Managing 2.0 newsrooms: insight stories of spontaneous innovation and improvisation

Abstract

Nowadays audiences love live communication (Deuze, 2011), the possibility of reaching news in real time, receiving contents without the effort of having to search for them. The concept “news now” (Sheller, 2014) is an audience imperative.

Previous research show that media have developed in the last decade a great dependence on social networks (Singer et alt, 2011). Source of new audiences, social media are also a space for the verification and localization of new contents. Sometimes these functions has forced to alter editorial models to host viral topics, necessary to try to overcome the crisis of attention particularly concerning in the context of the young people (Boczkowski and Mitchelstein, 2016). Digital media estimate that one third of their visits come from Facebook (Somaya, 2014), a figure that forces them to create specific strategies that ensure the reputation and growth of the company in the 2.0 sphere because the atomization of content causes fragmented and decontextualized audiences to consume individual news. Recently, Emily Bell (2018) confirmed also that Facebook is reshaping newsrooms. From the point of view of the audience, the number of users of Facebook or Twitter in Spain is not reached by any mass media. This context generates a strange symbiosis, which combines the need and the competition that we consider relevant to analyze. One of the routines which come from this relationship has been the integration of soft news on the front page of online media. This practice has also affected media credibility.