Marketing the construction of reality: Multiplatform production routines and the renegotiation of journalistic role identities in a legacy local television newsroom

Abstract

Times have changed since Warren Breed published his famous study, ‘Social Control in the Newsroom’. Today, corporate owners are requiring newsroom managers to adopt marketing strategies, launching many television newsrooms into routines similar to those of their newspaper-turned-online colleagues. This exploratory case study presents data from 6 months of observations of digital training in a legacy television newsroom, including interviews with the managers who underwent the training, conversations with newsroom staff, and a survey of that staff, all to explore how managers moderate between these corporate and journalistic needs by learning what corporations require as marketing-based multiplatform production routines and by helping journalists to reconcile their traditional role identities within these new newsroom requirements.

Cross-Media Alliances to Stop Disinformation: A Real Solution?

“…The University of Malaga was given the opportunity to partner with this experimental project, applying non-participant observation during its realization and participating in all the meetings as it formed part of the deliberative council, including the final one where the post-mortem review occurred (Collier, DeMarco, & Fearey, 1996). Over the course of three months, the period for which the project was active, data referring to the production routines was collected, a methodology that has also been applied in studies concerned with the same question (Henderson, 2020). From the first meeting in February 2019 until the final one in May, a diary was kept containing field notes that registered the perceptions of the fact-checkers concerning the project and how they discuss their methods and proposed solutions.…”

Could cutting costs mean changing minds? Effects of local television news work routines on viewer attention, information-processing, and perceptions of story importance

“…This approach supports the financial goals of the newsroom but does not specifically require including the useful information falling within the purview of professional journalism. Journalists today must also use social media to market their own content to viewers (Henderson, 2020; Tandoc Jr. and Vos, 2015) and to directly monitor viewer interactions with their content (McGregor and Molyneux, 2020; Tandoc Jr., 2014), all for the purpose of giving audiences what they ‘want’ to know as much as what they ‘need’ to know. Additionally, prioritizing the immediacy norm as part of a live, breaking news model, scholars have determined, is now regularly delaying the use of traditional news presentations and the search for traditionally newsworthy information, contributing to an overall paradigm shift in journalistic norms (Henderson, 2020; LaPoe and Reynolds, 2013; Lipschultz and Hilt, 2014; Schudson, 2001; Seib, 2002; Tuggle and Huffman, 2009; Vos and Moore, 2020).…”

“…Of course, the contemporary local TV news business is really a multi-platform effort, including web, social and streaming products designed to cast a wide audience net. Notably, the television news work routine, however, currently drives many of the content decisions across those other platforms (Henderson, 2020).…”

The Impact of Economic Globalization on Corporate Marketing and Countermeasures to Cope with It

“…Economic globalization is one of the important trends that cannot be ignored in today's world, which has a far-reaching impact on enterprise marketing [1]. With the increasingly close connection of the international economy and the strengthening of information exchange, enterprises are faced with a more complex and changeable market environment [2]. Globalization makes enterprises no longer limited by national boundaries, but need to compete and cooperate on a global scale.…”