JOURNALISTS DOING VIDEO: EVOLVING PROFESSIONAL VALUES IN RESPONSE TO VIDEO WORK by MICHELLE NICOLOSI A DISSERTATION Presented to the School of Journalism and Communication and the Division of Graduate Studies of the University of Oregon in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy June 2022 DISSERTATION APPROVAL PAGE Student: Michelle Nicolosi Title: Journalists Doing Video: Evolving Professional Values in Response to Video Work This dissertation has been accepted and approved in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Doctor of Philosophy degree in the School of Journalism and Communication by: Scott Maier Chairperson John Russial Core Member Chris Chavez Core Member Jill Harrison Institutional Representative and Krista Chronister Vice Provost for Graduate Studies Original approval signatures are on file with the University of Oregon Division of Graduate Studies. Degree awarded June 2022. ii © 2022 Michelle Nicolosi iii DISSERTATION ABSTRACT Michelle Nicolosi Doctor of Philosophy School of Journalism and Communication June 2022 Title: Journalists Doing Video: Evolving Professional Values in Response to Video Work Much of the research examining how newspaper journalists respond to changing labor practices finds that journalists are terrible at change. Ryfe’s influential study of newsrooms undergoing change found that journalists tried to change but were unable to change in part because their profession’s values and habits constrained them: “The culture of journalism inhibits change” (Ryfe, 2012, p. 19). Ten years after Ryfe’s study, this dissertation uses the diffusion of innovations theoretical framework, semi-structured long interviews, a constructivist approach and grounded theory methods to examine how journalists’ responses to change in the newsroom have evolved over the past decade––a decade in which the industry’s fortunes have worsened dramatically, forcing mass layoffs, the closure of many newspapers and the spread of “news deserts” across the country. This study examines how newspaper journalists invoke their profession’s values when discussing a new form of labor they’ve been asked to do: produce social media video. Where much of the journalism innovation literature has focused on resistance to change, this study seeks to add to the literature that examines the attitudes of journalists who accept a new form of labor. Understanding what motivates journalists––and workers iv in all industries––to adopt and use an innovation is key to successful organization-wide adoption of innovations, and to organizations’ ability to evolve as new technologies transform their industries. Fifteen journalists at newspapers across the U.S. were interviewed to learn how journalists invoke their profession’s values when discussing social media video work, and to learn how those values are evolving. Journalists said they accept this new form of labor in part because it helps them fulfill their profession’s public service value by allowing them to reach large new audiences and to explain issues effectively. Participants repeatedly invoked journalism’s public service and truth values as motivators, as they have in past research. Interviews also found that journalists’ attitudes toward how “quality” is defined are evolving, as are attitudes toward “the wall” that in traditional journalistic culture separates journalists from the commercial side of a newspaper’s operations. v CURRICULUM VITAE NAME OF AUTHOR: MICHELLE NICOLOSI GRADUATE AND UNDERGRADUATE SCHOOLS ATTENDED: University of Oregon, Eugene University of New Orleans, New Orleans, Louisiana DEGREES AWARDED: Doctor of Philosophy, Communication and Media Studies, 2022, University of Oregon Bachelor of Arts, Drama and Communications, 1987, University of New Orleans PROFESSIONAL EXPERIENCE Research assistant, University of Oregon School of Journalism and Communication, Fall 2021–Spring 2022 Writing for Communicators solo instructor, University of Oregon School of Journalism and Communication, Summer 2021 Teaching assistant, Writing for Communicators, University of Oregon School of Journalism and Communication, Spring 2021 Reporting 1 solo instructor, University of Oregon School of Journalism and Communication, Winter 2021 Reporting 1 solo instructor, University of Oregon School of Journalism and Communication, Fall 2021 Teaching assistant, Writing for Communicators, University of Oregon School of Journalism and Communication, Spring 2020 Teaching assistant, University of Oregon School of Journalism and Communication, Winter 2020 Graduate Employee, Innovation Partnership Services, University of Oregon, September 2018–June 2019 Director of Digital, Video and Photo, The Oregonian, December 2014–August 2018 Managing Editor, Los Angeles Register, March 2014-September 2014 Community Engagement Manager, Orange County Register, November 2012–March 2014 Adjunct instructor, California State University at Fullerton, 2013 Adjunct instructor, University of Washington extension program, 2012 Editor-in-Chief, multiple other roles, seattlepi.com, April 2004–January 2012 Editor, Online Journalism Review, University of Southern California School for Communication, October 2001–March 2004 Reporter, Orange County Register, 1990–1999 vi GRANTS, AWARDS AND HONORS Best of the West: 2nd Place, project reporting 2006 I was a lead reporter on the Orange County Register Fertility Fraud series, which won the following awards: 1996: Pulitzer Prize, Investigative Reporting 1996: George Polk Award for medical reporting 1996: Roy W. Howard award for public service 1996: Investigative Reporters and Editors gold medal 1996: Sigma Delta Chi award 1996: National Headliners award for investigative reporting vii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS My deepest thanks to my advisor Scott Maier, whose encouragement and feedback kept me on track throughout the reporting and writing of this dissertation. Thanks to John Russial for taking the time to do such close reads, and for the many insightful edits and notes. Thank you Chris Chavez and Jill Harrison for all you taught me in our classes together and for all your help on the dissertation. I feel lucky to have had such a generous team of advisors. viii Thanks to my sources for sharing your thoughts and your time with me. And thanks to Mark for your support, and for your many great edits and suggestions. ix TABLE OF CONTENTS Chapter Page I: INTRODUCTION ........................................................................................................................................ 1 Research Context .......................................................................................................................................... 6 II: LITERATURE REVIEW.......................................................................................................................... 11 Video and Social Media Video in Newspaper Newsrooms ........................................................................ 11 Journalists' Responses to Changing Labor Practices .................................................................................. 15 Journalism as Ideology................................................................................................................................ 20 Journalistic Autonomy and “The Wall” ...................................................................................................... 22 Diffusion of Innovations ............................................................................................................................. 24 Who Adopts Innovations? ........................................................................................................................... 26 Job and Industry Insecurity ......................................................................................................................... 28 Research Questions ..................................................................................................................................... 30 III: METHODS .............................................................................................................................................. 31 Participant Selection ................................................................................................................................... 34 Taking a Constructivist Approach .............................................................................................................. 36 Grounded Theory Methods ......................................................................................................................... 37 Content Analysis ......................................................................................................................................... 41 Member Checks .......................................................................................................................................... 42 IV: RQ1 RESULTS ....................................................................................................................................... 45 RQ1: How is social media video created in newspaper newsrooms? ......................................................... 45 Newsroom Communication and Video Production .................................................................................... 51 Video News Values ..................................................................................................................................... 52 Video Tools ................................................................................................................................................. 57 Level of Newsroom Acceptance for Social Media Video Work ................................................................ 58 Ebbing Resistance ....................................................................................................................................... 63 V: RQ2 RESULTS ......................................................................................................................................... 68 RQ2: How do journalists invoke their long-held professional values when discussing why they embraced x social media video work?............................................................................................................................... 68 Audience Growth and the Public Service Value ......................................................................................... 68 Public Service Through Better Storytelling ................................................................................................ 69 Truth and Immediacy Values ...................................................................................................................... 70 VI: RQ3 RESULTS ....................................................................................................................................... 76 RQ3: How are journalists’ values evolving in response to video work? .................................................... 76 Evolving Ideas About Quality..................................................................................................................... 76 Evolving Ideas about the Newsroom Wall ................................................................................................. 77 VII: DISCUSSION AND CONCLUSIONS .................................................................................................. 83 VIII: REFLEXIVITY AND LIMITATIONS ................................................................................................ 90 Research Reflexivity ................................................................................................................................... 90 Limitations .................................................................................................................................................. 91 Future Research........................................................................................................................................... 93 APPENDIX .................................................................................................................................................... 96 REFERENCES CITED .................................................................................................................................. 98 xi I: INTRODUCTION Journalistic work has been undergoing rapid change since the 1990s, when the internet and digitization of news radically altered how content is produced, distributed and consumed. Many studies examine how journalists have responded to innovation–– defined by Rogers (2003, p. xx) as “an idea, practice or object that is perceived as new by an individual or other unit of adoption.” Journalism innovation studies have covered everything from the introduction and use of computers and email to the emergence of the internet, video and other multimedia, computer assisted reporting and more (Assaf, 2021; Deuze, 2005; Ekdale et al., 2015a; Garrison, 2000; Greenwood & Reinardy 2011; Huang, 2007; Mäenpää, 2014; Maier, 2000; Russial; 2009, Ryfe, 2012). These studies are part of a larger body of work examining how people respond to all kinds of innovations in all kinds of settings, from farmers trying out new types of seed, to consumers responding to new products, to workplace users adopting or rejecting new technologies (for a comprehensive review see Rogers, 2003). This dissertation contributes to this body of work with an examination of how journalists at local and regional U.S. newspapers invoke their professional values in response to a new type of labor––social media video work. Social media video is one of the latest iterations of multimedia, defined by Russial as including “online audio, video, photo slideshows and other forms of multimedia content” (2009, p. 59). While videos produced early in the internet era were posted primarily to newspapers’ web platforms, where they languished unwatched, social media videos are published to social media platforms, where they can accrue hundreds of thousands of views. This difference in viewership is a primary driver for acceptance of this form of labor among the journalists interviewed for this study. 1 As Maier notes, “The news industry overall has been hesitant and, at times, resistant to new technology” (2000, p. 95). Ryfe, Deuze and many others have reported that journalists’ shared culture and values are a powerful source of resistance to change in newsrooms: Whenever changes are introduced to newswork, newspaper journalists evaluate those changes through the filter of journalistic values (Ryfe, 2012; Deuze, 2005) and resist changes that they feel are not consistent with those values. Early internet-related changes to newspaper newswork––dubbed “convergence” by some scholars and industry sources––required staffers who previously had only worked with text, photos and graphics to learn to create audio, video and other forms of multimedia for new platforms, such as the internet or cable or broadcast stations. During this time many reporters, photographers and others in newsrooms were asked to go from being specialists at reporting or photography, among other specialties, to “multi-skilling,” which “means each journalist is expected to gather the facts, assemble the content, edit the pictures and sound, and deliver the news via several platforms” (Avilés & Carvajal, 2008, p. 225). In their survey of newspapers and other types of news outlets, Kalogeropoulos, Cherubini and Newman found three main approaches to video in newsrooms (italics mine): News organisations that have only one or two people working on online news video; news organisations with large and well-established teams that operate largely independently from the main newsroom; and, finally, publishers that have tried to fully integrate online video into the commissioning and the production of their journalism. (2016, p. 6) As this study explores how journalists who are not video specialists respond to video production as a new form of labor, this study focuses on newspapers that take an 2 integrated approach to video, asking reporters and others across the newsroom to participate in making video. Using semi-structured long interviews with current and former newspaper journalists, this research explores how journalists in newspaper newsrooms articulate their values in relation to social media video work, and how those values evolve in response to video work. Finneman et al. note that “examining what journalists say about the changes in their field helps us understand the significance of those changes” (2019, p. 4). The 2018 Reuters Institute report on video notes that “Despite its growing importance ... there is relatively little research” on the use of online news video (Kalogeropoulos & Nielsen, 2018, p. 2210). News organizations’ use of online video “is a particularly important aspect of the current wave of digital disruption and hence may help inform our understanding of how news organizations will approach the next wave” (Kalogeropoulos & Nielsen, 2018, p. 2222). Studying newspapers’ efforts to adapt to the evolving content ecosystem is important, because whether newspapers continue to serve many communities depends in part on whether they are able to find new business models and new sources of revenue. “Many media enterprises, including newspapers, are in tenuous economic positions, and many have gone out of business” (Pavlik, 2013, p. 184). “A lack of innovation is likely to erode the economic viability of incumbent media industries” (ibid). The survival of newspapers is important in part because newspapers serve as important tools for some people seeking to stay informed about their communities and have positive impacts on the communities they serve. Newspapers “increase voter turnout, reduce government 3 corruption, make cities financially healthier, make citizens more knowledgeable about politics and more likely to engage with local government, force local TV to raise its game, encourage split-ticket (and thus less uniformly partisan) voting, make elected officials more responsive and efficient” (Benton, 2019). Watchdog reporting has improved conditions in many communities by uncovering abuses of power and other issues that may then be addressed and corrected as a consequence of newspaper reporting (Hamilton, 2016). Studying how people in the workplace adapt to innovation is important because failure to evolve as technology and ecosystems evolve has profound implications: The ability to innovate is often key to a company’s survival, and to workers’ employment prospects. “Innovation is generally considered to be one of the key drivers of corporate success,” (Frambach & Schillewaert, 2002, p. 163.) “Organizational innovations …are of little value if they are not used or complied with” (ibid, p. 167). Diffusion of innovations theory (Rogers, 2003) has been used as a theoretical lens by many scholars studying how journalists respond to changes in labor practices (Assaf, 2021; Boyle & Zuegner, 2012; Ekdale et al., 2015a; Greenwood & Reinardy, 2011; Huang, 2007; Singer, 2004b; Zhang & Feng, 2019). Diffusion of innovations theory posits that several factors influence whether a user will adopt an innovation: Perceived usefulness and complexity, observable efficacy, the perceived compatibility of an innovation with the user’s “values, beliefs and past experiences” (Rogers, 2003, p. 4) and trialability of the innovation. Compatibility includes compatibility with professional values (Rogers, 2003). 4 While many studies have examined how journalists' responses to change are influenced by their strongly held professional ideology, a search of the literature turned up no studies examining how newspaper journalists today are evolving their interpretations of their profession's values in response to social media video work. Journalists’ professional values are resilient but have shifted over time. Journalists are slowly evolving, “mapping old norms onto new technology while in some ways challenging them” (Molyneux & Mourão, 2019, p. 248). In some cases, previously resisted changes eventually become the new commonsense way of doing things. For example, many journalists initially resisted publishing news to their company’s website quickly; over time it became an accepted practice to publish news online first (Ekdale et al., 2015a). With each innovation, change is accepted or resisted, journalistic values are contested and sometimes reconstructed. Over time, new practices are legitimized, and journalistic values are reinterpreted. Journalism “is forever changing, forever becoming” (Deuze & Witschge, 2020, pp. 125-126). As Schudson notes, “History keeps happening, and the media keep changing. If a major effort of the sociology of media is to explain why the media are the way they are, a concurrent effort seeks to understand why they change” (2003, p. 90). Molyneux and Mourão note “it is important to follow ... earlier studies with an understanding of how processes of normalization and professionalization occur over time and how these processes respond to changes in the media ecosystem” (2019, p. 248). Deuze and Witschge write that journalism should be studied not as a fixed entity but “as a moving object, as a process, as something that is continuously constituted as it is practiced … We need to ask how journalism is becoming, rather than what journalism 5 is” (2020, p. 17). Guided by these ideas, this dissertation examines how journalists are invoking and revising their profession's values in response to changes in news work and to changes in the content ecosystem. Research Context In recent decades, as the content ecosystem has been transformed by the internet and other new technologies, the newspaper industry has faced intense competition for revenue and readers from new online challengers, has endured tough economics and been impacted by a transformation in news audience behaviors, among other challenges (Abramson, 2019). The newspaper industry has also been transformed by consolidation, with corporations buying newspapers, and newspaper chains being bought by other corporations. These moves often involve layoffs and other cost-cutting. Benton (2021) illustrates the trend with a dizzying tally of recent consolidations: • Freedom Communications: sold in 2016 to Alden • Journal-Register Co.: rebranded to Digital First Media after being bought in 2011 by Alden • Journal Communications: sold its newspapers to E. W. Scripps, which then spun them into a new company, which was then bought in 2016 by Gannett • GateHouse Media: bought up lots of smaller chains until it could acquire and assume the brand identity of Gannett • E. W. Scripps: bought Journal Communications’ newspapers, spun Journal’s and theirs into a new company, which was then bought in 2016 by Gannett • Media General: sold its newspapers to Berkshire Hathaway, which then sold them in 2020 to Lee • Tribune: sold in 2021 to Alden • McClatchy: stayed stubbornly independent until going into bankruptcy in 2020 and being bought by hedge fund Chatham Asset Management • MediaNews: still owned by Alden • Lee Enterprises: bought Berkshire Hathaway’s Media General newspapers, still Lee 6 • Gannett: bought by GateHouse, which then took its brand and became Gannett Thanks to declining readership and revenues, many newspapers have closed. “In the 15 years leading up to 2020, more than one-fourth of the country’s newspapers disappeared, leaving residents in thousands of communities–inner-city neighborhoods, suburban towns and rural villages–living in vast news deserts” (Abernathy, 2020, p. 8). At papers still operating, staff reductions “have been severe over the past 20 years. On average, newspapers have cut nearly half of their staff since the early 2000s” (Jennings & Rubado, 2019, p. 1). Over the past few decades newspapers have gone from being one of the main ways people get news, to being just one of many voices competing for the attention of a fragmented audience. For many consumers today, newspapers are an afterthought. Today many people turn to social media platforms instead of mainstream news sites for information, and many people consume news on phones and tablets instead of TVs and newspapers. Content is so ubiquitous, many readers feel that important news will appear in their social feeds and that they don't need to seek out news in order to be informed (Bergström & Belfrage, 2018). As of 2018 just 16% of U.S. adults said they often get news from print newspapers, while 20% said they regularly get news from social media (Shearer, 2018). There are striking age differences in media consumption patterns, and those gaps are growing. “Those 65 and older [are] five times as likely as 18- to 29-year- olds to often get news from TV. …The age divide is nearly as large for social media, but in the other direction: Those 18 to 29 are about four times as likely to often get news 7 there as those 65 and older … Print’s popularity only persists among those 65 and older” (Shearer, 2018). Among those who prefer to watch the news (rather than read or listen to it), just 10% of those 50 and older prefer to watch news online, while 34% of those 49 and younger prefer to watch online (Mitchell, 2018). There are age differences among those who use podcasts to get news as well. A 2021 Pew survey found that “about a quarter of U.S. adults (23%) say they get news at least sometimes from podcasts” (Walker, 2022). Among those 18-to-29, 33% said they sometimes got news from podcasts, while only 12% of those over 65 said they sometimes got news from podcasts. In 1990, the combined weekday circulation of U.S. newspapers was 62 million. By 2020, that number had dropped to an estimated 24 million (Barthel & Worden, 2021). “Online, individuals have more freedom to choose and more options from which to choose, and this has dislodged journalism from its role as a primary filter of public information” (Ryfe, 2012, p. 10). Digital platforms such as Facebook and Google have played an oversized role in the displacement of newspapers: Of the many changes introduced in the digital era, few have been so consequential for news media companies as the emergence of globally dominant digital intermediaries. Situated between news producers and news consumers, these platforms shape much of how digital information moves and is monetized. Such intermediaries control the vast majority of digital advertising revenue, thus undercutting news business models, and also control a growing share of user time and attention, thus weakening the reach and impact of news organizations’ sites and apps. (Westlund, Krumsvik, & Lewis, 2021, pp. 5-6) As a result of these changes, "advertising revenues have fallen off a cliff,” (Ryfe, 2012, p. 1). A recent Pew Research Center analysis found that “total estimated advertising 8 revenue for the newspaper industry in 2020 was $9.6 billion,” down from more than $48 billion in 2000 (Barthel & Worden, 2021). Newspapers have responded to changes in the content ecosystem by following the readers and catering to their habits. Many newspapers market their content on social media (Hong, 2012), and many use metrics to track reader interests (Napoli, 2011) so they can more effectively produce content that will attract more readers, among other adaptations. Among the changes designed to attract new readers and revenue: Many newspapers create content specifically for social media platforms, including social media video––in an attempt to generate revenues and reach readers (Kalogeropoulos & Nielsen, 2018). More recent research (Rashidian, Tsiveriotis, Brown, Bell, & Hartstone, 2019) reported a shift in attitude toward partnerships with platforms such as Facebook. Some news publishers producing content for platforms such as Facebook were pulling back from that strategy, in part because "any hope that scale-based platform products might deliver meaningful or consistent revenue for publishers has disappeared" (ibid, para. 5). The radical transformation of the content ecosystem, media economics, technology and other forces have led to profound changes in journalistic practice. Where newspaper reporters, for example, once were expected to produce one kind of content–– written news stories––today, many newspaper reporters are required to produce many different types of content for multiple platforms, and often have to produce more content more quickly than in previous decades. "Many are now expected to write a story, shoot still pictures or video, and then edit their work for multiple media platforms. These are new professional obligations that can increase the risk of burnout, exhaustion, and stress among journalists" (Weaver, Willnat & Wilhoit, 2019, p. 113). The volume and variety 9 of tasks journalists are asked to do are growing at a time when newspaper staffs are shrinking, thanks to dramatic drops in newspaper revenue and the resulting layoffs. In past studies journalists have noted that often they are asked to do new forms of labor––such as create multimedia content––but are given no additional time to do it. Convergence work “increases demand for and pressures on journalists, who have to retool and diversify their skillset to produce more work in the same amount of time under ongoing deadline pressures for one or more media” (Deuze, 2007, p. 155). Working as a journalist today means dealing with "continuous internal and external transformations, changes, challenges, evolutions, and revolutions" (Deuze, 2019, p. 2). New ways of attracting readers and generating revenue with new types of content are constantly being tried out, and journalists are constantly being asked to create that new content. Social media video is one of the latest of these content experiments designed to increase revenues and audience. 10 II: LITERATURE REVIEW Video and Social Media Video in Newspaper Newsrooms Video work was introduced in fits and starts to newspaper newsrooms starting more than two decades ago, but few audience members consumed newspapers' video until more recently in part because devices and infrastructure were not powerful enough to play video seamlessly, and there was no efficient way to easily distribute the video to the people who might want to watch it. The rise of social media platforms––along with the development of more powerful devices and internet connections––have more recently made video produced by newspapers a mass-consumed product (Kalogeropoulos & Nielsen, 2018, p. 2208). In 2007, Huang wrote that newspaper and broadcast news experimentation with online video and other forms of rich media––including, for example, audio and animation––had been ongoing for about a decade (p. 85). Russial and Santana reported in 2011 that “the mingling of audio, video, data and text on a single platform is evident on the websites of nearly all news organizations” (p. 6). Huang commented that as of 2007, much of the video was low quality due to various issues, including problems with the tools and infrastructure of this era, which led to long load times, display issues and other poor user experiences (2007). Early online news video was difficult for some users to access because the video players were not always compatible with a user’s computer, and videos often took a long time to download and play. Huang’s content analysis found that 34 of the 100 largest U.S. newspapers were publishing their own rich media on their websites, but that “much work remains to be done to provide viewers a truly pleasant converged media experience on the Internet” (Huang, 2007, p. 92). 11 Kalogeropoulos and Nielsen distinguish early newspaper convergence from today’s “‘second wave’ of digital disruption characterized by the rise of smartphones, social media platforms, and a video-enabled internet” (2018, pp. 2207, 2208). This second wave could be thought of as emerging after 2007, when both social platforms and smart phones were in the hands of users, setting the stage for the mass consumption of online video. YouTube launched in 2005, Facebook was made available to the general public in 2006, Twitter launched in 2006 and the first iPhone was released in 2007. Structural and technological advances that improved the quality of and access to video streaming were accompanied by increased audience adoption of internet video viewing.1 In 2010, the Pew Internet and American Life Project reported that “roughly half (52%) of all U.S. adults—have used the internet to watch or download video” (Purcell, 2010, n.p). By 2014, Pew reported that 63% of survey respondents were regularly using online video, that 36% reported watching news video and that “online video is clearly becoming a part of the news media landscape” (Mitchell, Holcomb, Olmstead, & Vogt, para. 8). In Bock’s 2011 paper looking at use of video in newspaper newsrooms, the author notes that newspaper journalists at this time were increasingly being asked to create video and that “Video is a key component for many newspaper organizations’ multi-media websites” (p. 600). Bock reported in 2016 that “newspapers are hiring video journalists, purchasing equipment and re-training staff, some of whom have never held a camera before, let alone produced a video story” (p. 494). Along the same lines, Santana and Russial reported that “The growing emphasis on the online product has brought considerable change to newspaper newsrooms. Entirely new positions have appeared, including online producers, multimedia reporters and videographers” (2013, p. 84). 12 Bock's analysis (2016) of newspaper video found that it fell into four main buckets: features, sports, crime and disaster and politics/civics.2 The quality of newspaper video, Bock noted, was sometimes “amateurish.” “Some of the video posted to the web by newspaper organizations would not pass muster in a college-level production class. Examples include a single shot of a car accident that lasted more than 5 minutes, or a single wide shot of a children’s baseball game that was posted without any editing, any contextual language or any graphics to indicate when the baseball game occurred or who was playing. Some images were shaky; others had unclear audio… Such examples exemplify complaints by photojournalists (Yaschur, 2012) that newspaper organizations are pressuring staff to put ‘anything’ on the web as long as it can be called video” (Bock, 2016, p. 505). Kalogeropoulos et al. reported that audience use of news video on news websites was very low (2016, p. 5). Kalogeropoulos and Nielsen noted that news video has gone from being produced mostly for consumption via computers on a news organization’s website, to being produced mostly for consumption on mobile devices via social media platforms such as Facebook and YouTube (2018, p. 2210). Before newspapers began posting video to social media platforms, users came across newspapers’ videos typically by visiting a newspaper’s website and discovering the video on the front page or on a story page. Today many users consume videos and other content on social media platforms including Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube and others. On many platforms, users scroll through a “feed” of content, and videos appear in users’ feeds as they are scrolling through content posted by friends, family, advertisers and others. According to a Pew Research Center survey, as of 2021 the two most widely-used social platforms in the U.S. were YouTube and Facebook. Around 81% of U.S. adults said they use YouTube, while about 69% said they use Facebook, 40% said they use 13 Instagram and about one in five adults say they use Twitter, Snapchat and WhatsApp (Odabas, 2022). On Facebook, when a newspaper posts a video, it can appear in a user’s feed in a number of ways. It may surface in their feed if a Facebook friend comments on or shares the video, if the newspaper has paid Facebook to publish the video to users’ feeds or if the user is “following” the newspaper—essentially asking Facebook to share the newspaper’s posts to the user’s feed. YouTube describes the platform’s video discovery tools this way: Your homepage is what you see when you first open YouTube—it displays a mixture of personalized recommendations, subscriptions, and the latest news and information. The Up Next panel appears when you’re watching a video. It suggests additional content based on whatever you’re currently watching, alongside other videos that we think you may be interested in. (YouTube, undated) Some platforms attract a range of ages, while others are more heavily used by younger audiences. A recent Pew Research Center survey found that 48% of people 18- 29 said they use TikTok, while only 22% of those 30-49 and 14% of those 50 to 64 said they use TikTok. The user demographics on the two largest social media platforms, YouTube and Facebook, are “most broadly representative of the population as a whole” (Pew Research Center, 2021). Kalogeropoulos et al. reported that many of the most popular videos posted to social media conform to a specific style, which many newspaper newsrooms use. They “tend to be short (under one minute), are designed to work with no sound (with subtitles), focus on soft news, and have a strong emotional element” (2016, p. 5). Kalogeropoulos et al. evaluated a group of news organizations' Facebook videos and found that: 14 Almost 40% of the most successful videos ... related to lifestyle or entertainment content (for instance about animals, babies, or cooking) rather than harder news subjects such as current affairs, politics, science, or the environment. ...Even for brands associated with hard news like the Telegraph, the Guardian, or the Independent, their top or second videos in terms of Facebook engagement numbers turned out to be animal videos. (2016, p. 15) Kalogeropoulos and Nielsen interviewed 26 mostly senior staff at 19 news organizations in the U.S., U.K. and Germany––including newspapers, broadcasters and digital outlets–– and found that “many news organizations are aggressively investing in online news video, producing content specifically for this purpose, developing distribution strategies tailored to mobile and social video” (2018, p. 2214). (The U.S. newspapers in the Kalogeropoulos and Nielsen study included The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal and USA Today.) They found that news managers were investing in video because they hoped video would be a new source of revenue, they believed audiences wanted video and because of “a pull from platforms prioritizing video” (Kalogeropoulos and Nielsen, 2018, p. 2215). Journalists' Responses to Changing Labor Practices Studies have found that journalists often resist new work practices on the grounds that changes compromise one or more of their profession’s values or are inconsistent with journalistic culture and habits. Changes to journalistic work are often “met by doubts regarding their perceived impact on editorial autonomy”––one of the profession’s strongly-held values (Deuze, 2005, p. 449). Ekdale et al. also found “journalists are resistant to adopt changes that they believe challenge journalistic autonomy and judgment” (2015a, p. 955). Ryfe spent five years visiting newsrooms investigating how journalists adapt and change (2102). He found that journalists understood the need for change, wanted to change, and tried to change, but were unable to change because of 15 their profession’s constraining culture, values and habits. “The culture of journalism inhibits change” (Ryfe, 2012, p. 19). “Everywhere journalists talk about the need for change, and yet nowhere is change happening to any significant degree” (ibid, p. 27). The culture of journalism consists of “principles, like ‘cover the story but do not become the story;’ of shared norms like ‘objectivity’…; or of practices, like the practice of verifying information” (Ryfe, 2012, p. 11). Journalistic reporting routines and habits are passed from journalist to journalist: Fishman notes that when he trained to be a reporter he learned what he needed to know from other reporters (1980). Ryfe relates that he learned by doing, and though newsroom socialization. Culture and habits are passed on by example, in conversation and via workplace routines (such as via the editing process, at news meetings that daily reaffirm news values, and through systems created for covering news beats). Fishman, for example, quotes a beat reporter who simply continued to cover the beat the way his predecessor did: The beat “was set up when I came into it––and I haven’t changed it that much” (Fishman, 1980, p. 50). According to Ryfe: Habits allow them to work quickly without having to think very much. Once I learned which kinds of sources to talk to in which situations, I could unreflectively apply this knowledge. … The fact that habits are widely shared also allows journalists to work with minimal supervision… Habits allow journalists to work together in a relatively seamless way. (Ryfe, 2012, p. 59) Many journalists’ identities are tied up in doing journalism in the ways that their profession and culture endorse (Ryfe, 2012). “Since being a journalist is closely connected to doing journalism, a change in habit can trigger an identity crisis. Asked to do journalism in a different way, a reporter can come to feel less and less like a journalist” (Ryfe, 2012, pp. 19-20). 16 Previous studies have documented print journalists’ responses to changes to labor, including changes that required learning and doing video and other multimedia (Avilés & Carvajal, 2008; Bock, 2011; Greenwood & Reinardy, 2011; Mäenpää, 2014; Santana & Russial, 2013). Some newspaper journalists interviewed by Bock, for example, found video work frustrating and exhausting: “The demands of operating a camera, toting equipment and conducting interviews that can carry a story, with appropriate lighting and microphone operation seemed in some cases overwhelming” (2011, p. 609). Mäenpää notes that U.S. and European photojournalists were first tasked with creating video “during the period 2000-2006,” and that “there were divisions among photographers regarding how they reacted and adapted to this new form of expression in their daily work” (2014, p. 97). During this transition, video work got a mixed reception from photographers in Mäenpää’s study: “While some were enthusiastic about the possibility of broadening their skills…some photographers clearly still identified themselves as photographers and did not want to work with moving images,” (ibid). Mäenpää found that some photographers felt they had inadequate training and too little time to do quality video, and that their sense of autonomy was challenged by the new video labor they were being asked to do (Mäenpää, 2014, p. 102). In Mäenpää’s study, photographers evoked the public service value when discussing their attitudes toward new digital work–– including video work. Public service is one of the key values journalists evoke when discussing their work. Journalists view the work that they do as an essential public service that supports and enables healthy democracies. The public service value is frequently invoked by journalists accepting or rejecting new journalistic practices. In Mäenpää’s study, “New practices such as digital photo editing, fast online publication of 17 photographs and videos and the use of amateur images are often justified by better public service” (2014, p. 93) Some photographers “see the quality of photojournalism being threatened, which deteriorates the idea of public service” (Mäenpää, 2014, p. 93). Not all studies found that journalists disliked or resisted change. Santana and Russial reported in 2013 that newspaper photographers across the country were producing video and photo galleries, and that “most have accepted their expanded role (p. 74). Avilés and Carvajal (2008) studied two newsrooms asking journalists to work in multiple platforms and found that while some journalists were “utterly opposed to being turned into multi-media professionals,” most journalists liked the idea that publishing on more platforms would help them reach more readers, while “some were still uncomfortable with multimedia and they struggled to acquire the necessary skills to do well in all media” (2008, p. 230). Singer found that many journalists said that providing content on multiple platforms enabled them to reach more readers and give them “a richer account,” helping journalists serve their public service goal (2006, p. 39). While organizational diffusion of innovations research often focuses on how staffers respond to technical innovations, some authors have noted that innovation adoption in the workplace can be about “workplace power” as much as it is about whether workers are interested in learning new technologies. While a workplace innovation may introduce a new technology, it may also introduce other unwelcome changes to labor, including increases in the amount of labor expected, new requests to speed up labor, and other labor changes that staffers view as a decline in work conditions. A staffer might be interested in learning how to produce video but may be uninterested in producing more work in the same amount of time for no increase in pay. “The basic 18 purpose of introducing technology into workplaces is to foster the transference of skill from labour to capital and to provide the management with greater control over the labour process. In other words, technology engenders a dialectic relation between labour and capital, mediated by the location of skill, with the stakes being workplace power” (Krutova, Turja, Koistinen, Melin, & Särkikoski, 2021, np). Participants in past newsroom innovation studies have noted that innovations often come with the expectation that staffers will do more work for the same money (Avilés & Carvajal, 2008). Some journalists raised concerns about the quality of the work and ultimately the quality of the service being offered to the public (Singer, 2006). And some have noted that multiskilling presents safety issues for some journalists. After a local TV news reporter was hit by a car while doing a live report, The Washington Post reported that “New York Times writer Sopan Deb called the footage ‘harrowing’ but said the clip was ‘a good opportunity to remind people that in most markets, TV reporters are solo, shooting, editing, lighting and doing everything else themselves, while being paid little to do it,’ calling such pressures a ‘safety hazard’” (Hassan, 2022). Avilés and Carvajal reported, “Time is one of most frequently mentioned structural constraints. While management wants more cross-media cooperation and production, reporters negotiate this in their daily work by stating that they do not have the required time” (Avilés & Carvajal, 2008, p. 237). Journalists said the changes in their newsroom meant “some public service standards might deteriorate, such as accuracy in the news reports or making the effort to check sources or find additional voices that could enrich a story” (ibid, p. 231). 19 By 2015, Ekdale et al. found that many journalists no longer resisted new technologies to the extent that they had in the past: “Journalists are increasingly convinced of the merits—indeed, the necessity—of adapting their practices to newer technological capabilities” (Ekdale et al., 2015a, p. 939). The authors wrote that many journalists continue to resist changes based on “compatibility with established norms and routines” (Ekdale et al., 2015a, p. 941) and those that “disrupt their professional values, autonomy, and work” (ibid, p. 955). “To say that journalists are Luddites or opposed to change is to miss the point. As our findings demonstrate, they are open to a variety of changes that they view as compatible with their work and as better than the status quo” (ibid). Journalism as Ideology In his landmark essay “What is Journalism” (2005), Deuze notes that “journalists in elective democracies share similar characteristics and speak of similar values in the context of their daily work ... It is therefore possible to speak of a dominant occupational ideology of journalism on which most news workers base their professional perceptions and praxis” (Deuze, 2005, p. 445). Deuze notes that many journalists share a dominant ideology defined by professional values including objectivity, ethics, public service, immediacy and autonomy. These values are similar from newsroom to newsroom, making it possible for an editor at one U.S. newspaper to hire a reporter trained at another paper, confident that the reporter will share a basic set of underlying values that are instilled in students in journalism schools and perpetuated by dominant texts and by professional journalism organizations. Journalism’s dominant ideology is “a collection of values, strategies and formal codes characterizing professional journalism and shared 20 most widely by its members” (Deuze, 2005, p. 445). A more recent paper Deuze co- authored with Witschge notes: Journalists tend to benchmark their actions and attitudes self-referentially using ideal-typical standards, seeing themselves as providing a public service; being objective, fair, and (therefore) trustworthy; working autonomously, committed to an operational logic of actuality and speed (preeminent in concepts such as reporting on breaking news, getting the story first); and having a social responsibility and ethical sensibility (Deuze, 2005). This conceptualization is still strong within the field today and seems to endure even in the midst of profound changes and challenges to the profession. (2018, p. 167) According to this ideology, “the purpose of journalism is to provide people with the information they need to be free and self-governing” (Kovach & Rosensteil, 2001, p. 12), and independent newspapers and journalists are important to democracy. To accomplish their critical mission, journalists need to be free from corporate, commercial and other influences, and should be empowered to make decisions about what to cover and how to cover it. This strongly held value system means changes to journalistic work are often “met by doubts regarding their perceived impact on editorial autonomy” (Deuze, 2005, p. 449). These ideologies, along with journalistic rituals and norms, are the filter through which newspaper newsroom workers view changes introduced to newswork by managers. There are dozens of ethics, value and mission statements published by media corporations and professional organizations expressing versions of this professional ideology. Many echo the key values captured by Deuze (2005) and by Kovach and Rosenstiel (2001).3 The public service value is central to the mainstream U.S. newspaper culture and ideology. Singer notes that “journalists believe they work in the public interest and that their primary purpose is providing citizens necessary information” (2004a, p. 844). The public service value is invoked by journalists when championing and rejecting 21 innovations. For some the public service value is fulfilled by innovations that allow journalists to offer “better, deeper, and more detailed information” (Singer 2004a, p. 844). As noted above, others hold up the public service value as a reason to reject an innovation, saying, for example, that the new labor requires them to work too quickly, leading to inaccuracies or thinner stories, and harming their ability to serve the public. In cases where immediacy compromises accuracy, mainstream journalistic values hold that the truth value should always trump the speed value. “Accuracy is at the heart of what we do,” Reuters Standards and Values statement reads (Reuters). “It is our job to get it first but it is above all our job to get it right. Accuracy, as well as balance, always takes precedence over speed” (Reuters). The Society of Professional Journalists Code of Ethics agrees journalists must “take responsibility for the accuracy of their work. Verify information before releasing it. Use original sources whenever possible. Remember that neither speed nor format excuses inaccuracy” (Society of Professional Journalists, 2014). The Radio Television Digital News Association Code of Ethics reads “Truth and accuracy above all,” (Radio Television Digital News Association, 2015). Journalistic Autonomy and “The Wall” In some newsrooms, journalists are collaborating with their companies’ business staff to in an effort to improve revenues. This dissertation sought out sources at a newspaper where journalists are working on social media video “at the news–business intersection” (Coddington, 2015, p. 75) to learn how journalists are renegotiating the journalistic autonomy value and the concept of “the wall” that in traditional journalistic culture separates journalists from the commercial side of a newspaper’s operations. Coddington explains the wall this way: 22 That wall, between the journalistic and business-oriented functions of a news organization, is one of the foremost professional markers of journalism .… the news–business wall is the cornerstone upholding American journalism’s sense of autonomy, which allows it to function as a profession––to the extent that it does. The wall is arguably the preeminent boundary in American journalism, the one that helps give it the capacity to maintain its many other boundaries. (Coddington, 2015, p. 67) According to traditional journalistic culture and values, the wall means that marketing, sales and other business-side employees at a newspaper company should not cross into the newsroom and attempt to influence reporters and other journalists. Breaches of the wall might include, for example, advertising or marketing department staffers asking a reporter to write a positive story about an advertiser, or asking a reporter to pull or soften a story that is unfriendly to an advertiser. Journalists have a long history of invoking and defending the wall, arguing that that autonomy from commercial interest is key to journalists having the freedom to decide what to cover and how to cover it in a way that best serves the public interest. Many argue that maintaining the wall is key to maintaining the reader’s trust and fulfilling journalism’s public service mandate. “In the journalistic imagination, the wall is simultaneously venerable and crumbling, the cornerstone of the profession and something constantly under assault” (Coddington, 2015, p. 72). Many scholars have explored journalists’ defense of the wall between editorial and the business side of newspaper companies, and how what is acceptable and not acceptable is evolving as newspapers’ economic fortunes worsen. “The resistance of journalists to commercialization is an important part of the story of modern American journalism” (Coddington, 2015, p. 69). Westlund et al. examined how news executives perceive collaboration across news and business departments, noting that historically collaborations “between Editorial and Marketing departments, …have been the exception 23 rather than the rule” (Westlund et al., 2021, p. 4). Drew and Thomas note that “the separation of editorial and business departments has long been regarded as central to the identity and integrity of journalism in the United States. Financial challenges confronting news organizations are seeing a gradual relaxation of this separation, though tensions remain” (2018, p. 196). Their research found that the wall is “softening,” but that “older organizations are more resistant to change than newer, startup organizations” (Drew & Thomas, 2018, p. 211). Cornia et al. examined how newsroom leaders at 12 news organizations in six European countries view the newsroom-business boundary and found that “the traditional norm of separation no longer plays the central role that it used to” (Cornia, Sehl & Nielsen, 2020, p. 172). “The relationship between editorial and business departments is described by our interviewees as a collaboration, rather than in terms of separation” (ibid, p. 179). Coddington concludes that journalistic autonomy from commercial influences “has been continually contested for at least the last two decades, and now appears to be losing ground to such norms as transparency and integrity” (2015, p. 79). Diffusion of Innovations “Many technologists believe that advantageous innovations will sell themselves, that the obvious benefits of a new idea will be widely realized by potential adopters, and that the innovation will therefore diffuse rapidly. Seldom is this the case.” (Rogers, 2003, p. 7). Igbaria et al. wrote in 1996––as “microcomputers” were being introduced in many kinds of organizations––that “despite the adoption of advanced computer technologies by organizational decision makers, the actual use of microcomputers by managers and 24 professionals has tended to lag” (Igbaria, Parasuraman, & Baroudi, 1996, p. 128.) “Actual use… has tended to lag” could be said of many innovations when they are introduced to the workplace, and researchers have published thousands of studies exploring why people reject some and adopt other innovations, and why some people are more likely to adopt innovations than others. One of the most widely used theoretical perspectives for this type of research is the diffusion of innovations framework, which as of 1995 had been used in more than 4,000 research papers, including 400 communication studies (Rogers, 1995). Diffusion of innovations has been used as a theoretical lens by multiple scholars studying how journalists respond to innovations and to changes in labor practices (Boyle & Zuenger, 2012; Ekdale et al., 2015a; Greenwood & Reinardy, 2011; Huang, 2007; Singer, 2004b; Zhang & Feng, 2019). Diffusion of innovations theory proposes that a variety of factors influence whether a user will accept and adopt a technology: Perceived usefulness and complexity, observable efficacy, the perceived compatibility of an innovation with the user’s “values, beliefs and past experiences” (Rogers, 1995, p. 4) and trialability of the innovation. Agarwal and Prasad note that “it is not the intrinsic characteristics of an innovation, but rather the perceived characteristics that influence behavior” (1997, p. 10). Rogers also describes the phases users go through on their innovation journey: First they learn of the innovation. By gathering knowledge about it they reduce uncertainty about it. Users form perceptions about the innovation, and these perceptions influence the decision to adopt the innovation or not. According to Kapoor et al.’s survey of diffusion studies, “most studies have used adoption as the dependent variable …a very small percentage of studies chose to deal with the implementation aspect of an 25 innovation” (Kapoor, Dwivedi, & Williams, 2014, p. 78). This dissertation seeks to add to the literature examining the implementation phase by interviewing journalists who use and champion social media video as a storytelling technique. Who Adopts Innovations? Rogers classifies adopters into types: • Innovators are among the very first to try an innovation. Rogers describes these as “venturesome” people who are not afraid to take a risk on something that might not work. • Early adopters are next to try an innovation. This important group influences later adopters to try out a new tool, method or idea. Early adopters decrease “uncertainty about a new idea by adopting it, and then conveying a subjective evaluation of the innovation to near-peers through interpersonal networks” (Rogers, 1995, p. 264). • Late majority users wait to adopt an innovation until it’s widely used. “The pressure of peers is necessary to motivate adoption” in this group (Rogers, 1995, p. 265). • The last to adopt are laggards, who are focused on the past and traditional ways of doing things. “Laggards tend to be suspicious of innovations,” (Rogers, 1995, p. 265). Diffusion theory posits that innovations spread through social systems through interpersonal interactions, with the late majority tending to adopt after hearing good things about an innovation from the earlier adopters (Rogers, 1995, p. 265). Rogers defines individuals’ levels of innovativeness as “the degree to which an individual or 26 other unit of adoption is relatively early in adopting new ideas than other members of a social system” (1995, p. 261)––in other words this term refers to how early on a person adopts an innovation, compared to the rest of the social group. Early adopters and innovators make up about 15% of a social system, while the late majority and the laggards make up about half of a social system. A recent meta-analysis of diffusion studies (Dedehayir, Ortt, Riverola, & Miralles, 2017) refers to innovativeness as a personal trait that users have. Dedehayir et al. reviewed the takeaways of dozens of diffusion studies found “that a high level of innovativeness as a personality trait will lead to innovation adoption” (2017, p. 11). Diffusion theory also posits that the more exposed to technology people are, the more likely they will be to use a new technology. Studies have found that users’ past exposure to and experience with technologies can make them more willing to use new technologies (Rogers, 2003; Dedehayir et al., 2017), and trainings can increase users’ willingness to use a new technology (Agarwal & Prasad, 1997; Frambach & Schillewaert, 2002). The authors of a 2017 meta-analysis of diffusion studies note that adopters typically have higher levels of knowledge and technical abilities: “The more innovators and early adopters use technology in their lives … the more likely they will adopt innovations,” (Dedehayir et al., p. 10). Dedehayir et al. also found that a shorter time in the workplace was associated with higher adoption rates (2017). In organizational settings like newsrooms, often company managers decide that their staffers will adopt innovations. Rogers (2003, p. 28) calls these “authority innovation-decisions.” He distinguishes authority decisions from “optional innovation- decisions,” which occur when people decide to innovate on their own. Once an authority 27 decision has been made to require an organization’s staff to innovate, the staffers then decide whether they will adopt the innovation as instructed, a choice Rogers calls “contingent innovation-decisions” (Rogers, 2003, p. 38). Rogers defines these contingent decisions as “choices to adopt or reject that are made only after a prior innovation-decision” (2003, p. 38). Heidenreich and Talke note that “in organizations, mandated adoption contexts are the rule rather than the exception,” (2020, p. 279). Mandatory adoption can be met with a variety of responses by staff. “If in a mandated adoption context an organizational implementation decision violates the beliefs of individual employees, they may engage in various forms of opposition behavior, such as delaying the implementation misusing or sabotaging the innovation, or going on strike” (Heidenreich & Talke, 2020, p. 279). “The prior literature indicates that employee resistance and subsequent opposition is one of the biggest challenges in large- scale implementations of organizational innovations” (ibid). This study focuses on how journalists who chose to adopt this innovation in an authority innovation context discuss the adoption and use of social media video. Job and Industry Insecurity The studies looking at how workers respond to authority innovation decisions in times of work uncertainty have produced mixed results. In today’s environment, often “the same employees that have experienced increased job insecurity are also increasingly pressured to engage in innovative work behaviours…to help organizations survive and achieve a competitive advantage” (Montani, Courcy, Battistelli, & de Witte, 2021, p. 742). Ekdale et al. found that job insecurity concerns impact journalists’ “news practices and receptivity to change” in unexpected ways (Ekdale, Tully, Harmsen, & Singer, 28 2015b, p. 396). “One could assume that those worried about losing their jobs would be more likely to take risks that might make them more valuable to their employers, but our findings indicate the opposite. Fearful and cynical newsworkers who perceive job insecurity stifle innovation and experimentation by adopting a risk-adverse approach to newswork and actively challenging their employer’s efforts” (ibid). The authors note that workers fall into categories that take different approaches to innovation: Hopeful newsworkers believed they were secure in their jobs and were doing work that management viewed favorably. These workers engaged in constructive, active efforts––such as supporting new company initiatives, producing digital content, and proposing innovations––that afforded them a sense of job security. … Obliging newsworkers, meanwhile … were not opposed to the company experimenting with new ideas, but they were not interested in being at the forefront of such change. … Fearful and cynical newsworkers, on the other hand, believed there was little they could do to retain their jobs. Several of these workers said that they have given up trying to alter their news practices, because they felt either their efforts had gone unnoticed or their work had become marginalized.” (Ekdale et al., 2015b, p. 395) Thompson, Higgins and Howell found that “perceived … long-term consequences”–– such as the belief that mastering an innovation will improve one’s career outlook––is a factor in innovation adoption (1991, p. 129). Rogers notes that “in spite of the importance of consequences, they have received relatively little study by diffusion researchers,” (Rogers, 2003, p. 436). Agarwal and Prasad’s study of computer programmers being asked to learn a new programming language found that job insecurity was a powerful motivating factor for innovation adoption. “Insecure individuals perceive themselves as more ‘at risk,’ and therefore have more to gain from learning a marketable skill; they are more motivated to seek out the advantages and the compatibility of the new technology,” (1997, p. 15). Krutova et al. (2021, np) found that “Job insecurity is … positively [associated] with readiness to make concessions.” 29 Research Questions Based on the literature review discussed above, this study examines how journalists make sense of social media video work, guided by the following questions: RQ1: How is social media video created in newspaper newsrooms? RQ2: How do journalists invoke their long-held professional values when discussing why they embraced social media video work? RQ3: How are journalists’ values evolving in response to video work? 30 III: METHODS To get a sense for how frequently newspapers post original social media video, the websites and social media accounts of 15 newspapers attracting more than 30 million page views and less than 450 million page views per month according to Comscore (excluding the very largest and smallest newspapers)4 were reviewed in March 2021. Interviews were conducted with 12 journalists who work or recently worked for one of three newspapers that regularly produce video and appear to take an integrated approach to video. Three journalists who left newspapers some time ago and offered historical perspective were also interviewed. Participants were interviewed by phone and via Zoom. Institutional Review Board approval was obtained before interviews were conducted. As outlined in the IRB approval, a standard disclosure statement was read to participants, who verbally consented to participate in the research. Participants were told that they would be quoted anonymously and that their newspapers would not be identified by name or by using identifying information. Participants were told that the interviews would be recorded and transcribed and that as a part of the member checks process I would send them the sections of the dissertation with in which their quotes appeared, and any descriptive language used in reference to them before publishing. With each participant we established how the participant would like to be referred to (example, an editor at a West Coast newspaper). I interviewed participants using a pilot-tested questionnaire, which was adjusted after each interview as needed, based on the responses of previous participants. I asked questions about newsroom routines, along with open-ended questions designed to shed 31 light on their perceptions about video work and how it fits in with their professional values. “The long interview is one of the most powerful methods in the qualitative armory,” McCracken notes (1988, p. 9). “The method can take us into the mental world of the individual, to glimpse the categories and logic by which he or she sees the world” (ibid). McCracken notes that questionnaires bring structure to the interview process and allow the interviewer “to give all of his or her attention to the informant’s testimony” (1988, p. 25). As recommended by McCracken, I used the questionnaire as a guide, but pursued follow-up questions as needed during the conversation. Notes were taken during and after interviews to capture impressions. A typical example: Yesterday interviewed [two] subjects. … both observed without prompting that the dire financial situation facing newspapers may make journalists more flexible than they were in the past. [One]… had a lot of great information about how video and other products (podcasts, Instagram stories) are being sold to sponsors, and seemed to have a lot of hope for the revenue possibilities there. … She said she and certain others in the newsroom meet regularly with the sales and marketing team to discuss content possibilities. …She also said that she's slowly been bleeding into a new field even as others are bleeding into hers (video): She's been doing more social and enjoying it. She said there is an everybody does everything ––based on their skills––mentality with everybody pitching in. Participants were interviewed until saturation was reached. Saturation is reached when themes predominantly repeat those already reported in previous interviews. According to Guest, Arwen and Johnson, “If the goal is to describe a shared perception, belief, or behavior among a relatively homogeneous group, then a sample of twelve will likely be sufficient” (2006, p. 76). In the case of this study, as noted in my research journal (Nov. 6, 2021), I found while coding interviews that “I've got a lot of great material and am seeing a lot of repetition. I might be at saturation already” after 15 interviews. While interviewing can produce rich data, this method does have a number of 32 shortcomings. Participants may engage in deception, contradict themselves or answer questions in a way they hope will put them in the best light (Rosenblatt, 2003, p. 228.) They may attempt to answer honestly, but their memory of events may be imperfect. Rosenblatt notes that rapport building can help participants get beyond initial discomfort and encourage them to reveal more to a researcher and that researchers must be alert for hints in participants’ replies that they are only telling part of the story and to probe further in those areas. Rosenblatt notes: Even though I expect that interviewees will tell me what they consider to be the truth and I honor their efforts to tell that truth, I do not accept that the truth they have just given me is the truth that others share or that will be the whole truth after they reply to my next question. (Rosenblatt, 2003, p. 228) The interview should be viewed as a tool that helps researchers understand how participants recall events and represent themselves when asked questions, rather than a tool that will give researchers an objective truth: “It serves only as a mechanism for eliciting what people say they do” (Atkinson & Coffey, 2003, p. 117). We must recognize that memories and experiences are constructed through the resources of narrative and discourse. …When we conduct an interview, then, we are not simply collecting information … Interviews generate accounts and narratives that are forms of social action in their own right. (Atkinson & Coffey, 2003, p. 118) A number of methods were used to increase the validity of this study, including triangulation of sources, member checks and systematic data gathering and analysis. Triangulation is the process of using multiple sources––from a single newsroom, for example––to confirm consistencies or detect inconsistencies. Interviews were conducted systematically, using a predetermined set of interview questions, though those questions evolved over time in response to participants’ responses to the questionnaire. Questions 33 that were not producing meaningful replies were in some cases dropped from the questionnaire, and new questions designed to supply missing information were added. More detail on these methods is provided below. Participant Selection While the content analysis involved 15 newspapers, the interview portion of this study included a convenience sample of 12 journalists currently working for or who recently worked for one of three newspapers that are regularly doing video and take an integrated approach to video: a West Coast newspaper, a Midwest newspaper and an East Coast newspaper. In addition, three participants who had a long experience working at newspapers were interviewed for historical perspective. Of the 12 journalists who are working at newspapers or recently worked at newspapers, four were men and eight were women, five had been in journalism for 30 or more years, five had worked in journalism for 20 or more years but less than 30 years, and two had been in journalism at least 10 years but less than 20 years. One was in their 60s, five were in their 50s, two were in their 40s, and four were in their 30s. Eleven are staffers or recent staffers who regularly produce or used to produce video. One participant is a senior manager who has not regularly worked as a video producer. Interview subjects included two senior managers, two video department heads, one former website manager, two photographers, one former reporter turned editor, two full time video producers, one social media and metrics manager, two web producers and two reporters. These journalists have served in many roles over their careers. In some cases, to maintain anonymity of the subjects, the titles used in this study are non-precise or previously held titles. 34 As noted above, the three subject newspapers are among the largest in the U.S. Two of the subject newspapers are part of two different corporations, the third publication is independently owned. All three are innovating to keep up with changes in audience behaviors and to increase readership and revenue, including investing in social media accounts, podcasts, video, apps, newsletters and other products. Like most U.S. newspapers, they have seen recent print circulation declines. According to a 2021 Poynter article, “The top 25 U.S. newspapers lost 20% of daily subscriptions between the first quarter of 2020 and the first quarter of this year” (Edmonds, 2021). Triangulation was used in the case of two newspapers to gain a better sense of organizational context within which some of the participants operate: seven of interviews were with journalists from the West Coast newspaper and four were from the Midwest newspaper. Interviewing multiple people from one organization improves validity by allowing a researcher to detect consistency (or inconsistencies) between participants. Ekdale et al. note that “using triangulated data from a single case reveals how people with different organizational roles interpret the same newsroom changes” (2015a, p. 943). Efforts were made to interview more participants at the East Coast newspaper, but multiple calls and emails were not answered. The decision to interview multiple participants at the West Coast and Midwest newspapers was made early in the research process. The logic behind the decision was captured in a June 12, 2021, memo in my research journal: After starting with two subjects I knew, interviewing these two subjects I didn't know felt like a different experience. They agreed to interview with me but it felt like they had things they didn't mind saying, and other things they were avoiding saying. I came away feeling like I had a cleaned-up version of the truth, and that much of the story was left out in the details they chose not to reveal…I feel that at each paper if I interviewed 15 people and triangulated all their stories I'd get a fair 35 picture of the truth, but this project doesn't allow for that kind of depth. Even if I just dug deep into five of these papers, that would be 75 interviews. Considering that each interview is taking hours to process, that is just not feasible. … I'm thinking it might be better to focus on three to four papers in this list, doing 3-5 interviews at each so I'm able to triangulate more. Ultimately, seven journalists at the West Coast paper, four journalists at the Midwest paper and one journalist at the East Coast newspaper were interviewed. Taking a Constructivist Approach This study takes the constructivist approach that organizations are made up of the interactions and meaning making of the people within organizations (Fine & Hallett, 2014). Many previous studies of newsrooms take the constructivist approach: Manufacturing the News states at the outset that “The construction of social reality is inherent in the very nature of interaction” (Fishman, 1980, pp. 3-4). “By acting in accordance with our conception of the way things are we concertedly make them the way they are, whether we are treating pieces of paper as money, conducting a routine conversation or electing a new president” (ibid, p. 3). Tuchman’s seminal text Making News: A Study in the Construction of Reality also uses interviews and the constructivist approach to study journalists (1978). "As ideological institutions, the news media define reality; they do not merely process reports of events ... news media are constructing reality by constituting an event as news," she writes (Tuchman, 1976, p. 1065). The constructivist paradigm holds that qualitative researchers are not objective and value-free––that they bring values and history to their work and should be transparent about them. Researchers and participants work together to create meanings, and the qualitative researcher’s findings are not “the truth,” rather they are an interpretation or version of events influenced by the backgrounds all participants bring to 36 the research process. Similar research done by a different researcher without the same background and history would likely produce different results. Grounded Theory Methods Data was gathered and evaluated using grounded theory methods. Using grounded theory methods involves letting the data drive the process: Researchers adjust course if expected concepts do not emerge, and unexpected concepts emerge. Researchers using grounded theory methods are “continuously comparing theory and data until adequate conceptual categories had been developed” (Meyer & Goes, 1988, p. 902). Using grounded theory methods for example might mean dropping a question from the questionnaire if responses indicate that the question is off track. One example of this happening during this study, as captured in a dissertation journal entry (Aug. 24, 2021): Subjects so far don't seem to be confirming the "that's not news" theory. I will remove that line of questioning. They have confirmed job survival as a reason for flexibility, so I will add that to the questions. The questionnaire was iterated throughout the research process in response to participant responses, as captured in this later research journal note (Aug. 31, 2021): I was left feeling that the instrument/questionnaire was incomplete after talking to [two subjects]… After thinking about it, I added the following question to get at what feels like is missing: Imagine I'm a new hire and I've never done video. I've just been told that I'll be expected to pitch in by capturing video at some events, and sometimes doing standup. You've been tasked with selling me on the value of video. How would you explain to me why you consider video valuable? How does video help you accomplish what you're trying to accomplish as a journalist? How does it help readers understand what's going on in the world? I realize I'm speaking mostly with journalists who buy in to the value of video, and that may be a subject selection bias. I wonder if my question is, hey, let’s take the focus off the resisters and focus on the embracers. How do THEY talk about their values when discussing journalism? 37 As captured in this journal note, it was at this point that I realized that my aim is not to understand how all types of people in the newsroom are responding to this new form of labor but that I am specifically interested in understanding the motivations of people who accept this form of labor, as much of the previous research has focused on resisters. Using grounded theory methods when analyzing data, categories are created “through an ongoing process of comparing units of data with each other” (Lindlof & Taylor, 2017, p. 321). Categories are developed through the “integration and dimensionalization” process, in which the dimensions of categories are fully explored (Lindlof & Taylor, 2017, p. 324). Once the data have been fully categorized and studied, they are interpreted “through a ... practice of pattern recognition” (Lindlof & Taylor, 2017, p. 343). Rubin and Rubin note: First you set up a few main coding categories. … As you sort the data into the categories you chose, you might find that important information doesn’t fit into these categories, or that one of your categories blurs two or more separate concepts, themes or stages. Then you have to add more categories to fit the data. (2005, p. 239) For the first few interviews I used the Dedoose platform to create categories. This note from my research journal (April 8, 2021) discusses the process and a sampling of results: I've set up interview 01 in Dedoose. The subject describes many of usual reasons for resistance to work changes (no time, too many tasks, this is not what I signed up for). A couple of codes I'm interested to see if they repeat in other interviews include "video seen as an extra," "Text seen as most important" and "identity as a writer/photographer" as a reason for not participating in another form. There were quite a few references to youth as a factor of adoption, and older age as a factor for resistance, and to change in leadership and leadership and management response as a perpetuator of stasis or agent of change. Having actual hands-on experience with video seems to be the catalyst that causes many to accept video work. The subject notes that he himself experienced a value change after doing videos and overcoming his fear that he was not creating quality work: That storytelling with video is important to the public service goal; that it's just another 38 form of storytelling. He notes that fear of producing low-quality product was an impediment for three people whose journeys he detailed (his own included), and that feelings of efficacy followed experience. Once subjects were comfortable with their skill level in the new medium, they were more likely to create video. (I need to add the Quality value to these three stories). In this my first experience with coding a text in this way, I find that you discover new meanings every time you read the text, the same way I was discovering new meanings in [Tennessee Williams’ play] The Rose Tattoo weeks into the run, back when I served as a stagehand in New Orleans. Another later research journal entry details some of the thinking around the categories emerging during coding: Coding topics so far are below. Questions: What do journalists mean when they give "storytelling" as a reason they value video? Should that be coded as a subset of efficacy? What exactly should be coded into the Public Service category, since journalists rarely discuss that outright. I will have to look at how other researchers have interpreted that. Other thoughts: Safety is mentioned more than I expected. The speed value is impacted both by safety concerns and accuracy/truth concerns. Some people appear to be format agnostic (text, video, social etc.). It could be interesting to delve more into these subjects. Similarly interested in boundary crossers who switch from text to video permanently. Audience use is repeatedly mentioned. Reaching audience is efficacy related, but also public service related? Ultimately I found the Dedoose platform cumbersome and decided to use my preferred method: I printed out 178 single-spaced pages of interview transcripts and reviewed them, creating an index of categories and topics as I went. I studied each sentence for categories that they spoke to. A source might cover multiple themes in a single sentence, such as “quality,” “truth” and “speed.” As interviews were coded, an index emerged out of this process; in some cases categories I created early on remained virtually empty, making it clear that these were not significant categories or that they represented a concept that belonged in another category. In some cases categories were broken into subsets, some were merged, and others deleted. This excerpt from my 39 research journal (April 7, 2021) shows a few examples of how categories evolved as coding progressed: Having to do it Drivers of change: Drivers of change: resulting in doing it Drivers Audience use. Realizing newsroom Influencers of change: (Behavior it's storytelling changing attitudes change with experience) Drivers of change: Drivers of change: Drivers of change: News stories changing News stories changing Audience use of content habits habits growth of platforms Comfortable Naturals Drivers of change: (moved to comfort) Newsroom competition Competitive Drivers of change: Efficacy with Source of Modeling experience. resistance: Bad tools Training Learning curve Training Efficacy with experience After completing this process for all of the interviews, it was visually clear which topics and themes were top of mind for participants, as the page numbers featuring the topics “audience,” “audience use,” “reach audience,” “storytelling,” “efficacy” and “storytelling efficacy” stretched across the page, wrapping onto multiple lines, while other topics such as “prizes” and “interferes with job” had few entries. The following is an excerpt from the final index, with transcript page numbers in which themes appear noted after each topic: Tools enabled: 1, 90, 91, 92 Storytelling: 2, 19, 53, 90, 97, 98, 126, 139, 146, 150, 176, 178 Audience use: 14, 15, 23, 25, 30, 37, 38, 43, 44, 46, 49, 51, 54, 57, 59, 61, 71, 76, 79, 85, 86, 87, 91, 92, 93, 94, 95, 99, 105, 108, 136, 162 Reach audience: 18, 20, 22, 29, 54, 97, 109, 111, 113, 117, 126, 132, 138, 139, 140, 144, 146, 147, 149-50, 153, 155, 161, 163, 164, 166, 178-79 Efficacy: 12, 14, 15, 48, 59, 64, 73, 83, 91, 92, 93, 98, 99, 108, 113, 117, 123, 124, 130, 131, 135, 137, 139, 141, 146, 151, 162, 163, 175 Storytelling/efficacy: 23, 51, 57, 58, 64, 65, 70, 90 Explanatory power: 22, 73, 91, 98, 108, 122, 126, 131, 146 40 When writing the dissertation, the index was used as a guide to relevant passages in the transcripts; each mention of a topic, category or theme in the index was reviewed for inclusion. After the first draft of this dissertation was completed, the transcripts were reviewed from beginning to end again looking for any important themes that might have been overlooked previously, and information was added to the draft as needed. As Corbin and Strauss note, the unit of analysis is not the interviews or the participants, rather it’s each time a category or theme is mentioned by participants. “In grounded theory…it is representativeness of concepts, not of persons, that is important” (1990, p. 421). Content Analysis To get a sense for how frequently newspapers post original social media video, the websites of 15 newspapers––those attracting more than 30 million page views and less than 450 million page views per month––and their main social media accounts were reviewed in March 2021. The 15 newspapers reviewed include papers on the East Coast, West Coast, in the South and in middle America. Some are owned by corporations; others are independently owned. All are locally and regionally focused. The front page of each website was checked to see whether video was promoted to the front page, and whether a video link was included in the top of the site navigation links, or in the links in the footer. An attempt was made to find a staff list for each publication, and to note whether any staffers were specifically designated video staffers. To get a sense for which newsrooms are taking an integrated approach, each video was examined for a byline and these bylines were compared to available staff lists in an effort to determine whether videos were mostly done by video staffers, or whether the newspaper takes an integrated 41 approach to video, asking reporters and other journalists across the newsroom to participate. Videos posted to the main Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and YouTube accounts of each publication were reviewed. Four weeks of Instagram, Facebook and YouTube postings were evaluated. Because Twitter posting is typically done at higher volume, and because these posts typically feature little to no video, one week’s worth of Twitter posts were reviewed. In the interest of including a variety of newspapers in this study, this dissertation’s definition for “regularly” producing social media video is two unique locally produced videos published per week. A number of newspapers publish videos at about this rate, so defining “regularly” as three or more videos per week would have narrowed the field considerably. Locally produced in this study means videos shot and edited by newsroom staff, or sourced videos edited by newsroom staff to tell a story. Sourced videos (sent in by readers or acquired from sports teams or wire services, for example) that were not edited in any way by newsroom staff were not considered locally produced videos. This content analysis found that 11 of the 15 newspapers evaluated were publishing at least two locally produced social media videos per week in March 2021––and some were producing many more than two per week.5 Three of the publications that appeared to be taking an integrated approach to video were selected for interviews with current and recent staffers: One West Coast, one in the Midwest, and one on the East Coast. Member Checks I did member checks by giving draft copies of the dissertation to two key sources and by showing sections of the dissertation to all the other quoted sources to confirm that I’d accurately represented their views, that they felt their anonymity was adequately 42 protected, and to ask for clarifications and participants’ perspectives on the information gathered. One email to a key source read in part: I am sending you the whole dissertation because I’m interested in knowing not just are you ok with how you’ve been identified and with your quotes –– I’d also like to know if the whole story being told here resonates and rings true for you. If you are too busy to read the whole thing I understand, feel free to skip down to your quotes. Let me know if you’re comfortable with how you're identified …I kept your title vague in the interest of not identifying you but if you’re ok with more specific title let me know. I hope that I haven’t said anything in this dissertation that you feel identifies you or the paper. If you would like me to be more vague in any spots please let me know. If there’s a clarification or change you’d like to suggest, let me know. You can see how those are handled by reading [the footnotes]… The member checks process serves as a validity check for the study. Bock followed a similar process, both for validity and collaboration purposes, noting “that subjects have a right to contribute to representations about them” (Bock, 2011, p. 607). This approach is similar to the one Lawless describes using in her text about female preachers: “Each of the women was given a copy of her own life story. I asked them to tell me if anything should be changed or deleted” (1992, p. 305). Most participants simply sent back brief notes (“This looks fine to me!” for example.) A few offered clarifications or requested minor changes. I made changes to the text in the following cases: • A source noted that a brief detail might be identifying. The detail was deleted. • One source, when speaking about the response others in the newsroom had to video work, spoke alternately about historical responses and current responses. In one passage it was unclear to me whether a quote was a 43 historical or current reference. I asked the source for clarification and used the source’s response to craft that passage. • Another source asked for slight modification to how she was identified in the study. • After reviewing the draft dissertation language, Participant 13 offered clarifying language to explain the difference between sponsor content and sponsored content. This was added as a footnote. • After seeing the draft dissertation language, Participant 7 clarified her thoughts about low-quality video. This detail was added as a footnote. • This dissertation originally called all three of the newspapers included in the interview portion of the study “midsized” based on online audience, but Participant 3 noted (in a follow-up email as part of the member checks process) that his employer is better described as large. I agreed with him and updated the study. • Participant 3 also noted in his follow-up email that technological improvements that made the iPhone “as good as specialized equipment” were key to improved adoption of video. This point was added as a footnote. • The literature review and a number of participants noted that videos do not get as many views on newspaper websites as they do on social media. Participant 3 noted in his follow up email that that’s not true for his publication. “Our brand really monetizes and gets views on our own website too.” This point was added to the main text of the study. 44 IV: RQ1 RESULTS RQ1: How is social media video created in newspaper newsrooms? A content analysis of 15 U.S. newspapers’ websites and their primary social media accounts found a variety of approaches to social media video: • Publications regularly producing social media video post a wide variety of videos. One of the sites reviewed posted live-streamed videos, how-to videos, videos of interviews with sources, videos of press conferences, beach cams, sourced video and a great deal of sports video (which is often posted to YouTube). Like most websites included in this review, this publication posts video to multiple social platforms. Over a one-month period they posted 18 videos to Instagram, 57 videos to Facebook, and 85 videos to YouTube (about one-third of them sports related.) They posted about five videos to Twitter over the course of a week. • Total video counts varied dramatically among the sites reviewed, with some sites posting almost none, some sites posting two per week, and others posting 20-80 videos per month (some videos were posted multiple times, some were not locally produced). • There is variability to how sites use social media platforms. Some post videos mostly to Facebook, Instagram and YouTube; some post a few to Twitter. One site posted primarily sports-related videos to YouTube. One posted some of its videos only to its website, an unusual approach, given that many news sites get little video traffic. As noted above, Kalogeropoulos et al. reported that audience use of news video on news 45 websites was very low (2016, p. 5), and Kalogeropoulos and Nielsen reported that news video has gone from being produced mostly for consumption via computers on a news organization’s website, to being produced mostly for consumption on mobile devices via social media platforms such as Facebook and YouTube (2018, p. 2210), where individual videos can rack up millions of views. Participant 4, a video producer at a Midwest newspaper, explains why most sites de-emphasize posting to their websites: “Our website,” she said, “is honestly a graveyard for video.” Video ends up on the newspaper’s website because “that’s what we’ve always done, not because it’s going to perform well.” The participant noted that a specific video in production at the time of the interview would be posted to YouTube, “because I know it’ll blow up there.” Participant 3, on the other hand, noted in a follow up email as part of the member checks process that videos do well on his publication’s website. “Our brand really monetizes and gets views on our own website too.” • Posting frequency varied over time. One prolific publisher of social media videos, for example, historically had published 2-12 videos per week to Facebook but stopped publishing videos to Facebook months prior to the content survey. In interviews, a number of participants noted that strategy shifts by management were behind some shifts in how and where video is posted. Some said that the Covid-19 pandemic impacted video production volume, and that changing management can impact posting volumes and 46 video strategy shifts. Some sources noted that some drops in social media video posting had to do with managers wanting to keep audiences on news organizations’ platforms, rather than sending audience to Facebook by posting content there. • Some sites post sponsored or sponsor content to their social media accounts.6 Video Training and Expectations Journalists at the West Coast, Midwest and East Coast newspapers included in the interview portion of this study said that their newsrooms held staff-wide video trainings to teach journalists across the newsroom how to shoot and transmit video, when to shoot video and other video basics. Sources at all three newspapers said that journalists across the newsroom––not just those on the video team––are expected to contribute to video as needed, but that the newspaper also has specialized video staff who support the rest of the staff. Journalists across the newsroom are asked to pitch in when possible and when appropriate. “Capturing video is part of the job these days,” said Participant 12, an editor who worked at the West Coast newspaper until recently. Participant 13, a top manager at the West Coast newspaper, agreed. “When you're in the courtroom and the guy jumps up and confronts the defendant, you're not sitting there thinking ‘Gee I wish I could capture that.’ You're up there with your phone before you even know it because that's part of your workflow.” Video is produced in one of a number of ways depending on the circumstances. In some cases, a video specialist will shoot the video, in other cases a reporter or photographer will shoot the video. At all three papers, in cases in which a video needs 47 extensive editing, a video specialist usually handles the editing. In cases when news is breaking and video is needed quickly, whoever is at the scene is expected to record video and either post it directly to social media, or to transmit it via Slack or another platform, where it is processed and posted by others. “All reporters should have the instinct in a breaking news situation if it warrants it to take … phone video,” said Participant 9, a reporter at the West Coast newspaper now working full time on the video team, producing both videos and text stories. “For the most part it’s going to fall to the video team to publish and edit” the video. Some noted that early in the transition to social media video, in some cases staff were asked to multitask too much, but they’ve since learned how much one person can reasonably do, and typically arrange to have more than one person assigned to a story when a heavy video workload is expected, allowing the reporter to concentrate on the story they need to report and write. Sources at all three newspapers said that now when big news breaks, video specialists are sent along with other journalists to the scene––that reporters and photographers aren’t expected to do it all without help. “We don’t overextend the reporter,” said Participant 3, the East Coast video manager. Participant 9 at the West Coast newspaper said, “I think they're better now about talking about … maybe we could bring in a video producer… maybe there's a video element to this. …And so it's more like a reporter and a videographer working together on something.” Video expectations for newsroom staff vary at each newspaper. Sources at all three papers said that some staffers contribute to the video product more than others. At the West Coast and Midwest newspapers, those who contribute the most include journalists on the video and social media teams, journalists covering breaking news, 48 courts and crime, sports and features topics, those covering weekend shifts and those who simply like video work and look for opportunities to do it. Participant 8, an editor and former reporter who produced video at the Midwest newspaper, describes a typical scenario: “If I have a reporter at a scene I will frequently say, ‘Hey, go ahead and shoot some video for Twitter or live stream this.’ …It serves the reader, then it also serves me as their editor so I can sit there and watch a live stream of what my reporter is doing, and I can pull quotes from that … and that can enable me to get something online more quickly and it frees up my reporter to keep reporting rather than having to call things in to me.” Some journalists may have little to do with video on a day-to-day basis, while others deal with it daily. At the West Coast newspaper, cops, court and breaking news reporters, along with sports and features reporters––for example, reporters writing about food and travel––routinely contribute to the social media video effort. Some reporters’ beats don’t usually intersect much with video, but they may be asked to cover someone else’s beat temporarily or to work a weekend shift, and if they are sent to cover something video- worthy, they’d be expected to gather and transmit video as part of their coverage. Reporters often use their own mobile phones to record video, while photographers and videographers frequently use specialized camera equipment. Part of what makes recording and transmitting video difficult for those who don’t regularly do it is simple mechanics: Do I hold the phone vertically or horizontally when shooting video? Another challenge is lack of familiarity with the software used to transmit the video. “I think part of it's just some basics of understanding how to use the technology,” said Participant 10, a reporter at the Midwest paper who regularly does video. “Whether it's dealing with your phone and certain apps, whether it's, you know, creating new accounts and sort of dealing with the actual work of having to set up the 49 tripod and then type in, you know, a headline and hit record––those are just all extra steps,” he said. And those less familiar with video may struggle to find a way to fit a quick video into the reporting routine, or may simply forget to do it. Journalists in previous research have frequently commented that they don’t have time to fit this extra work into their day. Participant 3, the video manager at the East Coast newspaper, said that time is still an issue. “I don’t see a resistance” to doing video, he said, “but I also see that there’s a day job, you know? This is so hard. And I know, having…earned my stripes as a reporter.” When considering adding video to a story, Participant 3 said, the reporter thinks: “‘I’m going to have to talk to the video team about hey, can you film this, can you help me design this, can you record and help teach me how to use a camera in the field’ … they’re always like ‘help me out. Help me figure it out.’ And then in the rush of deadline, ‘Wait. I’ve gotta figure out how to do the actual first part of my job…without which I don’t have something else to offer.’ …I just feel like that sometimes we ask a lot.’’ Participant 3 said in addition to other types of video, his newsroom has been publishing Zoom interviews, and is asking journalists around the newsroom to participate. He said the newsroom’s Zoom video training described the ask this way: “‘Hey, if you’re talking to someone interesting you might as well instead of … taking notes or recording it on your phone–– why don’t you video the interview?...We’ll help you set it up …can we do that?’” He said that sometimes reporters have reasons why they can’t record an interview such as “I can’t break a confidentiality source” or “I'm trying to convince this person to talk. I don't want to…scare them away … [but some] people are just like ‘Nah I don't want to do it.’” He notes that, on the other hand, “there's definitely 50 people who have been excited” by video work. “You … get in a groove with certain people [and]…you end up doing more projects with those reporters.” Participant 14, an engagement editor at the West Coast newspaper, said, “Literally every day video is essential to, you know, the way we do something as simple as… a restaurant review.” A restaurant review previously might have involved a story written and an accompanying photo gallery. Today a restaurant review might also feature a live video, an Instagram story and a produced video published to multiple platforms. Participant 4, a Midwest video producer, noted that expectations of journalists across the newsroom have changed over time as the newsroom’s video strategy has changed. “Most of the reporters in the room were asked at some point …to be on camera for something or another. …They don't love it.” The newsroom is less focused on that style of video now, so reporters are only asked to do this kind of task for big stories. Newsroom Communication and Video Production Each weekday, representatives from video teams attend news meetings where journalists from around the newsroom discuss what they are working on that day. The news meeting and the less frequent special projects meetings are events where video staff learn about upcoming stories that they might be able to create video for, and where video team members ask for video assets from other teams. “We are also in the news meetings and so we get to pipe up and say, ‘Hey that would make a cool video. Can we get involved?’” said Participant 9, a reporter and video producer at the West Coast newspaper. At these meetings, video staff may negotiate with others in the newsroom over whether reporters and photographers can handle video on their own or will need assistance from the video team. “In some cases we’ll be like ‘we're going to give you 51 extra resources.’ …[On a big story] we're going to send out some people to support that,” Participant 3 said. Many newsroom staffers communicate via Slack––a messaging platform––and other communication platforms both during breaking news situations and for ordinary day-to-day communications. “We have a morning meeting … we manage over Slack in the afternoon,” said Participant 3, the East Coast newspaper video manager. Slack makes it easy for reporters and photographers covering events in the field to share videos and photos they’ve shot and get feedback from editors and others in the newsroom as news is breaking, said Participant 7, a West Coast video manager. Participant 9, a West Coast reporter who is now a video team member, adds, “Slack is like a total lifeline.” She said staffers can, for example, let the video team know “we got this video; can somebody edit it and put it up? That happens in Slack… the communication is pretty immediate.” Communication tools like Slack make it easier to make better quality videos quickly, said Participant 7, a video manager at the West Coast newspaper. “I feel like we get more of an opportunity to look through the options of what the videos are and be a little more decisive on what we want to upload, or make a tighter compilation, versus just like, let’s just upload whatever we can get” in a fast-moving breaking news situation. “It makes it much more efficient” and improves the quality of the end product, she said. Video News Values Journalists apply “news values” to a story idea to judge whether it’s “newsworthy,” or worth covering. To decide whether a story idea is newsworthy, newspaper journalists apply a set of shared professional values many learned in journalism school: Is it timely? Is it local? How much of an impact will it have? And so 52 on. A number of sources noted that what makes for good video is different from what makes a good written story, and that sometimes text-oriented staffers don’t understand that the standards can be different for video than for a text story. “The newsroom …sometimes says to the video team, ‘Hey there's going to be this great court case today can you bring the cameras?’ And we're like … that's not going to be dynamic visually,” said Participant 3. “There's a cultural chasm” Participant 3 said. “The effort is how do you bridge these cultures?” Participant 3 noted that training helps: the newsroom-wide video trainings in his newsroom explained the difference between a good text story and a good video story. And he said he expects things will improve over time as more digital natives are hired into the newsroom. In the meantime, he notes, “We want to work with the newsroom. We also want to be able to say no when it’s not the right assignment or the right ask because then you’re in a position where you’re making video that no one watches…. We’re not doing our job if we don’t sort of try to program to what makes people interested. We’re not doing it for …our own sake…It’s not an art project, it’s news. And we want to be connected with our audience.” What counts as good video can differ from paper to paper. While Participant 3 uses the court case as an example of a story that is often not visual and so not a good use of video (unless it’s a “perp walk,” which he notes is a highly visual event), sources at a Midwest and West Coast newspapers commented that prominent court cases can be good video stories. Sources at the Midwest newspaper said that they’ll often have a reporter outside the courthouse to give video updates for prominent court cases. 53 Journalists at multiple publications noted that good video stories are often highly visual. Other things video staffers look for include quirky topics, emotional topics, things you have to see to fully understand and videos that capture key moments, among other things. Participants noted that they closely watch how many times videos are viewed to learn what works and what doesn’t, and that they adjust their approach based on that feedback. Participant 14, a staffer in the same West Coast newsroom who works with social media, video and metrics, noted that after years of watching metrics her newsroom has gotten better at figuring out what will resonate with audiences. “We pick our shots a little bit better right now,” she said. “At the beginning … you're ‘Does this work? Does that work?’ …We've gotten better at reading the room.” Participant 13, a senior editor in the same newsroom, agreed. “We saw over time that video for the sake of video wasn’t really going to be the answer, that people weren’t really watching talking heads, whether it is our sports guys …talking about the game or whether it was, you know, the mayor standing up at a press conference. That kind of generic, not very emotional, not very exciting [videos]…weren’t really moving the needle in terms of connecting with the audience.” Participant 10, a reporter at the Midwest newspaper, adds: “For better or worse, you know, like, seeing that people are viewing videos is incentive to keep posting them, you know. And I think part of that is, you know, there's a huge incentive, there’s a huge drive from upper management, too, about hits online.” Examples of video that audiences respond to mentioned by participants include: 54 • Quirky, visual: Festivals, dog shows, pig races, “a light saber sword dance party.” • Dramatic, emotional: Such as the story of a person with a terminal disease choosing to end her life, or the story of a woman who was almost murdered by a serial killer. Many breaking news topics also fall into this category, including protests and wildfires. • Some of this video is “sourced,” or used with permission from a non- staffer who shot it. Examples include “the half-court shot, the dashcam video of the chase by the police officer, the raw video of the person in court standing up to confront the defendant,” said Participant 13. • Crime: “People love the closed-circuit camera stuff like robberies and things” including low quality raw videos “that you barely can discern,” said Participant 3, an East Coast video manager. “That was a big shock and it’s changed a lot of assumptions of what I had about what’s presentable,” Participant 3 said. Participant 7, a West Coast video manager agreed7: “If you’re there and you got the explosion on video and it’s, like, you know, really pixelated and it’s dark, who cares? It’s like, if you were the only one there to get it, you got it, and you got the essence of what happened and that’s plenty good.” • Instructional videos: Such as recipes, how to prune a tree, how to make sanitizing hand gel. Types of social media video being produced by newspapers also include documentaries, newsroom debriefs (journalists chatting about news stories on video), 55 video interviews with sources, and videos in which journalists face the camera and do “an explainer of something, like for instance [during a trial] …our main courthouse reporter would come down at lunch break and kind of explain what was going on,” according to Participant 8, an editor and former reporter at the Midwest newspaper. Some videos are short, while others are documentary length videos that allow for longer form, compelling storytelling, such as the West Coast newspaper’s documentary about a serial killer, which had accrued 16 million views at the time of the interviews. Participants distinguished between “produced” video––in which a staffer decides to do a story, schedules shoots, gets the shots and other assets needed for the video, and has time to polish the edit on the story––and a breaking or urgent news video, which allows for less production time. Breaking news such as protest coverage is sometimes live-streamed and is sometimes presented in “highlights reel” format: An edited video that stitches together the most interesting or important parts of the event. Newsroom staffers also mentioned “explainer videos”––produced videos that are designed to fulfill the public service of explaining a complex topic to audiences. At the West Coast newspaper explainer videos are in some cases done with animation, though not often, as animation videos can be time consuming. Examples include explainers telling readers how the local tax system works or showing how a wildfire spread. Participant 7, a video manager at the West Coast newspaper, noted that explainer videos can be used to combat misinformation: “There is just so much information out there, and a lot of misinformation out there, so I guess it feels like our jobs to distill that, you know, when we make explainer videos we’re like ‘OK –– what’s the five minutes you need to know? … We 56 want the short, simple, sweet version that’s like OK, this is the truth and the facts and that’s the best, you know, simple way to put it.” Video Tools Multiple sources said that video work is more accepted in their newsrooms than in the past thanks to a few main factors: The tools are now easier to use, and audiences now are watching videos in large numbers––which journalists can see for themselves by reviewing readily available metrics on the videos. These results are in line with what diffusion of innovations theory predicts: That people are more likely to adopt innovations if they are easy to use, are effective and users can see the positive results. “I would say right up until like ’17 or ’18, I think people were still struggling” to make video, because the newsroom’s video upload tool was difficult to use, said Participant 1, who previously worked at the West Coast newspaper as a copy editor and later as a Web producer. “Issues [with the tool] drove them crazy. … The tools got better. … Instagram and Facebook made it easier to record, and just being able to record directly to your phone” was much easier than past workflows. Participant 8 at the Midwest newspaper agreed: “The difference now from 10 years ago is all of my reporters have a smartphone and all of my reporters are on Twitter…they can easily stream [video]… or throw it on Twitter. …It’s not like in the old days when I first started, and they’d have to go check out a camcorder and then we’d have to bring it back and upload it …[now] it’s so easy…” “Everybody can hold an iPhone,” said Participant 13, a top editor at the West Coast newspaper. Today, that’s all a reporter or photographer needs to shoot and transmit a basic video to their newsrooms or post it online. That ease of use played a big role the adoption of video in these participants’ newsrooms. 57 Video sharing and publishing tools also got better at reaching audiences. Early on many newspapers posted video to their own websites, but this web video did not generate many video views. Many newspapers now post their videos to social media platforms where some newspaper videos now get a million or more views, while others still attract a few hundred views or less. Video also became essential as a newsroom communication tool during the pandemic: Many journalists worked from home and communicated using videoconferencing platforms such as Zoom, which made it possible to hold essential meetings at a time when getting together physically was not possible. “Video has been vital for us to, you know, maintain our newsroom,” said Participant 8, a former reporter turned editor at a Midwest newspaper. Participant 11, a reporter at the Midwest newspaper, adds that “from a newsgathering standpoint it’s invaluable.” When news breaks many people out in the community “whip out their smartphones and start recording,” so reporters no longer need to go to a breaking news scene with no idea of what to expect. “Before I run out to the scene I’ll think to check any number of Facebook pages or Twitter accounts… just to get a sense of what I’m going into.” He said these community-generated videos, once vetted, are “indispensable in terms of finding potential sources but also being able to sort of describe the setting or get some general color.” Level of Newsroom Acceptance for Social Media Video Work Participants at the three newspapers estimated that 30 to 50% of their peers are producing video. Participant 3 at the East Coast newspaper broke this down further, 58 saying that 10% “are always down for video. Forty percent who are open to it depending on situationally, and then maybe 50% who are indifferent.” As noted in the literature review, diffusion of innovations theory predicts, and past research has found, that people who have past experience with an innovation or technology are more likely to adopt an innovation than those who do not. Participant 1, who worked for more than a decade at the West Coast newspaper, noted that his earlier experience with photography made him feel that he could successfully tackle video. Participant 14, who also works at the West Coast newspaper, took video classes in college, which made her feel comfortable picking video up again at work years later. “There was some panic of it’s been a really long time since anybody asked me to do anything like this. I don’t really remember how. I hope I don’t mess this up. But once I was in there doing it again it was … like a bike.” Two sources who worked as photographers noted that their previous experiences watching and appreciating documentary videos prepared them for doing video work. Sources made repeated references to the idea that some people are simply more comfortable than others with video, that they are “naturals.” In many cases participants noted that those who seem to be naturally comfortable are younger staffers who grew up with mobile phones capable of making and viewing video––that there are “generational” differences when it comes to previous exposure to social media video and video tools, and the resulting comfort with making social media video. As noted above, Pew Research Center reports that there are generational differences in how audiences watch news content: Among those who prefer to watch the news (rather than read or listen to it), just 59 10% of those 50 and older prefer to watch news online, while 34% of those 49 and younger prefer to watch online (Mitchell, 2018). “Our digital natives, the millennials and youngers who are as comfortable sort of communicating in video as they are in text, but the newsrooms are traditionally text- based, so there’s a generation divide about how to tell a story and even what tools to use in telling a story,” said Participant 3. Participant 11, who was 36 years old at the time of the interview, agreed. “There's a pretty clear divide … between like older and younger reporters.” He noted: “You sometimes get the sense from some of the older, even older than me, generation that they see it as kind of a gimmick and…it kind of was a burden on their newsgathering… it didn't come naturally.” Participant 10, who works at the same paper as Participant 11, agreed there are generational differences in how video and other recent changes to news distribution methods––such as social media––are perceived. He said that more than a decade ago his newspaper worked to create new products that would draw in new audiences, and there was “a lot of rumbling among older reporters about devaluing our product in order to draw in younger readers.” Social media and video were perceived by many older reporters as “less thorough” forms of storytelling. “I think there’s a sense that you’re not giving people the best or full story through some of these alternative avenues,” he said. “I think some people also think of it as not being real journalism, you know, kind of like pandering in a way, I think, is some of the mentality. …[that] real journalists are, you know, working hard diligently asking questions, calling folks, writing stories. They’re not flashy with the videos or social media.” 60 Over time, he said, attitudes toward video have evolved and older journalists at his paper “definitely see the value now. I think now they probably understand it and accept it and watch it as much as we do. I think it’s just a matter of them not necessarily having the interest to produce it themselves. So I do think now… they’re all on board with video. I think they all know we need it. … I just think their instincts aren’t necessarily to turn on the cameras when they show up somewhere the way it is for me or somebody else.” Interestingly, two other sources working in the same Midwest newsroom as Participants 10 and 11 see things differently: “I don’t think it’s generational. I just think it’s a personality thing,” said Participant 8, a manager and former reporter at the Midwest newspaper. “I would say everybody in this newsroom’s pretty game to help out with things like that. I don't think you'll have a single person that's like ‘Nope I refuse to do it.” Participant 4 agreed “I don’t think it is specific to age,” then amended her thought to say “it does in some ways follow along with age,” and that “part of it, I think, is… exposure to technology,” noting that some people in her newsroom who are not bought in to video have told her they don’t watch TV. The difference of opinion on age as a factor highlights the fact that the views collected here are opinions and perceptions, which can differ from person to person depending on outlook, position, age and many other factors. One person’s truth about how people act and why can be different from that of others working in the same newsroom and with the same people. Many participants clarified that when they speak to the motivations of others, they don’t know the answer, but that they were providing their best guess based on observations and conversations. 61 Some sources connected levels of acceptance for video work to career stage: “Some of the mid- to late-career folks just wish they could just focus on the writing,” said Participant 4 at the Midwest newspaper. Participant 12, a former editor at the West Coast newspaper, agrees, saying “The resisters generally would be older people who are a little more set in their ways. …In many cases it would be people towards the ends of their careers. …[They] figure ‘I’ve been a reporter for x number of years … I’m not going to bust my ass trying to learn this new system when what I’ve been doing is working fine. Let the younger people deal with it.” She notes: “They didn’t think video was a waste of time … they just didn’t see that they personally as reporters should be doing it.” Participant 10, a mid-career reporter at the Midwest newspaper who was 40 at the time of the interview, said he didn’t grow up with social media and mobile phones: He learned to use social media tools as a journalist in his late 20s. “There was a lot of resistance from my older colleagues, you know. And they felt it was a burden and extra work, and you know, I just thought, ‘We need to run with it. It's not going away.’” Many of the journalists interviewed for this study say that they found the new video labor difficult at first but that they adapted soon after they picked up the new tools, and in many cases video work has become a new habit that they do automatically. Participant 6, a photographer at the West Coast newspaper, said it’s become “a natural reflex” to shoot phone video. “I’ll just automatically shoot it.” “It feels much more like second nature now,” said Participant 11, a reporter at a Midwest paper. “That is one of the first things that I think to do when I, if I roll up to a scene and like, it’s a big enough story. …I always just think to shoot at least some video.” 62 But that’s not universal: Some sources said a number of journalists have not developed the habit and have to be asked to shoot video every time. A few of the journalists interviewed for this study said they are at this point format agnostic: The West Coast reporter and video team member said she doesn’t prefer one format over the other––she tells each story using the type of media that it calls for. The West Coast video team manager noted that for some stories the best way to tell a story is not with video, but with a social media card––a graphic that is posted on social media platforms. So she learned how to make social media cards, and if a story calls for a graphic, she does that instead of a video. “Everybody is doing more things and has different tools, and you can …use what you know, what the best way is to hit that particular news event.” Says Participant 6, the West Coast photographer who also often writes and shoots video, “Now I can enter a situation and it’s very fluid. You know, like, what …is the best way to tell the story? What are the best tools? What sort of feels right in this moment?” Ebbing Resistance Sources said they had heard others in the newsroom mention multiple reasons for why they have resisted video work over the past two decades up to today, including feelings that the work interfered with their regular job, that they didn’t have time to do it, that they didn’t have the skills to do it well, that the tools were difficult, that it was too much work on top of their regular work, and that the video work was not “real journalism”––echoing sentiments expressed in past studies. Participants noted that over the past decades that they’d also seen journalists around them resist when newspapers first started putting content online, resist when newspapers first began using computers to 63 lay out pages and resist working on infographics to accompany their stories, among other things. “There are always a few people who dig in and refuse to learn it, and they don’t last,” said Participant 12, who worked until recently at the West Coast newspaper. “I think that’s what happened with video. People were initially like ‘Oh my God, it’s going to take from my real work.’ And then they learned how it enhanced their work and … they built it into their day as part of what they were going to be doing.” Some journalists said the voices of resisters are growing fainter as layoffs and retirements have left their newsroom with a smaller group of journalists, many of whom are flexible and ready to try new things––including podcasts, which some staffers have recently embraced. “If you look at the room as a whole the biggest [change]…is just that the makeup of the staff changed,” said Participant 1, who said his West Coast newsroom had gone from 300 staffers to 65 in recent years. “It got smaller, it got more mobile, people had to be more flexible with everything they did. You might be asked to cover somebody else’s beat because we were down so many people. …People had to become more flexible about a lot of things, and I think in that mix it always felt like it was easier for video to become part of it.” “I was more haughty and more, you know, more of a complainer back when I had it made. …back when there was a lot of money is what I mean, when I had it made,” said Participant 6 at the West Coast newspaper. “There was a lot of money, there was a lot of travel budget, we were all spoiled and all we did was complain … in general, in the industry… And now I just feel grateful and happy to learn things.” 64 The number of people resistant to video work is “not many anymore, because we’ve had such a changeover with retirements and new people coming in” said Participant 4 at the Midwest newspaper. Another factor pushing some to learn and do video is the fear of being laid off, or the fear of not having the skills needed to get hired into another job. “When you’re in an industry that has layoffs every year, sometimes every quarter, and the bosses say you need to learn this, it becomes pretty damn clear that if you don’t learn it when the next round of layoffs comes along you’ll be at the top of the list,” said Participant 12, who worked at the West Coast newspaper. “It’s not the best motivation in the world but it’s pretty damn effective.” Knowing how to use video is important for journalists looking for new jobs as well, she said: “If you don’t have video that’s going to be a huge gap on your resume. … People will learn more because they realize I’ve got to keep my resume up because there’s a real good chance I’m going to be looking for work at some point.” Some of the ebbing resistance to video work in these newspaper newsrooms has to do with the fact that more journalists are gaining experience with video, and as they do they become more comfortable with it. Participant 12, who was 50 at the time of the interview, said she was “not thrilled” to be asked to do video. “I figured I’m a writer, I’m a word person … I’m going to stink at this. It’s going to be a nightmare. I saw the value in it, but I didn’t think that I personally would be able to do anything, and it was more of a ‘Oh my God, I’m going to get fired’ kind of thing,” she said. After editing a handful of videos, she realized “the more I did it the more comfortable I got with it…the more I did it the more I realized, ‘Oh my God, this can really change the way a story lands.’” Participant 12 now calls herself “a born-again believer in it.” 65 Fear of failure or the fear of producing low-quality content was repeatedly mentioned by sources who were asked to start making videos. Participants 1, 6, 7, 11, 12, and 14 all mentioned worrying that they wouldn’t be good at this new skill or that they’d create low-quality content: “I hope I don’t mess this up,” Participant 14 recalled thinking when she was first asked to work with video. Previous studies have found that training and experience with an innovation can help people get comfortable with and adopt an innovation. Many of this study’s participants confirm that was true for them and for others they observed. For some of the adopters, fears that they would do poorly at this new form of labor quickly dissipated with experience, and they embraced the new labor soon after starting to do it. Some sources noted that a single event causing a journalist to have to do video for a few days over the course of a specific story, or when taking over someone else’s beat temporarily– –is in some cases enough to accustom a worker to video and to lead to long-term adoption. In one case, a participant noted that he is proficient at most of the skills needed but continues to struggle with one aspect of video work (being on camera, and narrating scenes live). Some also said they accept video work because video is important to their company’s profitability and survival––that their newspaper needs to publish social media video to remain relevant to today’s consumer and to develop new revenue streams. “We’re going to wither and die if we only exist in a print box on the corner,” said Participant 4, a video producer at the Midwest newspaper. Asked to explain why his newspaper invests in video, Participant 10, who works at the same newspaper, said “I think they know multimedia is here to stay, and that our younger consumers are 66 multimedia focused. … We reach a lot of people through videos.” Participant 7, a West Coast video manager, agreed: “Everything being online, I feel like there’s, there’s no newsroom that has a future without video. So I don’t, I don’t even think it’s even a question anymore. I think before it might have been like a bonus or a perk or a shiny thing, but now it’s kind of like that’s just how it has to be.” Like many of the sources interviewed for this study, Participant 3 at the East Coast newspaper notes that offering video is important because “the audience today demands it.” But also, he said, video is important because of the revenue opportunities it represents. “We’re all about revenue diversification,” said Participant 3. “Video is a part of the mix and an important part of the mix in our diversification strategy.” 67 V: RQ2 RESULTS RQ2: How do journalists invoke their long-held professional values when discussing why they embraced social media video work? Audience Growth and the Public Service Value Giving the public information they need is journalism’s public service mission, one of the key professional values shared by many U.S. mainstream journalists. As noted above, Singer writes that “Journalists believe they work in the public interest and that their primary purpose is providing citizens necessary information” (2004a, p. 844). For some, Singer continues, this public service value is fulfilled by innovations that allow journalists to offer “better, deeper, and more detailed information” (ibid). Most of the participants interviewed for this study mentioned that social media video is powerfully effective at helping journalists reach large audiences, and this is a key reason they endorse this new form of labor. Multiple sources noted that video is especially good at reaching young audiences, audiences that don’t use mainstream news products, audiences that don’t read much or that simply prefer video––in other words, video is a way to expand beyond mainstream newspapers’ traditional, aging and shrinking audience. In some cases a single video can accrue hundreds of thousands––and sometimes millions of views. A number of sources said that resistance to doing video work was much more common before social media platforms expanded the reach of newspaper videos. “I remember … talking to people who produced the videos and them being like ‘well our videos don't get any traffic. Like I'm not sure why we're doing this. Nobody watches these. Nobody comes to us for this,’” said Participant 14. After the newsroom began posting videos on social media, “overnight all of a sudden it was like 68 ‘we put this video up on Facebook and, you know, look how many tens of thousands of views it got in the first day. …That went a long way toward showing the value [of video], because people were paying attention to it. And very quickly, lots of people were paying attention to it.” Reaching audience is “the point of …doing what we do,” Participant 8 said. “We want people to read our stories. So if video helps with that we’re certainly going to adapt to that.” “I’ve always, always thought about …how can we reach as many people as possible?” said Participant 1, the artist who learned video late in his career. “Sometimes that means you produce the Spanish edition, sometimes it means you make a video, sometimes it means you put it on Facebook, because that’s the only place they’re going to see this hugely important story.” Public Service Through Better Storytelling Most journalists interviewed for this study said that social media video is an excellent storytelling tool, allowing journalists to share information to large audiences in an engaging way––which is key to their public service mission. “Sometimes video is better than anything that I could come up with to write or is just as good,” said Participant 9, a reporter and video producer on the West Coast newspaper’s video team. Participant 10 at the Midwest newspaper notes that “some things can only be told, or best told, through video.” Participant 12, a former editor at the West Coast newspaper, said “video has a kind of an immediacy to it that even the best writer can’t convey. … It’s one thing to read about, you know, the ruins… after an earthquake. …A video, it can actually take 69 you there and you can see for yourself just how awful it is, the shellshocked expressions of the people and all that.” “You can get the job done without video, but video enhances everything,” Participant 12 said. “Video brings a kind of emotion to things that you just don’t get any other way. I mean, when you can see someone breaking down in tears, it’s a much more visceral experience than just reading that so and so was crying.” Truth and Immediacy Values The idea that it’s important to give readers important news quickly is one of the many values that journalists invoke when they discuss their work––called by some the “immediacy” value. Many journalists interviewed for this study said they appreciate the ability to stream video live to Facebook and other platforms, because it helps them deliver news immediately––as it is happening. As described above by a Midwest newspaper editor, many journalists stream video to Twitter or other platforms as a way of communicating events both to readers and to editors who can use the video to keep track of events and to compile reports. The West Coast newspaper previously streamed a great deal of protest and other coverage live, but more recently has cut back on live streaming protest coverage––and on Tweeting protest coverage as it unfolds: “We were … kind of using Twitter the way that we use instant messaging…We were having reporters and photographers just tweet out these clips often with just like one line. And that was more so that we could gather them, and it wasn’t really always serving a reporting purpose,” said Participant 14, a West Coast engagement team member. They stopped doing this because they felt that the 70 quickly posted videos were providing bad public service in a number of ways, all having to do with the truth value. Participant 14 notes: A big reason that we changed approaches with that was people were taking our video and editing them in ways that are deceptive. The other thing that we were finding was that if you have someone at the scene who is just tweeting out small clips, these small moments in time, it doesn’t provide the full context of what actually happened in that situation. In both of these cases, streaming or quickly posting video from the scene was not helping journalists fulfill their public service obligation to give readers the truth. Participant 14 notes that because of this they “very much moved away from that because if you’re then Googling that incident as a reader later and all that comes up is this Tweet from one of our reporters, that doesn’t really explain what’s happening in the video. Then that adds to the confusion rather than calming the confusion.” Another reason for the change was concern for the safety of the journalists in the field, who can be located based on the video and photos they post (many no longer post on personal accounts, instead sending their posts to editors to post on the newsroom’s main account). “It became clear over time … that activists were targeting anyone that they thought was recording them,” said Participant 13, a top editor at the West Coast newspaper. Where previously journalists at the West Coast newspaper often uploaded video directly to social media, now they frequently upload it to a Slack channel instead, where editors review the available feeds and then publish them, or edit them together before publishing them to the publication’s website. Immediacy is in the public interest, as is giving readers a truthful account. As noted in the literature review, journalism ethics statements are clear about which of these 71 values is more important: Accuracy. When these two professional values were perceived to be at odds, journalists at the West Coast newspaper added gatekeeping measures to their reporting methods to improve their ability to fulfill their truth obligation, putting truth before immediacy, as called for by their professional values. “We did move away from Facebook Live coverage of things like protests because we were worried that that wasn’t always giving a holistic and highly accurate view of a very dynamic situation,” said Participant 9, a reporter and video producer at the West Coast newspaper. “A constant live stream of a reporter from one spot doesn’t necessarily tell you the overall picture of what’s going on in a protest…We’re trying to provide… a better view of like what happened rather than just a live stream that people can watch and be mad about and not learn anything.” Live-streamed video also sometimes gives actors the opportunity to spread misinformation and is not used in some settings because of that. “We don’t do all press conferences live anymore because the last few years you would not be able to fact check certain politicians in real time and they would say things that were false. But once it’s out there, if you’re just streaming it live, raw, there’s no commentary, there’s no check, there’s no––you know, you can’t get in there and say, ‘Well that’s actually not accurate and here’s our reporting,” said Participant 14, who works on the engagement team at the West Coast newspaper. “There’s no reason to be live the whole time. There are safety issues, there are context issues––we’re just more selective now about how and when we do that.” Multiple journalists at the West Coast paper said they were concerned that their video was being used for disinformation purposes. Participant 7, a video manager at the 72 West Coast paper, said she has seen cases where people outside the newsroom have downloaded newsroom news videos and then uploaded them “adding their own weird commentary to them and editing them in a way that makes them false.” Because of fear that their videos will be misused, journalists have on some occasions chosen not to publish some videos at all. “I think we have a pretty great responsibility to consider how the images we put out in the world are going to be used by various actors, and a lot of that was happening,” said Participant 9, a video producer and reporter at the West Coast newspaper. “It’s just being co-opted and used by bad actors who want to take a snippet of something and turn it into their own kind of propaganda.” Participant 7 adds: “At the end of the day we have to really ask, like, what are we adding by using this video? …Does that outweigh everything else––the risk to the reporters, risk of it getting used improperly by being downloaded?” Participant 6, a photographer at the West Coast newspaper, has stopped uploading video coverage of protests to Twitter because “those little bits of information were in fact, you know, being used to cause harm or to distort the story. …People with much more influence than I had were, in the end, creating narrative out of that stuff…It was doing harm, frankly, to like, democracy. Because, like, you’re not really being informed here … you’re being misinformed.” A photographer at the West Coast newspaper who regularly does video––and who previously was prolific on Twitter––Source 6 said Twitter is valuable because it helps journalists reach new readers, but that “covering extremism in a way that’s just sort of live Tweeting from the events without context …is not serving the public.” 73 Participant 13, a top editor at the West Coast newspaper, said the newsroom stopped using Twitter for updating in certain situations, sending readers to their website instead, where readers can see all the content in context in a story post. “You could be posting a series of posts in a certain context on Twitter…[and] somebody might seize on Tweet number 8 out of 11 and it might lose its context and become something …that, you know, wasn’t as useful or helpful or potentially could be misread entirely because it lacked important context,” she said. Journalists at the West Coast and the Midwest newsroom said that over time they’ve been less interested in the immediacy offered by Tweeting video and live streaming in such cases and are taking more time to make sure the readers have the context they need to understand events. In telling these stories, journalists repeatedly invoked the public service and truth values, and their willingness to sacrifice immediacy for telling the full story accurately and giving the public the information they needed. Despite the downsides of using video mentioned above, Participant 6 said video has been a valuable tool for explaining what’s happening at protests. “People don’t have any sense of just how screwed up it is,” Participant 6 said. “They get a glimpse by looking at this raw footage … It’s a real different kind of hellscape that they don’t typically see.” Video “has become essential” to protest coverage Participant 6 said. “In the protests of 2020 …[video] played a really critical role in just showing things that people don't really believe it until they see that raw clip,” said Participant 6. We’re “in a period where people just are going to believe what they think in their head and … it doesn't really matter what you say to contradict or confirm anything, 74 they're just going to have their very fixed thoughts about it,” Participant 6 said. “We’re in an impossible time.” 75 VI: RQ3 RESULTS RQ3: How are journalists’ values evolving in response to video work? Evolving Ideas About Quality As noted in the literature review, Bock wrote in 2016 that the quality of newspaper video was sometimes “amateurish.” “Some images were shaky; others had unclear audio” among other issues (p. 505). Mäenpää found that photographers invoked the public service value when discussing image quality, noting that “some photojournalists see the quality of photojournalism being threatened, which deteriorates the idea of public service” (Mäenpää, 2014, p. 93). Less than a decade after these studies, journalists interviewed for this study said their ideas about video quality are evolving. They note that raw video, shaky video and other video that might be considered low quality does well with readers on YouTube and other platforms. “People love the closed- circuit camera stuff like robberies and things” including low quality raw videos “that you barely can discern,” said Participant 3, an East Coast video manager. “That was a big shock and it’s changed a lot of assumptions of what I had about what’s presentable,” Participant 3 said. “News bureaus of the past never would have run something like that on the nightly news, and now that’s our currency.” Participant 7, a West Coast video manager, agreed: “If you’re there and you got the explosion on video and it’s, like, you know, really pixelated and it’s dark, who cares? It’s like, if you were the only one there to get it, you got it, and you got the essence of what happened and that’s plenty good.” Participant 6, a photographer working at the same publication as Participant 7, said that in the beginning the attitude toward video was “who wants to do work that they don’t think is their best? …Like the highest quality, 76 most boutique work that you could produce.” Participant 6 is an avid consumer of documentaries, and through watching films and internet videos noticed that what might be considered low quality videos were often quite compelling, that “sometimes what really is the most resonating thing is just the most raw thing and the most immediate thing … and that can be more intimate, really.” Participant 6 said that “quality really does matter, and, you know, how we produce quality…the definition of that always changes. I’m sure there was a time in the beginning of the onset of video, where, yeah, I wanted to be all boutique-y and long form, and now it’s like, I really love a good beautiful raw clip, you know what I mean? Like that, that actually is quality to me, depending on the clip.” And so, while quality is still being connected to the public service value, what quality means is evolving and being reinterpreted, in part based on what consumers are responding to, and in part based on what journalists are responding to as consumers. Evolving Ideas about the Newsroom Wall The West Coast newspaper in this study sells video sponsorships, and in some cases journalists place sponsor products in videos that they produce. Some newsroom staff at the West Coast newspaper included in this study attend meetings with business staff to discuss videos and sponsorships. The sponsored videos are typically not hard news, but softer, feature participants, such as gardening and travel. Sponsored videos are published to multiple social media platforms, including Facebook, YouTube and Instagram. Some newsroom podcasts also feature sponsorships. The West Coast newspaper journalists interviewed for this study invoked transparency, integrity and autonomy values when discussing their newsroom’s collaboration with their company’s business department. Many mentioned that their 77 newspaper needs to generate revenues to survive, to continue to support public service they provide, and to employ journalists, and that’s an important reason for supporting this collaboration. Journalists working in the newsroom said they have no problem with the way news staff are creating sponsored video and videos with product placements. “I have not heard anything bad about, like, ‘Oh my god, there’s a car company involved in our videos,” said Participant 6. “I mean, does it say sponsored? …So, cool. They’ve done their job with that,” referring to the “transparency” value. Source 6 said newspapers’ financial situation makes the money being brought in by sponsored content welcome and needed. “Maybe there was a time decades ago where I would have pooh-poohed that. You know, right now I’m like, ‘You go, sponsored content,’ …Like, good. Good. They’ve got sponsored content clients? Excellent. Thank you very much. You know, that’s saving a job.” Participant 9, a video team member at the same newspaper, said her publication “has tread a very careful line on that. And if anything I would be like, ‘Put more sponsorships out there.’ Like I would be happy to do that. If a sponsored video is what pays for a news reporter to go ask tough questions of the governor I have like no problem with that at all.” As long as the video is transparently labeled as sponsored, “I have like, zero concerns about that. It’s beautiful, I love it, I think we should do more of it.” Participant 7, a video manager at the same paper, said the company has numerous video sponsorships. Participant 7, a business undergraduate with a graduate degree in multimedia journalism, said, “The end goal is to monetize and to draw audience…Obviously we want it to do well because we want the client to sponsor it again.” 78 Participants said that the newsroom staff who meet and collaborate with the business team are typically not journalists who cover hard news, so the autonomy that news reporters need to have from commercial considerations is not compromised by this collaboration. “It’s not like they’re going to be meeting with marketing people one day and then covering a mayoral debate the next. I think that’s the kind of thing that would have upset people,” said Participant 12 at the West Coast newspaper. They also said that the business team and the advertisers do not have sway over what the editorial team covers and how they cover it––that journalistic autonomy is preserved. For example, advertisers can’t suggest the news team make a specific video or suggest that they add something to or take something out of a video, and they can’t preview the video before it publishes. Participant 13, a top editor at the paper, said the sponsorships and product placements work so long as the paper is “as clear as we can be that the journalism is independent, and … we are transparent with readers or viewers.” As noted by Participants 9, 13 and 14 at the West Coast newspaper, broadcast outlets have used sponsorships for years. The fact that newspapers now are creating video and podcasts enables them to now offer forms of advertising that have long been available to broadcast outlets. “When I hear people on the radio and they’re, the radio news person is reading the ad for the mattresses or whatever, you know it’s just a different, it’s a different ethos I guess for broadcast,” said Participant 13. “You know, for whatever reason, this tradition grew up differently, where the journalist host was also the one delivering the advertising.” One of the West Coast newspaper’s video sponsors is a car company, and the agreement with the sponsor is that the company’s car will be used in a series of travel 79 videos. But the sponsor “can’t, for instance…dictate any of the content of the show” they are sponsoring, she said. To make sure that everyone’s concerns about this new form of advertising and labor were addressed, the company held meetings with staff to discuss it. “As we walked these out we had the video team, we had the reporters, we had the editors involved, we had the social media folks” who, among other things, explained the Facebook rules surrounding sponsorships, said Participant 13. “I think it really helped that we had a lot of different perspectives all kind of bringing any concerns or any questions or any restrictions to the table so we could say well what do we have here, you know. And is this going to work for us? …What are the limits here, and so I think it has been successful.” Participant 7 notes that some staffers on the business side don’t always understand the boundaries that have been set–– boundaries related to journalistic autonomy and independence: “We’ve had to be like, ‘No, they can’t tell us to do a video about this place’ or ‘no, you know, they can’t watch it before it goes live.’” Participant 7 notes that in the videos with product placement, the product appears “semi-organically. There’s no big logos anywhere.” A review of the product placement videos found that in early episodes of one series of videos this was true––in fact it was difficult to see who the maker of the product placed in the video was. Later episodes seemed to take more care to show the product label more prominently. Asked about this, Participant 7 agreed and said that the business side at her company had given feedback, asking if the logo could be more prominent. After that feedback, subsequent videos stayed on the logo longer, making it easier to tell who the product maker was. The video team’s instructions were to shoot the video as they normally would, using the sponsor’s 80 product, she said. The idea was “Shoot it how you would shoot it. You’ll probably get the car in it and it won’t be a problem. But I think advice was taken to a point of like, ‘Well, where is the car now? Like, this could be any car.” At that point the team got “some feedback saying…‘we love what you’re doing…you don’t need to do any crazy difference, but just, like, we’re not really seeing that this is’” the company’s product. “So then, possibly we’ve overcompensated,” she said. “I think it’s shaking out now… And that’s why the car is in it more.” Participant 7 said it was difficult for video producers to find the right balance: “I think in the beginning maybe we did hit a good, sweet spot [in terms of how much to linger on the logo in the video] and then over time we were like, ‘Oh, maybe we’re giving them too much’…I was like, ‘get it out of your head, just shoot the video.’” She said the business staffers don’t give feedback directly to video producers. Instead they deal with a top editor, and that top editor decides whether the message is appropriate to pass to the video team members. Participant 7 said she has heard that others in the newsroom do not have issues with how they are handling the collaboration with the business side. “I think they’re fine with it and they’re happy to participate in something that’s like, keeping their jobs secure and keeping the lights on.” When asked for her thoughts on the collaboration, Participant 12 said advertising and newsroom content have always co-existed side by side: People laying out the newspaper pages have to decide which newsroom content will be next to which ads, and have to be careful not to put inappropriate content next to ads––for example by not putting a plane crash story on a page with an airline ad. Video sponsorship can be fine, she noted, “as long as it’s done ethically,” saying that “if I’m 81 paying attention … I can integrate this without influencing my work. It’s not necessarily the mark of the beast.” Participant 12 said the “separation of church and state” is still strong, “so even though the advertiser might think that there’s ways to… influence us, we in the newsroom know better. …If anyone tries to push us one way or another it’s not going to go well.” 82 VII: DISCUSSION AND CONCLUSIONS This study finds that the diffusion of innovations theoretical framework continues to accurately anticipate journalists’ attitudes toward innovation and changes to labor, and that mainstream newspaper journalists continue to invoke their shared professional values when making sense of a new form of labor. In some cases, journalists are evolving how they interpret journalistic values in response to social media video work––in others, they continue to apply traditional values to this new form of labor. As detailed in chapters 4-6, many participants echoed the key ideas mentioned by diffusion of innovations framework. The diffusion framework predicts that people are more likely to accept innovations that align with their values, that have “ease of use” and observable efficacy. Sources said they adopted and now regularly use video because it is effective and useful, is much easier to use than in the past, it is consistent with their norms and values, and it is clearly attracting viewers––an impact that journalists can observe via view counts on videos. Journalists said social media video work is an effective way of reaching readers and explaining key information to them, and helps them fulfill their public service mission. Some said that in some cases video was superior to the other tools they had available. These findings are consistent with Ekdale et al.’s finding that journalists who determine that new labor aligns with their professional values and norms are more likely to accept those forms of labor (2015a). This study finds that journalists are both reinforcing and evolving their interpretations of their profession’s values in face of social media video work. For example, journalists interviewed for this study faced situations in which accuracy and speed values were at odds, and they adjusted their routines in ways that reduced 83 publication speed and improved accuracy, as called for by their industry’s values. Sources also noted that while providing quality content is an important part of their public service mission, the interpretation of quality when it comes to video is evolving. Some sources said quality is less about aesthetics such as whether a video is shaky or grainy and is more about the video’s ability to give readers an accurate and compelling telling of what happened––again invoking the public service and accuracy values. Journalists working at the West Coast newspaper––where business and journalism staff collaborate on video products with product placements––invoke transparency, autonomy and integrity values when discussing this partnership. All of the participants at the West Coast newspaper asked about the arrangement said that they accept social media video labor that involves collaborating with their company’s business department, many mentioning that finding new sources of revenue is important to their company’s survival and continued ability to provide a public service––and to employ journalists. Likely this is an area that will see more experimentation in the coming years: Newspapers are struggling to make ends meet and may need to try out many––sometimes uncomfortable––solutions to get to profitability. Just as many of the newspaper journalists quoted here were learning video a few years ago and now feel comfortable with it, we will likely see the same evolutions in comfort with these kinds of collaborations. While the journalists interviewed repeatedly commented on the ways that social media video work is consistent with their professional values, many returned to another reason for accepting social media video work: The potential economic consequences of failing to adopt this innovation. The newspaper industry is flailing economically, and 84 newspaper layoffs and closures are frequent. A number of journalists interviewed for this study said that journalists who don’t acquire video skills in an increasingly video- saturated world might find their lack of video skills hurts their future job prospects, and that news companies that don’t invest in video could likewise face obsolescence. Some newspaper journalists interviewed for this study perceive that their own future employment and the future of their company is uncertain, and said learning the latest tools is a matter of self-preservation. Some of the sources interviewed for this study are clearly early adopters: People who said that in the beginning they used video even though no one asked them to because they like trying new tools, because they thought it was fun, because they wanted to pitch in, or keep up with the times. Some participants adopted video after their company asked them to, but did so when asked, recognizing that it helped them do the work they were trying to do––and that there might be negative consequences if they did not learn to do this new form of labor. Asked to comment on why others in their newsrooms were not adopting and using video, a number of participants suggested that adoption of the innovation could be related to career stage, saying that late-career workers might be less likely to adopt and use social media video. Previous diffusion of innovations studies have found that innovators and early adopters tend to be more aspirational in terms of their careers and may see adopting innovations as a way to advance (Rogers, 1995, p. 273). Some participants remarked that adoption of the innovation might be related to age, others thought it might not be. Rogers notes that diffusion of innovations research is mixed on the question of whether age is an important factor. “About half of some 228 85 studies on this participant show no relationship, a few show that earlier adopters are younger, and some indicate they are older” (1995, p. 269). A later meta-analysis of diffusion of innovations studies concluded that studies do not consistently support age as a factor, but that personality factors such as “technology orientation,” “technology anxiety,” novelty seeking, “risk attitude” and other attributes were indicators of whether someone would be an early adopter or a later adopter (Dedehayir et al., 2020, p. 9). This dissertation’s findings offer clues to newsroom change managers looking to encourage staff adoption and use of innovations in an authority decision context. As Agarwal and Prasad note in their study of computer programmers, it may not be enough to simply train people how to use the new tool––it’s important to also “sell” staffers on the innovations (1997, p. 14) by addressing in training and communications with staffers the key issues that seem to influence adoption: How the innovation will improve the journalists’ ability to accomplish their public service mission, how the innovation conforms to the journalists’ existing values and norms (for example, public service, accuracy, immediacy), and by pointing to the clear evidence (in this case metrics) showing that the innovation does in fact work. “It is incumbent upon management to proactively ‘sell’ the benefits of the new technology, as opposed to placing the onus of evaluating outcomes solely on individuals” (ibid). Heidenreich and Talke suggest that managers “use internal marketing to help overcome employee resistance to innovation in mandated usage scenarios,” (2020, p. 287). Rogers notes that “when two individuals share common meanings, beliefs, and mutual understandings, communication between them is more likely to be effective” (2003, p. 306), including communications about innovations. Managers planning 86 trainings should look for coaches who trainees will relate to, and who understand the workflows, goals, needs and constraints of the people they are training. Participant 12 at the West Coast paper recalls an unsuccessful training in the newsroom that failed to address these points: The person in charge of training us loved Twitter but had a really hard time conveying to us as journalists why it was important, and we just dismissed it as like ‘oh God this is some stupid thing that young people do.’ And Twitter is obviously an extremely valuable tool…A lot of people found the woman training us to be––she was a lot younger than most of us. She was in her 20s. They found her to be condescending, and that would get their backs up. And they didn't see how this would help us at all…I was working on the wire desk at the time and… you know I'm a good soldier. I do what they want me to so I––I was on Twitter. I had my account and all that. But when I realized that news moved on Twitter at least 20 minutes before it moved on the wires, and to me that flipped the switch. And it's like––this is a game changer and I wish to hell the woman training us had mentioned that because that would have converted the staff––instead of just telling us oh it's important, this is the new thing, you need to learn this. But I think if you make it clear to people when you're training them you need to learn this here's how it's going to make your work better. That made a big difference and we started getting better on Twitter. Many of the participants interviewed said that they initially had a fear of failure but that they felt capable and confident about doing the work after regularly doing the work for a short period of time. This suggests that trainings should be followed by work assignments that allow staffers to immediately and regularly put their new skills to use. As inadequate time and inadequate training have been repeatedly mentioned by users as an issue in past studies (Assaf, 2021; Singer, 2004b) it may also make sense to give beginners assignments that are not extremely time sensitive and to give trainees a mentor to work with them as they are gaining confidence about the new work. “We will send a visual person out with [a new]… reporter at least the first couple of times, because the best way to show people the value [of video] is to do it,” said Participant 14. She noted: 87 “It’s easier for people to get comfortable doing it if they have a partner with them who has done it before and knows what they’re doing. And most of the time if you take that approach where people go out and they do it and they have somebody to kind of mentor them and, you know, show them the best practices … then after the fact you can see… the metrics, you can see the engagement, you can see how well it does.” As noted in the literature review, journalistic reporting routines and habits are typically passed from journalist to journalist. Ryfe relates that he learned by doing, and though newsroom socialization. “Journalists reproduce their culture naturally, unconsciously, habitually. Socialization is the key dynamic in this process. Journalists, the argument goes, learn habits through immersion in newsrooms” (Ryfe, 2012, p. 19). Participant 14’s description of how new hires learn video work indicates that this is now happening with social media video in the West Coast newsroom, where doing video “does not feel like a very hard sell anymore because … it’s just part of the DNA. …When people come in new it’s just like, well, you know, this is how we do it and here is a person to help you do it and then they get comfortable, they start to do it on their own.” Some participants said they initially viewed video as not the kind of thing they would do, and after learning to use it and overcoming their fears about it, they realized that it is much like all the other tools they use to reach readers with important information. Consistent with previous research, a number of participants mentioned that previous exposure to similar technology made them more comfortable with adopting and using video. Comfort is a word repeatedly used by many participants as they talked about learning and using video. Some referred to adept video users as “comfortable” with the tools, and to themselves as initially “uncomfortable” using the tools. Many noted that they became comfortable through a combination of training, mentoring and experience 88 using the new tools. Once they were “comfortable” and had overcome their fear of failure, using the tools was second nature for them. Getting users from fear to comfort is the challenge for many change managers. In some cases the realization that an innovation is valuable may not come until after a new user feels comfortable with it. For example, Participant 1 was asked late in his career to learn to create video. He had taken photography classes in college, “so I felt like I can figure this out. But… I was very stressed” working on the first few videos, wondering “is this going to work? …Then once you get a couple of them out there you start to pick it up more” until “it was just like any other part of the job. I would just sit down and do it.” Participant 1 recalls realizing during his transition from unfamiliar to comfortable with video that it isn’t so different from all the other tools he uses to reach the public with information: “It’s just another way to tell a story.” He recalled earlier in his career when he was an artist trying to convince reporters to work with him on graphics to accompany their story and telling them: “…This is just a way to expand the audience that’s seeing it …or finding out about the news. And I think people came to realize that more and more.” 89 VIII: REFLEXIVITY AND LIMITATIONS Research Reflexivity I worked as a newspaper journalist for 30 years, and so am far from a neutral researcher studying newspaper newsrooms as an outsider. I previously worked with some of the journalists interviewed for this study and felt an immediate affinity for others I met through this research because of our shared backgrounds and values. While journalism’s professional values insist on reporter objectivity, the constructivist research tradition does not: Instead it assumes that researchers are not objective, that researchers bring sympathies and histories to their work, and that these backgrounds shape their studies. Rather than seeking objectivity, the qualitative research tradition requires that the researcher be transparent about her history and values––that researchers “make public their claims, to show the reader, audience, or consumer why they should be trusted as faithful accounts” (Altheide & Johnson, 2011, p. 584). McCracken notes that “deep and long-lived familiarity with the culture under study has, potentially, the grave effect of dulling the investigator’s powers of observation and analysis. But it also has the advantage of giving the investigator an extraordinarily intimate acquaintance with the object of study” (McCracken, 1998, p. 32). According to McCracken, past experience in a culture “is the very stuff of understanding and explication. It represents vitally important intellectual capital without which analysis is the poorer” (1988, p. 34). He suggests that such past experience offers “an exceptional analytic advantage and the long qualitative interview must be prepared to harness it as fully as possible” (1988, p. 32). I have no doubt that my background as a newspaper journalist helped me have richer conversations with my sources and was in this regard an 90 advantage. At the same time, my history and identity as a journalist can make me less likely to see some things that a researcher naïve to this culture would have considered noteworthy, and has other impacts on how the study was conducted and its results. Limitations As this is a qualitative study featuring interviews with a non-random sampling of participants, the findings presented here are not generalizable to a larger population. This study relies on interviews to “study the way people represent their experiences to themselves and to others” (Denzin, 2010, p. 10) and “how a social world appears to its participants” (Lindlof & Taylor, 2011, p. 136). The work presented here is influenced by the backgrounds and histories of both the researcher and the participants. As such, this study is not replicable. The goal of this study is not to report an objective, verifiable “truth” but to understand how newspaper journalists perceive, make sense of and talk about their experiences. While interviewing can produce rich data, this method does have a number of shortcomings. Participants may engage in deception, contradict themselves or answer questions in a way they hope will put them in the best light (Rosenblatt, 2003, p. 228.) They may attempt to answer honestly but their memory of events may be imperfect. Another limitation of this study is that it was conducted during a pandemic, and as such reflects circumstances that are different from non-pandemic circumstances. For example, workflows in many newsrooms were changed because of the pandemic. Instead of meeting in person, many conducted news meetings via Zoom. A number of sources said that their video production rates dropped during the pandemic, as staffers worried about the safety of being near to video participants, and about whether some of the light 91 topic videos that they would normally produce might be perceived by audiences as tone deaf. One participant said that at least one video staff layoff had taken place due to the pandemic––another pandemic-related outcome that could impact production of videos. As such, it’s possible that the content analysis did not detect normal video production volumes, but pandemic-specific video production volumes. This study is narrow in scope, including only newsrooms that are regularly producing social media video and talking only to journalists who have accepted this new form of labor. These choices allow this research to go into greater depth with this population, but as a result of these research choices, this study does not contain views and perceptions of journalists working at newspapers not producing video, or perceptions of journalists who have not accepted this form of labor. Conversations with people who oppose the new labor would likely have shed light on other issues not mentioned here, such as how and why workers oppose the innovation and the new labor. In some cases workers can “feel threatened by an innovation they are expected to adopt,” (Heidenreich & Talke, 2020, p. 283). The change being proposed may cause “dissatisfaction, lack of motivation or low organizational commitment. If employees are unable to resolve their perception of being threatened by an innovation, these rather mild forms of opposition may grow more destructive over time” (ibid). Innovation-resistant participants were not interviewed for this dissertation, and so those issues are not captured here. Because this study’s discussion points emerged from conversations with participants and the issues that they raised, some issues that other research has found influence innovation diffusion are not discussed here. For example, former studies have found that inviting staff participate in “selecting, adapting and implementing an 92 innovation” and letting staff test out or handle the innovation shortly after it’s announced can be beneficial (Heidenreich & Talke, 2020, p. 290). These and many other types of methods and situations were not mentioned by participants, and so are not covered here. Future Research Some journalists interviewed for this study mentioned that they adopted social media video because they were concerned for their own future employment prospects and their company and industry’s prospects as well. Thompson et al. found that “perceived … long-term consequences”––such as the belief that mastering an innovation will improve one’s career outlook––is a factor in innovation adoption (1991, p. 129). Rogers notes that “in spite of the importance of consequences, they have received relatively little study by diffusion researchers,” (Rogers, 2003, p. 436). Krutova et al. (2021, np) found that “Job insecurity is … positively [associated] with readiness to make concessions,” anticipating the responses of a number of journalists interviewed for this study, who said some staffers seem to be more willing to be flexible as the industry’s outlook worsens. There is little research on this topic. Future studies could further explore job insecurity and the role it plays in innovation adoption decisions and attitudes of flexibility and change- readiness among newsroom workers. It would be interesting as well to examine more examples of newsroom/business side collaborations in newspaper newsrooms, and to the extent to which perception of job insecurity influences staff acceptance of these arrangements. Montani et al. note that “only a few studies have actually examined the impact of job insecurity on innovative behaviours” (2021, p. 743). 93 As strongly as the participants in this study believe that social media video is essential to the future of newspapers and to their own careers, the content analysis conducted for this study found that some of the largest newspapers in the U.S. are not regularly producing original social media video. It would be interesting to compare the views of the journalists in this study with those of journalists in newsrooms not producing social media video. Many innovation studies examine the motivations of actors in the workplace through the lens of logic: Participants made decisions to adopt or reject an innovation based in part on their values and how the new innovation fits into those values. This study mimics the approach of these studies. Many participants in this study talked about their responses in terms of excitement, fear, apprehension and other emotions. There might be some value in examining innovation adoption in the workplace through the “emotion” lens. A study that investigates innovation adoption not as a rational choice, but as an emotional or intuitive response could shed new light on innovation adoption in the workplace. For example, a number of journalists mentioned that they had a fear of failure when they first contemplated creating social media video. While many studies address elements of fear of failure––by noting, for example, that workers worry that they’ll create low quality product––not many examine how fear of failure influences innovation adoption and use decisions. The fact that so many people mentioned fear of failure in this study indicate that further studies examining the fear of failure and how it influences responses to workplace innovation might be worthwhile. Finally, this study relies on participant interviews to describe how workers are responding to a new form of labor. As Finneman et al. note, “examining what journalists 94 say about the changes in their field helps us understand the significance of those changes” (2019, p. 4). But as also noted above, interview participants may engage in deception or answer questions in a way they hope will put them in the best light (Rosenblatt, 2003, p. 228) and their memory of events may be imperfect. It would be interesting to follow up this study with an ethnographic study to compare what participants say with what researchers observe them doing. Using ethnographic methods was not possible for this research as it took place during a pandemic. Newspaper journalism has been rapidly evolving for some time, as companies look for better ways to reach audiences and generate revenues that can pay for journalism that communities depend on. Journalism outlets are getting smaller, and news deserts are spreading to more and more areas of the country. In this key moment for U.S. newspaper journalism, it is crucial that researchers continue to examine new revenue models and other innovations being tried. Journalism “is forever changing, forever becoming” (Deuze & Witschge, 2020, pp. 125-126). It’s essential that scholars continue to study what “journalism is becoming” (ibid) with studies that track ongoing changes, giving practitioners insight into how their peers’ norms are changing and bringing to light emerging best practices. 95 APPENDIX QUESTIONNAIRE There were multiple iterations of the questionnaire, as it was altered as needed based on participants’ responses. In some cases questions specific to a person or publication were asked, as in: tell me about video x, produced by you recently. This is a generic version of the questionnaire featuring questions asked of many of the participants. • How long in journalism? Briefly describe career trajectory. • How old are you? • What is your job? • What is the value of video? How does it help your you achieve your goals? • Can you describe a time when video was essential to your ability to do journalism? • Imagine you're talking to a new reporter hire who has never done video. They've been told that they'll be expected to capture breaking news and other video, and sometimes do standup. How would you sell a new reporter hire on learning and using video? • Looking out over the newsroom, how do you think staffers have changed their attitudes toward video over time? • Have economic uncertainties of the newspaper business made people more flexible and more willing to change? • Think of a resister in the newsroom. What makes them tick? How are they different from adopters? 96 • What's your impression of why your company is investing in and doing video? • Can you describe your company's approach to video? • Can you talk about changes to how you use live video and live tweeting around protests? • What changes are you seeing over time? How are things evolving? Have you detected changes to how we think about doing journalism and the rules that govern journalism? • How is the "church and state" idea of keeping editorial and marketing/advertising teams and products separate evolving? What are your thoughts on how that line is moving in relation to the video sponsorships? • Attitudes toward speed: Can you talk about how this has evolved from the early days of video? • Has the evolution of the tools for doing video had an impact? • Did the pandemic change how video was made in your newsroom? 97 REFERENCES CITED Abernathy, P. (2020). News deserts and ghost newspapers: Will local news survive? Center for Innovation and Sustainability in Local Media, School of Media and Journalism, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Retrieved from: https://www.usnewsdeserts. Abramson, J. (2020). Merchants of truth: The business of news and the fight for facts. Simon & Schuster. Agarwal, R. & Prasad, J. (1997). 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Journalism Studies, 20:9, 1281-1300. 104 Footnotes 1Subject 3 noted in a follow up email (as part of the member checks process) that technological improvements that made the iPhone “as good as specialized equipment” were also key to improved adoption. 232% of newspaper online videos were crime/disaster related, 26% were features, 22% were sports-related and about 14% were about politics and civics, with 6% falling into the "other" bucket. 3 The Society of Professional Journalists for example lists the following (in part) as the obligations of journalists (Society of Professional Journalists, 2014): Seek Truth and Report It Ethical journalism should be accurate and fair. Journalists should be honest and courageous… Minimize Harm Ethical journalism treats sources, subjects, colleagues and members of the public as human beings deserving of respect.... Act Independently The highest and primary obligation of ethical journalism is to serve the public.... Be Accountable and Transparent… 4 Many U.S. newspapers are affiliated with corporate parents and multiple websites; for the purposes of this study each newspaper’s main website was used. In a few cases, newspapers have two main websites. In these cases, both websites were considered. If one of the websites met the standard for “regularly” posting video, that newspaper and its two sites were counted as one publication regularly producing video. 5 Counts were averaged over a month. So if a paper produced eight videos in a month, this was counted as two per week. Duplicate videos (i.e., the same video posted 105 twice) were counted once. Videos made by services like AP or picked up from corporate parent companies or affiliates were not counted. Gifs and Photo slide shows with motion (automatically advanced photos) were not counted as videos. 6 Subject 13 noted via an emailed follow-up that there’s a “difference between ‘sponsor content’ under FTC rules vs. sponsored videos, such as our [name omitted]” show. “So ours is sponsored, i.e. the journalism is completely independent but an advertiser specifically supports it. ‘Sponsor content’ must be labeled and is produced by or for an advertiser.” 7 The sentence “Many sources noted that online viewers love low quality, raw video when the footage is compelling,” originally appeared in this section. I deleted this sentence after Subject 7 offered this clarification during the member checks process: “I wouldn’t say they “love” low quality video but they don’t mind it. As in, they … are ok with lower quality footage if it’s compelling and rare (aka, you might be the only one who has it). In a way it's a tradeoff. Otherwise, I’d say there are higher expectations for preplanned video shoots where you might not be breaking news or have more competition. While “viewers love low quality” video uses the language of Subject 3, it clearly didn’t capture the sentiments Source 7, and so deleted it. 106