From Ivory Towers to Online Bazaars? Internet, Social Media and the Competing Discourses in the Newspaper Industry

In line with the development of new media, newspaper companies are facing drastic changes in their competitive environment. Managing change requires both new capabilities and frames of thinking. Organizational learning can be understood as the increase of shared organizational knowledge through changing the social practices, which, in turn, consist of discourses. In this paper we investigate the Internet and social media related discourses among newspaper journalists, in order to better understand how social reality is constituted and made sense of in terms of new media. As a result, we identify four types of discourses: Ivory-towerizing and Shielding, which seem to impede learning, and Accelerating and Connecting, which encourage adapting to learning and change within newspaper companies.