Theoretical perspectives on crisis, resilience, and innovation

Abstract

This chapter describes how the concepts of crisis, resilience, and innovation are well-suited for capturing how Norwegian news media dealt with the Covid-19 pandemic. The pandemic posed threats to public health, leading to increased urgency for accurate information dissemination. As such, the crisis served as a catalyst, accelerating changes in news production, distribution, consumption, and business models. Persistence reflects resilience as the ability to regain stability and get back to “business as usual”, adaptability as resilience refers to large adjustments in professional practices in response, while transformability brings radical long-lasting renewal of the whole organisation. Presenting a normative view of innovation in journalism, this chapter focuses on value creation, improvement, and novelty. Innovation involves adjusting existing products or services and introducing new ideas perceived as novel by audiences. This coincides with the transformation of journalism from physical news products to digitalised services. Summarising insights from different strands of innovation literature, we identify a set of internal factors, or building blocks, of journalism innovation: resources, technology, organisation, management, culture, and business model.