Are Traditional News Operations Really Ready for Innovation?

Mediashift reporting:
As news professionals — and journalism educators — rethink their businesses, they are championing the words “innovation” and “disruption.”

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But do they really understand the complexities and the costs (both financial and cultural) of innovation and disruption? And are news organizations truly prepared to innovate, or they are merely playing a kind of organizational “keep up with the Joneses” (a phenomenon that  scholar Wilson Lowrey would call “institutional isomorphism”)?
Since the news industry is one of research and explanation, it seems reasonable to look at what we know about innovation and compare that knowledge with what news organizations are actually doing. This might be helpful in determining whether they are likely to accomplish meaningful innovation in journalism and, if not, what may need to change.

Sameness, Difference and Innovation

In his seminal work, “The Diffusion of Innovations,” scholar Everett Rogers argued that sameness (which the scholars call “homophily”) creates cultures that are easy to manage, but relatively unlikely to innovate anything meaningful. Difference (“heterophily”), on the other hand, is more likely to spark innovations but it is much more difficult to manage.
A look into the culture of the news business, then, will provide clues as to whether that business is likely to innovate.
At the risk of oversimplifying the research, it seems that news organizations embrace sameness to the point that they are right down defensive about it.
Back in 2001, the Readership Institute at Northwestern University found that news professionals embrace sameness (link opens PDF). It said that “newspaper cultures are more defensive than other organizations — and the results are fairly uniform across all newspapers. In a defensive culture, employees lose sight of the overall goal, get lost in details, and make little effort to coordinate with others.”
To look at an example of this, a study that I conducted with Ball State colleague Mary Spillman found that newspapers are significantly more likely to share information with organizations that are like their own than they are with organizations that have cultural differences. Newspapers, as expected, embrace sameness and eschew differences in their partnership. Our study is scheduled for publication in the fall edition of Newspaper Research Journal.
http://www.pbs.org/mediashift/2013/07/in-fostering-innovation-news-industry-educators-first-have-to-confront-a-past