Dancing in the Dark-Social Media Tactics in the News Industry

The news media ecosystem has expanded over the years leading up to today’s society to include advertisers, newspapers and other media houses, content producers, along with new players like social media platforms to together form a value packed mix of services for end-users to embrace. The shift from being a dominant platform owner concerning the printed paper, often with its own distribution network, presents the newspaper with many challenges when transforming into, or entering other platform owners’ ecosystems. While previous research has mainly focused on the newspaper industry’s development of strategies for embracing social media into their ecosystem, this study investigates newspaper workers’ social media usage for the purpose of attracting attention and generating value. The study of newspaper workers’ practices shows that, moving into digital platforms controlled by other dominant actors in the ecosystem, workers enact a tactical approach. Two tactics are identified: adaption and exploitation. The paper contributes with empirical insights into how newspaper workers develop practices to embrace social media that goes beyond previous research on social media strategy. We also apply the theory of everyday tactics developed by Michel de Certeau as a scaffold to theorize newspaper positioning in the rapidly changing news media landscape.