Renowned Scholars Seminar Series with Professor Pär Ågerfalk from Uppsala University, Sweden

RENOWNED SCHOLARS SEMINAR SERIES - INVITATION

Through the Printing Press: On Openness in the Swedish Newspaper Industry

Seminar with Professor Pär Ågerfalk, Upssala Univeristy, Sweden.

Recent years have seen an increase in the use of social information technologies that have a decentralizing effect on collaboration and co-creation. These technologies carry a potential for organizations to open up aspects of production and directly involve external stakeholders. One result of this trend is an increased institutional pressure on the newspaper industry to facilitate an open approach to news production — a traditionally insular industry currently battling a near two-decade long financial decline. This talk focuses on how the newspaper industry meets the challenge of openness. Results from a combination of content analysis of the websites of Sweden’s 159 standard newspapers and deep qualitative interviews in one newspaper corporation, suggest that rather than embracing openness, newspaper organizations to a large extent tend to deflect open practices by either separating core, legitimizing practices from openness altogether or making openness non-invasive by institutionally assimilating the properties of open practices. An important reason for this carefulness is the inherent complexity stemming from mechanisms created and triggered by conflicting institutional logics. It seems that the process of legitimization inscribed by a particularly charged information technology — the printing press — continues to exert great influence on what constitutes openness in the newspaper industry.

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