Critical capabilities in local media management – the recognition and perception of technological opportunities

ABSTRACT

In the wake of recent trends forcing local news organisations to adjust business models, local news publishers are often challenged with recognising new technologies as business opportunities. This contribution investigates the role of localisation technologies by using an abductive qualitative approach. We analyse how local media managers’ everyday activities shape the capability of creating, identifying, and experimenting with new business opportunities in a local news media market – discussed here for location-based services (LBS) – in a case study of a local news market with local journalists with managerial responsibilities and newsroom managers. Doing so, this contribution comments on activities undertaken concerning evolving technologies. The findings indicate that the selected local media managers do not experiment with LBS, and most organisations use LBS only for advertising. We reveal the factors explaining this finding to be the media managers’ limited information about technological developments, their lack of experimentation within core areas, and media organisations’ constraints to the acceptance of mistakes.

KEYWORDS:

• Critical capabilities
• location-based services
• local journalism
• technology experimentation
• case study

Acknowledgments

The authors gratefully acknowledge the support of Daniela Vakalopoulos & Franziska Jaworek (both associated with the Ostfalia University of Applied Sciences) in the data collection, in particular concerning the problem-centred interviews with media managers related to journalism and content.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. All interviews and the focus group discussion were conducted in German. Therefore, all subsequent quotes mentioned in the further are translations by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF), under Grant (number ZW6-85003530).

Notes on contributors

Per Ole Uphaus

Per Ole Uphaus is a research assistant at the Institute for Media Management (Professorship for Communication Management) at Ostfalia University of Applied Sciences, Salzgitter (Germany) with a master’s degree in communication management, and as a PhD student associated to the Leibniz ScienceCampus Postdigital Participation. As part of the project “Location-Based Services in Regional Media Communication” (ERDF funding), he focused on identifying success factors for the digital transformation of regional media communication. In his PhD project he investigates participation opportunities arising from the use of location-based services.

Annika Ehlers

Annika Ehlers is a PhD Candidate at the Media, Management and Transformation Center (MMTC) at Jönköping International Business School. With a double master’s degree in both media management and business administration, she previously worked in several media management projects in Germany and is now focusing on the role of multiple stakeholders in sustainable transition processes in her dissertation project.

Harald Rau

Harald Rau is professor for communication management at Ostfalia University for Applied Sciences, Salzgitter (Germany), and dean of the faculty for transport, tourism, sports and media. He earned a degree in business administration from Hagen University, and a doctoral degree in journalism from Dortmund University, he habilitated in communication and media sciences at Leipzig University. Besides articles, he published monographs on benchmarking, key account management, newsroom marketing, and journalism quality, among others. His research focuses on media economics and the theory of merit wants, public service broadcast media, structures of TV-markets and business model innovation in media management.

Björn Beringer

Björn Beringer was involved in the project “Location-Based Services in Regional Media Communication” (ERDF-Funding) as a research assistant with a master’s degree in communication management at the Institute for Media Management (Professorship for Communication Management) at Ostfalia University of Applied Sciences, Salzgitter (Germany) during the data collection of this study.