Over the last 20 years, ongoing waves of digitalization have decimated the traditional business model of the news and fundamentally changed how the news, or more formally, the ‘institutional press’, works. Indeed, ever since reserved frequencies were gifted to television broadcasters in the 1950s, on the condition that they inform the public of current events, the subsidy underpinning newspapers and other forms of institutional media has slowly eroded. Like many other industries, the internet has accelerated this phenomenon. Not only has the hyper-targeted advertising facilitated by social media and other platforms functionally eroded the subsidy model to its breaking point; but the costless transmission of data facilitated by the internet has increased geographic scope of dominant players, permitting them to reach beyond their original markets and squeeze content producers across the globe. Against this backdrop, it is hard to overstate the importance of this 'crisis of the institutional press'. The news provides our primary means for understanding the world around us. Societies desperately need a well-functioning institutional press to tackle the many societal, economic, and environmental challenges we all face.
The first day of core courses usually begins with one of four motivating examples: the decline of incumbent sellers in favor of digital platforms, the increasing irrelevance of diseconomies of scale and the rise of digital monopolies, the rise of social media and user-generated content, or the decline of the newspaper industry. Yet, as these classes continue to discuss the opportunities firms have in the digital age and teach students to implement advanced analytics to more effectively mine business value from data, the decline of institutional media often fades into the background.
This phenomenon-driven special issue is motivated by the view that our students, colleagues, and society urgently need a better understanding of the causes and consequences of the changing nature of news in the digital era and potential solutions going forward. The special issue takes an interdisciplinary perspective, bringing together insights from across the broader information, managerial, and organizational sciences.
This failure to discuss the implications of the decline of institutional news media is troubling. Not only has the Fourth Estate historically served to counterbalance institutions with a monopoly on force and morality, it has been a cornerstone of democratic republics for centuries. These claims are not idle musings. News media outlets have been shown to influence many societal outcomes, from government agendas to public opinion to voting behavior. The Fourth Estate mediates the attention granted to social movements and can influence the strategic management of organizations. Institutional media can also prompt changes in corporate governance: it can shape the valuation of firms at IPO, influence firm founding, confer legitimacy on industries, and even elevate de novo technological innovations in the public consciousness.
Yet, seismic changes have assaulted the free press as we understand it. The late 20th century witnessed an increasing concentration in ownership of news outlets, leading to elevated reliance on advertising revenue that biased content. The recent history of the institutional press is interwoven with the history of digital technology. Initially, the World Wide Web served largely as a vehicle for the dissemination of news produced by professional news organizations, extending their reach. In time, the ensuing competition for reader attention shifted the gatekeeping function from professional news organizations to online content curators. Contemporary media coverage became more selective and influenced by market actors. With the advent of social media, user-generated content further usurped the gatekeeping role of professional news organizations. Moreover, public subsidy for the Fourth Estate was undermined by social media, accelerating the control of dominant players on public discourse and hollowing the local publishing industry. At the same time, social media has afforded citizen journalists the ability to counter-balance the biases of professional news organizations.
Even more recently, society has witnessed a demonstrable shift towards the 'post-truth era,' in which populist, tribalist, and anti-'mainstream media' rhetoric proliferates. While the blockchain has been heralded as a way of remaking the institutional press in the digital era, we have little systematic understanding of its efficacy. All the while, the process of news construction and dissemination is being disrupted by algorithms, machine learning, and artificial intelligence. The long-term implications of these AI tools on the institutional press are unknown. Indeed, we are witnessing intersections of the evolutionary paths of technology and the institutional press in ways that are fundamentally changing the 'freedom of the press' and the complex network that includes journalists, software engineers, relational databases, and social media platforms which form it; along with prevailing norms, values, and institutional logics of a particular sociotechnical moment.
Research has only begun to address these changes. The purpose of this Special Issue is to address this gap in scholarship head on and to inform stakeholders about how changes in institutional media are affecting society at the intersection of business, technology, and public policy. To this end, we invite scholarship that helps academia and society comprehend the major changes taking place within the institutional press, why those changes are occurring, and what the consequences of those changes are; and work together toward a more positive future for the institutional press.
We encourage an equally diverse breadth of scholars to submit their work to this special issue.