Combating ‘Shiny Things Syndrome’
A new report from the Reuters Institute at the University of Oxford on journalism innovation proposes an audience-focused, research-driven approach to avoid burnout and stagnation.
The Reuters Institute just published my report Time to step away from the ‘bright, shiny things’? Towards a sustainable model of journalism innovation in an era of perpetual change. It’s the first research to emerge from a year-long project. Here’s an extract.
The news industry has a focus problem.
‘Shiny Things Syndrome’ — obsessive pursuit of technology in the absence of clear and research-informed strategies — is the diagnosis offered by participants in this research. The cure suggested involves a conscious shift by news publishers from being technology-led, to audience-focused and technology-empowered.
This report presents the first research from the Journalism Innovation Project anchored within the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism at the University of Oxford. It is based on analysis of discussions with 39 leading journalism innovators from around the world, representing 27 different news publishers.
The main finding of this research is that relentless, high-speed pursuit of technology-driven innovation could be almost as dangerous as stagnation. While ‘random acts of innovation’, organic experimentation, and willingness to embrace new technology remain valuable features of an innovation culture, there is evidence of an increasingly urgent requirement for the cultivation of sustainable innovation frameworks and clear, longer-term strategies within news organisations.
Such a ‘pivot’ could also address the growing problem of burnout associated with ‘innovation fatigue’. To be effective, such strategies need to be focused on engaging audiences — the ‘end users’ — and they would benefit from research-informed innovation ‘indicators’.
The key themes identified in this report are:
a. The risks of ‘Shiny Things Syndrome’ and the impacts of ‘innovation fatigue’ in an era of perpetual change
b. Audiences: starting (again) with the end user
c. The need for a ‘user-led’ approach to researching journalism innovation and developing foundational frameworks to support it
Additionally, new journalism innovation considerations are noted, such as the implications of digital technologies’ ‘unintended consequences’, and the need to respond innovatively to media freedom threats — such as gendered online harassment, privacy breaches, and orchestrated disinformation campaigns.
The Journalism Innovation Wheel presented in this report is a visualisation of the foundational work the Journalism Innovation Project is doing to develop adaptable new frameworks to support sustainable innovation. It illustrates that journalism innovation can happen among many different dimensions, often at the same time, combining, for example new forms of storytelling with new business models, or new distribution strategies with new forms of audience engagement.
To be clear, this report does not amount to a call to stop innovating, nor justification for doing so, but it is a plea to avoid unsustainable approaches to innovation that fail to take account of potentially negative impacts — approaches that risk wasting time, effort, and money, without real returns.
Read the full report at the Reuters Institute online here.
Key Findings
The main findings from this research include:
1. There is a clear desire to pull back from the high-speed pursuit of ‘bright, shiny things’ (i.e. the proliferation of new tools and technologies) and to refocus on foundational concepts of journalism innovation, ‘end-user’/audience needs, and core elements of practice, especially within legacy news media contexts.
2. There is an identified need to develop research-informed, longer-term strategies designed to foster sustainable innovation.
3. There is concern that efforts in the field of digital journalism innovation have been too focused on distribution challenges at the expense of content and business development.
4. There is evidence of significant change fatigue and burnout that risks impacting on journalism innovation efforts (among other risks), in part caused by relentless pursuit of ‘bright, shiny things’.
5. These impacts are not uniform: smaller, ‘digital born’ news publishers indicated that they do not have time to ‘slow down’, nor contain experimentation, because their survival depends upon it.
6. There is an evolving new set of innovation markers e.g. the need to consider unintended consequences of technological innovation (such as gendered online harassment and viral disinformation); the role of diversity in audience development and divergent global contexts; growing media freedom threats and limitations.
7. There is a need for innovation-oriented journalism research that:
a. Provides clear, foundational definitions of ‘innovation’ in reference to journalism;
b. Develops a model framework (featuring core metrics or indicators) to support journalism innovation in a range of environments, and to enable impact assessment;
c. Produces transferable knowledge derived from in-depth study of identified innovative journalism practices through collaborative discovery processes.
Julie Posetti is Senior Research Fellow at the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism at the University of Oxford, where she leads the Journalism Innovation Project. She is a multi-award winning Australian journalist, having worked at Fairfax Media and the ABC, and as a journalism academic has authored Protecting Journalism Sources in the Digital Age and co-authored Journalism, F*ke News and Disinformation.
This research project is funded by the Facebook Journalism Project.
