Shifting institutional orders and responses to technological disruption among local journalists in Russia and the U.S.

Abstract

This study compares U.S. and Russian news organizations’ responses to today’s disruptive environment intensified by the development of digital online technologies and global economic crisis. Findings show U.S. journalists attempt to maintain legitimacy within ‘professional’ and ‘digital network’ orders by either decoupling their digital network efforts from traditional, core operations or by assimilating digital practices within traditional journalistic practices. For Russian journalists, the dominant conflicting orders are the ‘state’ institutional order and a weak ‘professional’ order; and accord with a ‘digital network’ order is most evident outside of traditional news organizations. Overall, in both countries, a lack of response to online audiences by media outlets is common, but differing institutional environments help explain differing reasons for these responses.

Keywords

Digital network institutional logic institutional theory journalism Russia the United States

Introduction

News organizations around the world have been challenged to adapt to market upheaval, to altered journalist–audience relationships, and to upended business models—each a result of new digital online technologies and global financial problems. While adaptation has been evident, so has maintenance of traditional journalistic practices. Reasons for these mixed responses vary across nations and news media systems, but one key explanation is the variation across countries’ institutional environments—particularly in the relationships between the news media, government, and commercial systems.

While the U.S. news media system is constitutionally separate from the political system, most major news media are owned by commercial companies and are strongly dependent on advertising support. U.S. journalists also depend on information from official sources, though historically journalists have had substantial professional autonomy, and the profession has gained legitimacy from its embrace and claims of ‘objectivity’, or neutrality and balance in reporting (Deuze, 2005; Schudson, 2002). In contrast, the Russian news media, particularly, newspapers, have been historically tied to government (Arutunyan, 2009; Vartanova and Azhgikhina, 2011). Their pages have also tended to serve as an ideological and personal space, rather than as a neutral space (Zassoursky, 2004).

Through in-depth interviews with managers and journalists, this study explores and compares complex responses by local news outlets to disruptive environments in four mid-sized cities—two in the U.S. and two in Russia. Local journalism was studied because (1) communities and their media offer a bounded microcosm of news ecosystems and of the disruption that is changing them, (2) analysis at the community level allows variability in community size and complexity, which therefore affords a study of their impact, and (3) local Russian media are under-researched, though they became increasingly important during the decentralization of perestroika and the years after (Strukov, 2009).

Lack of response to change is fairly common at news outlets in both countries. But differing institutional environments—and differing relationships between journalists and these environments—provide different reasons for this lack of response. Here, ‘institution’ is defined as an enduring, taken-for-granted model of ‘relations and exchange [that] are reliably reproduced through the actions of individuals and groups without requiring either repeated authoritative intervention or collective mobilization’ (Clemens and Cook, 1999: 445). A political system is an institution, but so is marriage. Institutions are not to be confused with organizations, which are social entities with authoritatively enforced rules, role assignments, and defined boundaries (Tolbert and Hall, 2009). Like individuals, organizations are shaped by the institutional environment.

The institutions of state-journalist relations in Russia differ distinctly from the U.S. This institutional-level difference suggests that responses to environmental disruption will differ between the two nations. So, responses should not be seen as universally ‘natural’ (Hallin and Mancini, 2004). Yet, there are similarities too. Journalists in both countries derive authority from connection with government officials, as predicted by scholarship that views news as a political institution (Cook, 2005; Schudson, 2002; Sparrow, 1999). However, political constraints are stronger in Russia, and professional autonomy is broader for U.S. journalists. U.S. journalists work within a ‘liberal media model’ (Hallin and Mancini, 2004), while Russian journalists work within a ‘statist commercialized’ system (Vartanova, 2012). This variability in professional autonomy in the face of political power suggests that journalists in the two media systems will differ in their response to the impact of a disruptive digital ‘network order’.

Recent advances in institutional theory in the study of organizations offer a helpful explanatory framework. According to traditional institutional theory, organizational actors seek to be in ‘accord’ with the dominant institutional ‘field’ or ‘order’ so they may maintain legitimacy (DiMaggio and Powell, 1991). An institutional order is ‘a … domain of institutions that … governs a commonly recognized area of life [and that] provides a frame of reference that preconditions the sense-making choices of actors’ (Thornton et al., 2012: 54). Commonly studied orders include Community, Religion, State, Market, and Profession, but there are others. Yet, there may be multiple and conflicting institutional orders (Friedland and Alford, 1991), causing mixed responses at the organizational level. This conflict keeps organizations such as news outlets uncertain about how to change and adapt. Organizational ‘actors’ like journalists and news managers must maintain legitimacy within a confusing, shifting constellation of institutional orders, and this is especially true in today’s disruptive environment. Both change and stasis in the organization may result.

For U.S. journalists, the source of authority for its established ‘Professional order’ has been its traditional access to the political/economic elite, while legitimacy within this institutional order derives from historical claims to objectivity (e.g., Cook, 2005; Schudson, 2003). But in recent years, a challenge has emerged from a budding ‘Network order’, which is tied to the advance of digital online technologies. In journalism, the Network institutional order derives authority from the Internet’s extensive scale, reach and access to an aggregated crowd. It derives legitimacy from the idea of egalitarian, open access, and from consonance with the normative prescription of a set of high-status foundations, schools, and professional associations that advocate innovation in digital news practices and forms (e.g., in the U.S., Neiman Journalism Lab, Knight Foundation, NYU, Poynter). These Professional network orders seem to clash.

It is less clear if a ‘Network’ order will register in the Russian provinces. For local Russian journalists, the dominant conflicting orders are the ‘State’ institutional order and a weak ‘Professional’ order that has fragmented in response to state/economic pressures (Erzikova and Lowrey, 2010; Pasti, 2012). News outlets’ responses to a Network order in Russian provinces seem more limited, evident primarily, as the present study showed, at the titular levels of government and media—e.g., former president Medvedev mandated that governors host blogs—and digital efforts by powerful Moscow media.

Literature review

Digital online news production and consumption in the U.S.

Online digital media have encroached upon traditional media, pressuring their practices and diminishing the number of loyal audiences (Hachten and Scotton, 2012). The recent economic downturn has aggravated the situation. In an attempt to replace lost advertising revenue, about a third of 1,380 U.S. dailies introduced some kind of paid digital content subscription in 2012. While it is expected that the paid content would be perceived as high quality, 31% of consumers have reported abandoning news outlets, citing low satisfaction with the quality and quantity of coverage—partly a casualty of newsroom staff cutbacks (Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism, 2013).

Just less than 100% of Americans have Internet access, about 95% have access to high-speed Internet, 81% of U.S. adults use the Internet, and 78% go online to get news (Pew Research Center, n.d.). Importantly, those who enthusiastically follow local news perceive their local newspapers as the most important source (Miller et al., 2012a).

Local news consumption practices vary across community type: Urban and suburban residents rely on both traditional and emerging platforms, while small town and rural residents consume news mainly from local print newspapers and broadcast television. Urban and suburban residents are more likely to use mobile devices to get news than rural residents, and they are more likely to share local stories with others via email and social networking sites and to comment on online stories (Miller et al., 2012b). Individuals active in these networks implement editorial judgment while selectively re-disseminating media content through personal digital networks (Singer, 2013). This increasingly active audience challenges the role of journalists as society’s news gatekeepers by increasing or decreasing the visibility of the news content for a secondary audience (Bastos et al., 2013; Singer, 2013).

The U.S. journalistic field has been encouraging online community involvement (‘opening the gate’) since the 1990s. As a result, the participatory online environment has increased website traffic, especially for smaller news outlets (Singer, 2013). Overall, in spite of staff cuts and decreasing reporting power (The State of News Media 2013, n.d.), many U.S. news outlets have been fairly active in embracing the ‘digital future’. Yet, within news organizations there has also been reluctance to change practices, and adoption of merely superficial change (Lowrey, 2012/2013).

Compared to Russian news organizations, U.S. news outlets have been better educated about and socialized to the idea that digital, participatory news are the ‘future of news’. U.S. ‘think tank’ organizations (e.g., the Neiman Journalism Lab, J-Lab, and Poynter) spread best, or at least trendy, digital practices, publishing new ideas, and conducting workshops and training sessions on journalistic change in a digital era. While response by news outlets has been uneven, the degree to which the embrace of a ‘digital future’ is advocated and has even become taken-for-granted affects how important this vision is for journalists, managers, and owners, and the degree to which they embrace it as a legitimate institutional order and logic.

Runet—Russian Internet

Originated during the late 1980s, Russian Internet practices reflected the perestroika ideology—the freedom of speech and right to publish (Strukov, 2009). Early Russian Internet was perceived as the ‘utopian—artistic/intellectual—world of freedom and democracy, in contrast to the greed of the Yeltsin era and the stifling tendencies of Putin’s regime’ (Strukov, 2011: 160). By 2004, when the Internet became a bona fide mass medium in Russia, the Internet was less free and more commercialized compared to the early 1990s (Strukov, 2009, 2011). Recognizing the potential power of the Internet as a public space, the Russian government has attempted to regulate its practices by, for example, prohibiting anonymous access to the Internet (Strukov, 2009). However, the Runet is not officially censored by the government. As an alternative strategy to Internet censorship, the Kremlin has increased the amount of pro-government online information (Strukov, 2009) and has introduced a new law that makes it legal to shut down a website without a court order (Klishin, 2013).

About 52% of the adult population in Russia has access to the Internet (Voronina, 2013). While Russia has the largest online community in Europe in terms of number of users (Russian Periodical Press, 2013), the percent of access is roughly half the access for U.S. citizens. Strukov (2011) identified the social profile of Russian Internet users as predominantly 20 to 35 years old, urban and male. The average cost of the Internet access has decreased significantly since 1999 ($121 a month) (Chadwick, 2006) and was equal to $20 a month in 2012 (Voronina, 2013). However, a digital divide based on Internet availability, cost, and speed remains a serious issue. Rural areas and remote regions (e.g., Far East) are lagging behind urban areas and regions located in the European part of Russia (Voronina, 2013).

The percentage of Russian Internet users who read news online doubled, from 12% to 25% in 2012 (Russian Periodical Press, 2013). Every fourth print publication has a mobile version and half of Russian print media maintain official Facebook and Twitter accounts. On average, Russian users spend about 9.5 h a month on social media websites. However, publications did not see expected advertising revenue from social media, and some publications reported revenue losses in 2012 on social media (Russian Periodical Press, 2013).

Print ad and circulation revenues have supported regional and municipal newspapers’ digital presence. Though editors and publishers have acknowledged the Internet’s capacity for facilitating transparency and dialogue at the local level, such efforts remain nascent, and the Internet has by no means replaced print and electronic media as an information source in Russia’s provinces (Russian Periodical Press, 2013).

Theoretical framework: Institutional theory and institutional logics

Institutional theory can shed light on the relationship between macro-level institutional orders and the behaviors ‘on the ground’ by actors within organizations—e.g., digital media practices in news outlets (Dacin et al., 2002). Variations on institutional theory have emerged over the last few years, including neo-institutional theory, organization ecology,¹ and the more recent institutional logics perspective.

Lowrey (2012/2013) summarized assumptions shared by these approaches: (1) Disruption in the wider institutional environment shapes changes in forms and practices of organizations (Aldrich and Ruef, 2007; Thornton et al., 2012); (2) Maintenance of legitimacy is key to organizational survival (Aldrich and Fiol, 1994; Carroll and Hannan, 2000); (3) Over time, surviving organizations tend toward isomorphism (sameness) with other similar entities and with their institutional environment, as they seek to secure a shared understanding about their practices and forms by consumers and other institutions (Aldrich and Ruef, 2007; Carroll and Hannan, 2000); and (4) Over time, surviving organizations tend toward an institutional orientation—they become partly buffered or decoupled from immediate, changing environments and more closely connected with other similar entities and with their institutional environment (the structures of interlocking and interdependent institutions) (Aldrich and Ruef, 2007; DiMaggio and Powell, 1991).

These are all tendencies and not certainties. More recently, institutional theorists have emphasized agency in the processes of institutionalization. While taken-for-granted premises are powerful, actual people (‘institutional entrepreneurs’) must work to devise and maintain institutions, and entities may deinstitutionalize as well as institutionalize (Lawrence and Suddaby, 2006). The institutional logics perspective represents a major recent attempt to transform institutional theory (Greenwood et al., 2010; Reay and Hinings, 2005; Thornton et al., 2012). This approach posits the existence of multiple institutional ‘orders’, which correspond with institutional ‘logics’ pursued by organizational decision makers. The approach helps to account for change and variability in institutional environments (as most previous institutional approaches have tended to emphasize stasis and isomorphism), and to account for the role of agency amid institutional structures.

Institutional logics are ‘the socially constructed, historical patterns of cultural symbols and material practices, including assumptions, values and beliefs, by which individuals and organizations provide meaning to their daily activity, organize time and space, and reproduce their lives and experiences’ (Thornton et al., 2012: 12). Logics must be in accord with institutional orders, and this becomes problematic if there are multiple orders (Reay and Hinings, 2005).

While this approach makes room for change, it is still assumed that institutional orders help establish legitimacy and tend to foster stasis and path dependence: ‘Once established and taken for granted, the institutional orders and their elemental categories are relatively stable over time’ (Thornton et al., 2012: 127). But as mentioned, unlike previous institutional approaches, the institutional logics perspective stresses the existence of competing or conflicting logics within a single field. To deal with uncertainty resulting from such conflict, actors must rethink and reposition their practices and beliefs so that they may remain legitimate within the context of shifting institutional orders. The institutional logics perspective assumes that actors have access to ‘tool boxes’ or ‘repertoires’ of logics, norms, narratives, and models and that organizational actors may embrace, reject, and negotiate these (Clemens, 2009). Actors try to ‘make sense of the array of collective identities and practices and assess whether there is anomalous variety that needs to be addressed’ (see also Greenwood et al., 2010; Reay and Hinings, 2005; Thornton et al., 2012: 143).

Faced with competing orders, models, or logics, organizations must find a way to hybridize them. One way is to segregate or ‘loosely couple’ conflicting logics from core processes and practices. For example, U.S. news organizations build a ‘wall’ between editorial and advertising to loosely couple professional news norms and practices and market-oriented norms and practices (Beam and Meeks, 2011).

Another way to hybridize multiple logics is to either blend them equally or to assimilate a rival logic within a dominant logic. For example, academic scientific researchers assimilated the market logic of patenting practices so they might maintain the primacy of ‘the scientific commons’ (Murray, 2010). And when faced with competition from local news sites or bloggers, U.S. newspapers have assimilated the form of local blogging to help maintain their jurisdiction over the work of informing communities (Lowrey and Mackay, 2008).

Research questions

All institutional logics must have a source of legitimacy as well as a source of authority. Identifying these helps us understand the varied possible outcomes in the event of clashing logics.

Traditional journalistic orders

Both the U.S. and Russian news media follow their own ‘institutional logics’, and seek authority and legitimacy within traditional institutional orders. It is argued here that the source of authority for traditional journalistic logic in the U.S. is its access to powerful legal, political, and economic institutions, and the source of its legitimacy is its professional claim to provide objective information needed for democratic governance. The traditional journalistic logic in Russia is weaker and more fragmented than is U.S. journalism, and overlaps more strongly with the logic of government. The source of authority stems from government, yet this is also an ongoing threat to journalism’s autonomy. The source of legitimacy is less clear—partly it derives from government connections (though this can undermine legitimacy as well) (Pasti, 2012), and partly it comes from a historical connection to the literary intelligentsia and a claim to the task of aiding ordinary Russians in moral, intellectual, and practical ways (Erzikova and Lowrey, 2010). Rather than pursuing detached facts for the truth, journalists have pursued istina, which is ‘a result of philosophical meditation about the self, others and the world’ (Lowrey and Erzikova, 2012: 140).

Digital network order

Both countries are experiencing the worldwide spread and interconnectedness of digital online networks, which we argue is a budding, potentially transformative institutional order. This network order has been destabilizing for journalism worldwide, and its sources of authority and legitimacy are very different from traditional journalism. It is proposed here that the source of authority of the network order is the extensive scale, simultaneity, and interconnectedness of the network, and its reach to distant resources. Castells (2010: xxxii) speaks to this in defining the network’s ‘space of flows’:

[I]t was the development of micro-electronics-based digital communication, advanced telecommunication networks, information systems, and computerized transportation that transformed the spatiality of social interaction by introducing simultaneity, or any chosen time frame, in social practices, regardless of the location of the actors engaged in the communication process.

The network’s source of legitimacy is its relatively open access, which affords egalitarian processes. Public communication in a network can (at least partly) bypass those traditional hierarchical communication patterns, in which journalists provide balanced statements from the powerful, to which they have unique access (Cook, 2005; Schudson, 2003).

We expect that because of different economic/political and historical contexts, because of different journalistic logics, and because of differences between the two countries in the pervasiveness of digital networks, city news outlets in each country will respond in different ways to the mix of ‘network’ logic and traditional journalistic logic.

The U.S. journalistic logic of balance and detached objectivity is one kind of sense-making, and the Russian logic of affiliation with government and personal connectedness with everyday people is another. The U.S. system is grounded in enlightenment ideals of rational, scientific expertise (Deuze, 2005), while the Russian system is grounded in nationalistic, romanticist, and intellectual ideals (Vartanova and Azhgikhina, 2011). In contrast to both, a network logic offers sense-making that is not grounded in any particular time, location, or systematic ideology. It is instead based on the aggregation of many diffused viewpoints and data points across an open expansive network of myriad connections and points of reference. The egalitarian nature of a digital network, and the ease of aggregation across an immense network, provides a new way of sense-making and a new basis of authority and legitimacy.

Any clash of institutional logics challenges the legitimacy of previous arrangements, requiring actors to reposition their work and its purposes in order to regain legitimacy—i.e., accord with conflicting institutional orders. The rise of a network logic clashes with traditional journalism logics, requiring journalists to reshape forms and practices in order to realign.

RQ1: How prevalent is a digital network ‘institutional logic’ in local city journalism in the U.S. and in Russia?

RQ2: How are journalists and news managers in each country responding to, and repositioning in the face of, conflicts between their traditional journalistic logics and digital network logics?

Method

Data for this study were gathered in two U.S. cities and two Russian cities in 2010–2011. The four cities are homes of a variety of media outlets, including print, broadcast, and online. To make this project manageable, only local news-related media outlets were included in the sample in both countries. Print and online entertainment media and radio and TV outlets were excluded from analysis.

In the U.S., a list of participating outlets was compiled from fwix.com, a site that indexed websites by location and from websites of the main media professional association in each city. Personal contacts were also used. In Russia, researchers relied on personal contacts.

Interviews with publishers, editors, rank-and-file reports and bloggers were conducted by native speakers and averaged 45 min to an hour. They were audio-taped for further analysis. Participants signed an informed consent form prior to conversations. Anonymity was promised to respondents, and pseudonyms are used in the manuscript.

Interview questions pertained to journalists’ and audiences’ use and perceptions of digital online media, and responses to these questions are provided in this study’s Findings section.

U.S. sample

News organizations operated in two urban communities in the same region of the country were included in the sample. ‘Larger City’ has a metro population of 1.7 million, and ‘Smaller City’ has a metro population of 1.1 million. Media markets differed between the two cities. Smaller City lost a major daily paper and a national magazine publishing company, leaving hundreds of media personnel unemployed. Larger City also suffered economically, but the media environment was somewhat more stable for the workforce. Overall, there are approximately 1,300 daily newspapers in the U.S. (Edmonds, 2013), but there are some 13,000 newspapers total, including non-dailies (Stanford University, 2012).

Seven legacy media and 11 emerging or alternative media were included in the study in Larger City. Twenty-two semi-structured interviews were conducted at these outlets. Sixteen were conducted in person, and six were conducted over the phone. In Smaller City, 21 interviews were conducted (17 in person, and four by phone) at eight legacy outlets and 10 emerging or alternative media. The top two news managers at each outlet were contacted by phone or email. In most cases, one manager was interviewed at an outlet, but in some cases a manager and an assistant manager or reporter were interviewed.

Russian sample

News organizations included in the study operate in two different cities. ‘Larger City’ located in the Ural region has a population of 1 million, while ‘Smaller City’ situated in Central Russia has a population of 0.6 million. Both cities are regions’ capitals with diverse media markets. However, Larger City is stronger economically, and this was reflected in newspapers’ higher ad revenues and salaries and stronger editorial independence.

Five quality publications in each Russian city were included in the sample. (Overall, there are 3,741 regional and municipal print media in Russia (Russian Periodical Press, 2013)). They represented general news dailies and weeklies and business news outlets. All outlets were legacy media. Managers and reporters were contacted via email or phone. Fourteen interviews were conducted in Larger City and 18 interviews were conducted in Smaller City. All interviews were conducted face-to-face in formal or informal settings.

Findings

RQ1: How prevalent is a digital network ‘institutional logic’ in local city journalism in the U.S. and in Russia?

U.S. cities

There is evidence of a network logic at both U.S. cities’ news outlets—in particular, there is evidence of the emergence of digital online outlets in the cities, interconnections among these outlets, and efforts by legacy media to interconnect with audiences.

Areas for niche news coverage, or opportunities for ‘other voices’ beyond the mainstream news outlets, have opened up in both cities in recent years. In Larger City, interview participants mentioned niches such as crime coverage, immigration, city transportation, and entertainment. Several bloggers and online citizen journalists specialized in these areas, which were poorly covered by mainstream media. The major paper adopted a common way to respond to conflicting logics—the outlet ‘co-opted’ emerging online media by establishing partnerships with them and hosting them on their main website. However, their ability to do this was limited, partly because the paper’s editors were skeptical of publishing news copy created outside the newsroom.

Respondents also said geographical niches opened up within Larger City. New citizen news sites covered specific areas of the city in order to balance legacy media’s traditional attention to the city’s ‘broad audience’. They tried to address concerns of hyperlocal areas previously ignored by the mainstream news media. Two citizen journalists—one whose site covers a northern section of the city, and a young media entrepreneur who started a website that aggregated local blogs and websites—were both able to acquire some legitimacy among the other city’s media. The city magazine's editor attributed the success of an urban housing story in part to the entrepreneur: ‘The story worked because [media like the entrepreneur's site] followed up on it’. Likewise, a number of journalists from mainstream media mentioned coverage by the northern section citizen journalist as quality work. Many legacy media (the daily paper, the arts magazine, and the city magazine) linked to both of these websites.

The Larger City daily paper was aware of holes in their coverage and made efforts to innovate practices and forms. The paper used a foundation grant to establish eight partnerships with local online hyperlocal startups in neighborhoods around the city. The ‘innovations’ subeditor from the paper demonstrated a network logic while discussing goals in partnering with these hyperlocal sites: ‘For me it would be keeping a relationship with all ... of our [online hyperlocal] partners. There needs to be growing partnerships’. At the time of these interviews, the partners shared news content, but their hopes for increased ad revenue had fallen short. This finding is consistent with reports on hyperlocal efforts in recent years.

Twitter appeared to be an increasingly important tool in news outlets’ routines. The Larger City magazine editor said he finds most of the area’s news bloggers on Twitter, and according to the Larger City Business Journal editor, ‘Twitter is our main reader engagement tool, every reporter has a Twitter account [and] every editor has a Twitter account’. The Larger City daily paper innovations editor said he thought their Facebook fan page was one of the best in the country for providing news: ‘Clearly, people on Facebook aren’t just there to look at pictures – they want to know what’s going on’.

In Smaller City, the main paper’s daily editor said he was well aware that emerging online media (and secondary traditional media) had encroached into coverage areas left open after staff cutbacks. The editor said a new alternative weekly newspaper/website (started by a prominent former journalist with the daily paper and a former media adviser for the city’s mayor) was an emerging ‘direct challenger’ to the city newspaper. The alternative publication’s publisher said he thinks they are ‘nimble enough’ to outflank the daily paper. The alternative paper’s editor also said the city’s daily paper had historically been a poor civic leader and that his weekly paper/website sought to be ‘part of a process of defining what our agenda is as a community … and to be a civic presence’. He hoped to aggregate citizen outlets and local bloggers, who he hoped would help his alternative publication cover the city with a small staff.

Management at many larger media outlets encouraged staff to behave more interactively toward the community and the market. The Smaller City daily newspaper editor asked reporters to track their own competition from rival startups. Reporters and editors were expected to keep tabs on web traffic and social media interest generated by their stories, as were content producers for the citywide website (owned by the same company that owned the main city’s daily paper). Editors at both the Larger City and Smaller City business journals said they were trying to be more conversational with readers. According to the Smaller City’s business journal editor, their parent company pushes interactivity: ‘We have a Twitter feed, Facebook feed, our reporters are on Twitter … It’s now a company initiative’.

Recently, the city’s main daily paper appointed an ‘innovations manager’ who focused largely on digital online content and products:

We are evolving with the rest of our industry around the idea that the currency of information and news is still extremely valuable. That’s why Facebook is so popular and Twitter is so popular. People want to tell each other what they know [now].

As with the business journals, the parent company of the daily paper and the citywide website is encouraging innovative digital activity.

While managers widely embrace social and digital media, and parent companies often formally pushed these efforts, there was reluctance as well. For example, subeditors at the main daily paper often hesitate to use content from hyperlocal website partners, and some news managers questioned the benefits of social media and of analyzing online audience traffic. As one news manager said: ‘The [sub-editors] aren't taking enough advantage of it. Stories from partners usually only appear if the top editor brings them to their attention'.

In sum, there is substantial evidence of online entrepreneurial efforts in niches left open by struggling mainstream media, while mainstream media are formally responding with their own online digital innovations, often supported by large parent companies.

Russian cities

There is much less evidence of a digital network ‘institutional logic’ at media in the two Russian cities, with Smaller City showing especially weak efforts to move into a multiplatform sphere. Newspapers in both cities did not have formal strategies to build a digital network. However, Larger City reporters were more active in experimenting with news delivery formats and content and in reaching out to local bloggers than were Smaller City reporters. Their websites appeared more professionally designed and written, and their social media activities were less top-down and formal. As interviews revealed, reporters in Larger City were eager to learn through trial and error. Still, they lacked professional training, and their online activities were limited.

Reporters in Smaller City appeared to be less dynamic and enthusiastic about new technologies and cooperative strategies. Only two of five newspapers offered an RSS feed. The rest simply posted stories online a day after a print issue published them. As a vice-editor said, ‘I understand it’s like an electronic archive, not a website’. A publisher of a private newspaper said her reporters were not experienced enough to ‘send news to a website while attending a news conference using an ipad—as a local news agency does’. A ‘print mentality’ and an inability to envision news production as 24/7 multiple platform reporting was especially evident in the Smaller City sample.

LiveJournal, a global social media platform acquired by a Russian company from a U.S. enterprise in 2007, hosts numerous accounts of Russian news outlets, but none are from Smaller City newspapers. A reporter at one Smaller City paper, owned by a Moscow company, is allowed to use social media at work, using it to chat with ‘celebrities’ to get information. While the owner tolerates this activity, he says he views social media as a distraction for his reporters—a very different reaction than most of the interviewed news managers in the U.S., who encouraged reporters’ use of social media for reporting and engagement with audiences. Interestingly, the one paper with a national-level ownership is more actively involved with digital online media—the same tendency was seen at U.S. publications such as the business journals and the large dailies, which are owned by large companies with a national footprint.

Overall, newspapers in the Russian Larger City uploaded more stories to news feeds than Smaller City news outlets. Although all papers in both cities tracked online audience traffic numbers, there was no indication that they actually used this information when they decided about news content.

Yet, while there was little evidence of organizational-level efforts to employ digital online media, there was some evidence that the lean staffs and competitive environment in these cities encouraged an informal, under-the-radar, network sharing. For example, an online editor for a private paper in Smaller City said local TV, radio, and newspaper reporters fished for news ideas on her website several times a day. She said exclusive information obtained by her papers’ reporters was usually broadcast by TV and radio stations within a few hours after she uploaded it. And a citizen journalist said a local information agency routinely turns his blog posts into news stories, but neither agency nor newspapers offered formal partnerships. Another blogger said reporters frequently asked him to share information ‘because newspapers are lacking staff these days’.

While no mainstream news outlets were associated with LiveJournal, there were three staff reporters in two papers, private and government, who blogged ‘on the side’ in LiveJournal. They perceived their private blogging as a new kind of identity. A female blogger said, ‘Blogging is сози∂ание (creation)’. For her, blogging took on sacred overtones. A male blogger said that the local blogging community is ‘healthy’: they do not badmouth each other, compared to Moscow bloggers or local reporters. He said a reason for this relatively ‘healthy co-existence’ is that the provincial community is small, and bloggers know each other in their offline lives.

A senior reporter from Larger City saw blogging as a form of intellectual escapism: ‘Livejournal is for intelligent people, for thinkers’. Overall, in both cities there was a tendency to perceive blogging as an intellectually enjoyable activity, a hobby. In contrast, blog posts ‘made for hire’ looked like a forced product, especially in Smaller City papers. Digitally savvy reporters tend to build their network outside of their workplace.

While some Larger City reporters with the oldest newspaper said they embraced journalistic blogging, their posts evoked little interest for readers. Though the website allowed blog posts to be shared through social media like LiveJournal, Facebook, Twitter, Google Plus, and Tumblr, there was no such activity. To try to generate buzz, each reporter created up to four different accounts in LiveJournal. A number of fake accounts aimed to draw attention to the newspaper’s blog undermined the authenticity of user-generated content. Some of the posts seemed to represent artificial provocation. For example, a story with the largest number of comments (15) was supposedly written by a Muslim woman about the role of Islam in her life. Her post seemed intentionally offensive toward Russian women. Aggravated readers responded, but the newspaper did not comment on any of the posts.

In general then, formal use of web editions and social media at these papers is minimal and skin-deep, though use is somewhat more developed in Larger City than Smaller City. The web is seen as a dumping ground for lengthier stories, and managers view social media as a distraction. However, many reporters embrace social media for personal use, and social media networks are more active in an informal, under-the-radar fashion, with reporters creating personal blogs outside of work and stealing story ideas from one others’ sites.

RQ2: How are organizational agents (journalists and news managers) in each country responding to, and repositioning in the face of, conflicts between their traditional journalistic logics and digital network logics?

As discussed earlier, there are a number of ways organizational agents may respond to clashing logics, including: (1) loose coupling (or segmenting), where certain practices and processes that are consistent with one logic are kept separate from others consistent with a second logic; (2) assimilation, where organizational agents ‘co-opt’ practices or forms that are consistent with a rival logic, and (3) merging, where practices consistent with different logics are meshed in some way (Thornton et al., 2012).

U.S. cities

There was evidence of ‘loose coupling’ of competing logics from core practices in Larger City. Most respondents from the legacy media said they tracked online audience traffic (evidence of a network logic), but that this information had little effect on news selection. An assistant editor who worked with the daily paper’s partnership project said that tracking web traffic ‘had not yet become a routine’ at the paper. This tendency to adopt skin-deep practices that enhance legitimacy, but that are buffered from core practices, is consistent with earlier research (Lowrey and Woo, 2010).

The daily paper handled the partnerships with hyperlocal neighborhood websites in an impersonal, often routinized manner, buffering organizational processes from their hyperlocal neighborhood partners. For example, news editors for the print edition were hesitant to pick up RSS feed stories from the paper’s hyperlocal partners. They feared poor quality, but the uncertainty of this new process also stopped them. Also, the daily paper collected web traffic data for its hyperlocal ‘citizen journalist’ partners, but the process was kept centralized at the daily paper, and data were difficult for hyperlocal partners to access.

An assimilation response was also evident in the daily paper’s online connections with local bloggers. When a neighborhood journalist joined the network, she said she noticed that her site gained legitimacy and ‘that some reporters in the [city's main newspaper] pay attention to my site for stories … it's definitely an ego boost for the blogger if the mainstream media pays attention'. Assimilation was also seen when legacy reporters started adopting independent bloggers’ logic by employing their impersonal tone and interactive, connective practices. For example, the daily newspaper’s associate editor said her online posting gradually moved from being ‘highbrow analysis’ with a focus on city and county government to being ‘much more aggregatory, pointing to local events, and linking to postings from blogs in the community, [and to] Twitter, and so forth’.

In Smaller City, there were several examples of a loose coupling response, or news outlets’ partial pursuit of a network logic. The business journal’s managing editor said their corporate owner pushed staff toward greater interaction with readers, but the shift was slow. Local news sources and advertisers worried about mixing professional content with reader content, which could undermine the paper’s legitimacy, and therefore their own legitimacy. According to the journal’s managing editor, the city ‘is not an open business community; a lot of deals are among the power brokers, [and] they don’t want their names out there in [the readers’] commenting on stories’.

Similarly, the editor of the daily paper companion website discussed the job of keeping user-generated and local business-generated material (which was posted on a separate ‘press release’ blog) from blending with traditional news content ‘ … because it doesn’t pass through the hands of journalists, and so can’t be given the same trusted level that the other pages of our site have’. This hesitation to fully embrace community content also damaged their ability to host community bloggers, because, according to the website editor, bloggers required attention from the news outlet: ‘If we don’t get back with them and say, “This is working. Here was your traffic,” then they don’t continue it … You have to have a relationship or it doesn’t work’.

The Smaller City daily created a digital innovation division so they might produce commercial digital products (e.g., apps, APIs), showing evidence of a network logic. However, they were buffered from the print edition’s daily production work. The ‘innovation division’ affected neither the regular news staff nor the content associated with daily production work.

Though loose coupling seemed the most common response to clashing logics in Smaller City, tactics associated with reader engagement and co-creation of the content also indicated a blending or assimilation as a response. According to the editor, the blending of journalistic comment and reader comments on stories is a ‘major change’ in the newsroom routine. The editor believed that the comments ‘are coequal’ with stories. Similarly, the daily paper editor said he thought the paper successfully encouraged reporters to use social media, especially Twitter, to engage readers:

When we have a story people are interested in, we push it through Facebook and try to get people to get likes and … Read posts and everything through Facebook. [I] don’t care who the reporter is – he’s going to have to learn to tweet.

Russian cities

Respondents at regional ‘quality publications’ (mainstream papers) in both Russian cities generally said they believed a newspaper should be both a print and online discussion platform or civic forum. However, this attempt to gain legitimacy by rhetorically embracing a network logic had been largely unsuccessful. At news outlets in both cities, online activities appeared one-way: Reporters focused on self-expression more than on dialogue with readers, or, as discussed later, they provided stiff, top-down posts that reflected a government mandate: journalists must ‘dialogue’ with citizens.

In addition, they saw online editions as only supplementary to print editions. A reporter from Larger City said the website ‘is needed as the air [is needed]’ because it allows free space for full versions of stories. He said the recent trend in his newsroom favors short texts in the print publication, and so journalists are ‘rejoicing’ online by flavoring their web stories with details and personal comments. Online texts were wordy, inconsistent with dominant practices of digital discourse, but consistent with the traditional Russian journalistic forms of long intellectual texts. Some of these stories find a home on the news organization’s website after they are rejected by the print edition’s editor. Thus, the web seemed to serve as an editor’s ‘recycle bin’.

Participants said online activities were discussed rarely at papers’ weekly meetings. It appeared the online editor at most papers is perceived as a ‘one-man orchestra’ or a separate department that independently makes content decisions. As a senior reporter for a state-supported Smaller City newspaper said, ‘I don’t care what she [an online editor] does. I have print pages to fill in’. A managing editor said, ‘I am not paid to do stuff online’.

This ‘online disconnect’ within newsrooms was especially evident at Smaller City news outlets. Both management and reporters came up with excuses to avoid active online involvement. A publisher of a private newspaper admitted he felt the need to develop an online presence ‘to be modern’. At the same time, he hesitated to do so because the ‘Internet brings neither money nor glory’. Citing a more intractable problem, a managing editor for an independent paper said many of their rural readers do not have computers. Some are quite poor—they subscribe to newspaper copies to use the paper in homemade cigarettes. ‘Our readers live a real—not virtual—life’, she concluded.

A supplement editor of an independent newspaper said her paper received letters from readers asking the paper to publish Internet information: ‘Readers say they heard particular information is available online, but they don’t have access to the Internet. And, as they say, they actually don’t need the Internet’. The editor of an independent newspaper from Smaller City thought if he pushes the website, it would hurt subscriptions, the main revenue source. So while at U.S. papers, traditional editors embraced social and online media so long as it did not actually reshape core norms and practices (loose coupling), in Russia, online media were often treated with apathy or contempt. This suggests the network logic may be so weak that it rarely, or barely, shapes the professional behavior of journalists within news organizations.

However, there was evidence that the state actively pushed use of the web, by mandating journalists’ blog postings, publishing ‘top-down’ messages to citizens, and seeking online citizen requests. Yet, when citizens did make online requests, they met with no meaningful response. For example, a state-supported paper in Smaller City created a link to the governor’s blog to increase traffic to the newspaper website. Each post generated 20 to 180 comments, mainly complaints from local residents. In one post, the governor addressed the topic of strategic development, while in one of the comments a person asked that dumpsters be moved away from an apartment building, but in such cases, the governor’s responses were short and directive: ‘Contact an official to solve your problem’.

It appeared citizens did not perceive the state-supported paper that linked to the governor’s blog as a problem solver. Reporters’ blogs did not have any comments/feedback. An overall lack of interest in official blogging among the state-supported reporters (referred to as ‘forced labor’ by one journalist) implied that the paper was pressed by the governor to initiate a newspaper’s blog. Here, the ‘government control’ logic appears to co-opt the network logic. The network ‘form’ is evident, but actual communication is meager. The network ‘form’ serves the state by appearing to allow citizens an interactive voice while actually allowing only one-way messages, or serving as storage for additional words.

Meanwhile, journalists are too financially strapped to pursue online media in any meaningful way. The vice-editor of the state-supported paper said, ‘It’s the governor who likes to meet with bloggers (about 30 people) to discuss different questions’. As for the paper, they do not recruit bloggers because ‘they have enough staff to write stories’. However, the publication did cover actions of one local group of environmentally active bloggers.

Unlike Smaller City reporters, journalists in Larger City did not appear to be tied to the regional government (though all five papers in the sample do receive subsidies from the regional budget). A freelance reporter was quite critical of the governor’s blog, which as in Larger City, appeared to be ‘interactive’ in name only:

Anyone could go to the governor’s blog and say that he is a bastard. He didn’t delete comments … He demonstrated that as a blogger, he is open and he is not afraid of criticism. He said he was building roads. People came to his blog and called him a liar because he didn’t build roads [but he did not respond]. This is a paradox: a blog demonstrates openness and at the same time, there is no openness in his blog.

Reporters from Larger City said the governor launched a blog to please Medvedev, a former Russian president. Also, they said he replaced news conferences with blogging: offering access via online blogs shields the governor from tough face-to-face questions. Yet, the Kremlin still recognized him as being an open, democratic governor. Again, we see assimilation—co-optation of the online network form for the purposes of strengthening government control.

Russian governors have halted their blog activities since the end of Medvedev’s presidency. And local news organizations have not rushed to fill the vacant online niche left in these cities’ media systems, though citizens demonstrated an interest in having their immediate concerns addressed online. Again we see the weakness of the network logic in the face of the logic of state control and state subsidies for news media.

Discussion and conclusion

Evidence of a budding ‘digital network’ logic was much stronger in the U.S cities. Online digital technology, coupled with the economic problems of traditional news outlets and the existence of resources to support alternative media, has facilitated the growth of new websites and blogs in both cities. Managers of legacy media have tried to innovate practices and to establish relationships with smaller emerging online media. In contrast, legacy media in the two Russian cities have been slow to reach out to a relatively small number of citizen journalists operating in the cities.

Generally, U.S. news managers and reporters said they felt the need to engage with digital networks and social media, and most mainstream news reporters said they were expected to push content on Facebook and Twitter. However, efforts to use social media and build relationships with bloggers were inconsistent. While managers felt the need to pursue digital networks and ‘participatory journalism’, they also needed to preserve the core practices that they, their sources, and their advertisers viewed as legitimate and stabilizing. These two logics clashed. As a result, managers took half steps and segregated innovative efforts from the news organization core. Interestingly, the parent company often drove the pressure to embrace the network logic, from the top down. In contrast, news professionals, sources, and advertisers at the local level often supported the traditional logic, seeking low uncertainty and high legitimacy.

This top-down push for digital innovation was also evident in Russia, though in Russia this push came from the government—and actual behavior fell far short of rhetoric. Attempts to interact with readers on social media websites were very limited, judging by the number of followers and content. Newspapers mechanically uploaded stories published in the print edition to Facebook, with no attempt to create dialogue. While Larger City news outlets made some attempts to collaborate with local bloggers, Smaller City’s news managers and reporters viewed bloggers as local activists whose interests diverged from their newspapers’ goals. Rather than viewing the web as a public forum, these journalists viewed it as additional storage space for long stories, and officials used it as a substitute for face-to-face interaction with audiences.

It was outside of the news organization that the journalistic digital network was most evident in Russia, in the form of personal blogs and informal networking. Personal blogging thrived, and information passed hands informally, as individuals took story lines from one another’s blogs. Previous studies have demonstrated this informal networking in local Russian journalism, revealing ways it has undermined professional news organizations and aided wealthy individuals who would pay journalists on an informal basis for their work:

[There is] an informal market for news stories among journalists across organizations, providing a motivation that undermines organizational goals and ‘legal-rational’ authority, and which helps pave the way for patrons seeking personal relationships with journalists. Editors have tended to turn a blind eye to this practice because supplemental income reduces journalists’ demands for higher salaries. Seeking higher pay, journalists also move frequently from newspaper to newspaper in the province. This further weakens formal organizational bonds and boundaries (Lowrey and Erzikova, 2010: 281–282).

Within organizational walls, newspaper managers and their state sponsors were either quashing the network logic under the weight of top-down government authority or they were dismissing it as a frivolous waste of time. In contrast, U.S. news organizations attempted to co-opt (assimilate) the personal, interactive fluidity of the digital network by incorporating its practices and forms, if sometimes in a shallow way. They also subtly decoupled it from their organizational and professional core, which embraced detached objectivity.

Importantly, the U.S. and Russia differ sharply in the degree of socio-economic development. A low level of Internet penetration, the unaffordable cost of Internet access, and a low level of civic engagement might have prevented many readers in the Russian province from developing online relationships with local outlets. Russian news outlets in this study did not make consistent efforts to reach out and connect with those who read and produce online news. In news managers’ eyes, the payoff for reaching out to audiences seemed small and uncertain.

Certainly, socio-economic conditions are key factors in explaining Russian journalists’ limited online activity. But the impact of differences in institutional logics between U.S. and Russian local journalists can be disentangled from socio-economic differences. In both cases, institutional dependencies on local officials discouraged adaptation to the digital network logic—this, despite the significant differences in resources between the U.S. and Russia. However, U.S. journalists have autonomous space within which to negotiate the clash of the network logic and their traditional logic, while Russian journalists do not. Thus, U.S. journalists embraced network practices in a partial ways, ‘showing’ digital practices while clinging to traditional, core practices. Russian journalists had no such autonomy, at least within news organizations. They abided by the top-down one-way communication mandated by officials. Rather than pretending interaction, they openly ignored online audiences and the blogging community. The Russian response of top-down communication was also consistent with the moralistic educational position journalists historically have taken toward their readers. Informal activity among Russian bloggers showed that the potentiality for journalist—citizen online dialogue exists, but the institutional logics of officialdom and moral education stunted this potentiality.

Hachten and Scotton (2012) noted that while the Marxist—Leninist communication model has been discredited worldwide, the U.S.-Anglo approach of news production has become something of a universal standard. Following this logic, Russian participants in this study were likely aware of digital, online news practices in the United States, and in fact, several interview respondents confirmed this. This certainly would be true of big-city journalists in Russia, and the social-media push by the Russian paper’s parent company mentioned earlier is some evidence. But clearly, these local Russian local journalists only vaguely understood the opportunities that the open nature of digital environment provides. Findings in this study suggested that the institutional logic of the digital network is not universally influential: It is strongly shaped by local traditional logics and political-economic realities.

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