategies and policies to improve digital work experience by providing tailored support to individuals with different levels of IT identity.

This article aims to study digital competence (DC) in media work.

The authors utilize frame analysis to investigate how DC is framed in media work using 30 semi-structured interviews as data with journalists in Finland.

The authors identify three main frames of DC in the context of media work. The individual attitude frame emphasizes employees' attitudes toward DC, the team-level support frame underlines the need for support in the work community and the organizational-level practice frame highlights enablers of and organizations' requirements for digital competence.

First, media workers' DC is necessary to enhance work efficiency and accomplish tasks and may be supported with supportive management practices. Second, the findings suggest that DC should be understood and analyzed as a multi-level issue. Third, the findings suggest that appropriate continuing education and study opportunities were needed. Besides formal arrangements for learning, informal contexts of learning are important.

The article contributes to media studies and studies on the digitalization of work by taking account of the organizational, team and individual levels in discussing digital competence in the news media sector.

This chapter examines strategies deployed at individual and institutional levels to combat fake news in two media houses in Uganda. Grounded in the hierarchy of influences model, we examine journalists' and editors' perspectives on how Vision Group and Nation Media Group newsrooms respond to fake news. Journalists' and editors' responses, obtained through semi-structured interviews as well as document review enabled us to underscore the centrality of professional standards, training and technology in combating fake news. We found that technology plays a key role in fact-checking, although newsrooms are yet to adopt advanced digital tools such as artificial intelligence (AI) and algorithms. The newsrooms under investigation deploy conventional hardware and software to detect, flag and debunk fake news. We posit that for the strategies adopted at the organisational level to succeed, they ought to appeal to individual reporters' goals and interests. Further, discourses on adoption of newer technology ought to reflect the contexts in which the news organisations operate in addition to their financial standing.

This article aims to report on research conducted inside British national media organisations. The research was designed to investigate the impact on the working practices of journalists of the process of production convergence – the trend towards news reporting in more than one medium in formerly single‐medium organisations. The article describes the changes that are taking place and the ways journalists are reacting to them.

Interviews were conducted with 20 journalists during 2002 and 2003. The interviews were with journalists working in newsrooms at the BBC, Sky News, The Guardian and the Financial Times.

The data show that while multimedia news is becoming well established, the multimedia journalist has been slow to arrive. This is because of the pressures that multi‐media working adds to the journalist's daily routine and a concern over the impact on the quality of output.

The media environment is evolving rapidly and research findings on this topic quickly go out of date, but the findings presented here offer valuable insights into the news production processes operating in British national media organisations and the ways journalists are adapting to, and are likely to continue to adapt to, changes in production technologies and changed systems of working.

The paper is the first to focus on journalistic practice in a converging media environment.