My UBC colleague Mary Lynn and myself argue that there is an acute need to question what innovation is and who it serves in a newly published book chapter.
The chapter, Journalism Innovation in a Time of Survival, is included in the book, News Media Innovation Reconsidered, edited by Maria Luengo and Susana Herrera-Damas.
The edited volume “presents an innovative framework of ‘creative reconstruction’ and reviews new journalistic concepts, models, initiatives, and practices that clearly demonstrate professional ethics that embrace truth seeking, transparency, fact checking, and accuracy, and other ethical considerations.”
With an international group of contributors, many of the examples come from Spanish-speaking media. In our chapter, we consider journalism innovation in Canada and conclude:
In many respects, Canada is a cautionary tale of the impact of the never-ending pivot, a technological lens on innovation without sufficient attention to infrastructures and longer-term strategy given the ongoing sustained losses in Canadian commercial journalism organizations. We propose drawing from the definitions of innovation that consider it at its widest possible remit. That would mean incorporating definitions from both journalism studies and economists such as Schumpeter (1934). It would mean recognizing that framing innovation in response to crisis has its own narrowing effect as it neglects longer-term social and cultural concerns about the role of journalism and its histories, and conversations about the infrastructures that need to be generated in the present.
Most of our chapter is currently available as a free preview on Google Books.
News Media Innovation Reconsidered is published by Wiley-Blackwell.