| Efforts to understand the relationship between technological change and organizational change in the journalism industry have taken on a new meaning over the past decade. If it is not already the case, beginning in the near future, the survival of professional news media may rely on the ability of organizations to strategically manage technological change. This dissertation proposes the use of the Mutual Shaping of Technology (MST) construct, based on the Diffusion of Innovations theoretical paradigm as a means to examine the relationship between technological and organizational change in a newsroom. The MST construct imagines a dynamic relationship between efforts to diffuse technological innovations and efforts to shape those innovations, both in terms of physical design changes and abstract, socially constructed meanings. The MST construct is applied to the introduction and development of an innovative journalism platform in a news organization with more than 100 years of experience publishing a newspaper and with experience developing online communication technologies in the form of content management systems. I argue that this news platform is innovative in its use of social networking tools and in its open publishing format, which encourages a level of citizen participation rarely seen. I use the five levels of analysis from Shoemaker's hierarchical model to organize my discussion of this study of an extreme case. Using data from in-depth interviews, I explore the introduction, adoption and iterative development of this news platform and related organizational change. I ask if such a platform is sustainable economically and analyze institutional influences that may aid or inhibit growth. I also compare the model to the ideal models discussed and tested in the public journalism movement and to the model some scholars consider the highest ideal---Habermas' public sphere. In this dissertation, I introduce the concept of "social journalism," and I find that, as a model of news production, it lives up to many of the goals of the public journalism movement. In some ways discursive practice on the "social journalism" platform matches the ideal of the public sphere, but the survival of the platform, based on an analysis of its related business model, is questionable at best. Application of the MST construct suggests that the diffusion of the innovation is felt most strongly at the individual, routines, and organizational levels of production where the individual's role conception, the routine amount of work and newsroom beliefs about the future of the organization are shown to be in flux. At the institutional level, community input factors in as a powerful social shaping force, while at the social system level, little information of value emerges. Research findings are discussed in detail, and many suggestions for future research concerning social media and professional journalism are proposed. |
