News Media Innovation Reconsidered. Группа авторов

as well as many successful live streaming platforms (Netflix, HBO, Disney+, Amazon Prime, Spotify, etc.).

In this complex scenario, aggravated by the worldwide crisis of COVID-19, the media have less control over how and where their contents are consumed, while their relationship with audiences is weakened by a more interactive, horizontal, and collaborative communication. On the other hand, digital-only media have been able to fully understand the mobile, social, and global ecosystem and, what is more important, they have rapidly adapted to the consumption habits of hyperconnected users. Therefore, when facing disruptive competition, legacy media companies need to focus their strategies on sustainability, market penetration, and innovation.

      In this context, media innovation has been invoked as a “mantra,” which offers a solution to the complex industry problems. However, innovation advocates often lack a clear conceptual background about how innovations are differentiated from change, when exactly is something considered to be innovative, and at what level of analysis (individual, organizational, product, or process) does innovation lie (Prenger and Deuze, 2017). As both authors argue (p. 235), “epistemological challenges further amplify these wide-ranging questions, as innovation is invariably a moving object, raising the issue of how to adequately study something so dynamic.”

      Any kind of innovative journalism should also be an ethical one. Without the essential component of ethics, no journalism is capable of innovating because the very professional activity of reporting itself is based on the commitment to the truth. Accordingly, journalistic ethics and quality are synonymous terms since all quality journalism is necessarily ethical. In Tony Harcup’s words, “ethical journalism is crucial for the health and well-being of a society” (2006, p. 144).

      Journalism ethics is the result of multiple and complementary forces. Ethical reasoning is a unique and indivisible reality, which is individually, institutionally, and culturally based. Professional ethics cannot be isolated from individual or social ethics. When news organizations face ethical quandaries, they often implement regulations, norms, and codes that soon tend to become obsolete (Whitehouse, 2010).

      We can distinguish three problems when making ethical decisions in journalism:

      1 Technological determinism: When focusing on the role of technology, we can easily exaggerate the influence technology as the driving force of media innovation and overlook the impact that emerging journalistic practices have on the development of innovative technologies. Technology plays a role in facilitating change, but overall, we do not find sufficient evidence to conclude that it induces disruption in journalistic activity. Technologies must also be balanced with prevailing standards that have guided the journalistic field, for these standards play a role in how journalists conceive of and perform their social roles (Singer, 2003).

      2 What we might call “normative apriorism:” That is, to regard ethics just as the result of the application of a series of norms embodied in codes and regulations. Ethical guidelines often become an excuse for ineffectiveness and reflects managements’ short sightedness when facing the challenges of making the right decisions. A focus on prescriptive ethics tends to ignore that there are competing views on how to address moral questions within the context of ethical reasoning (von der Pfordten, 2012). Hence, an ethical examination should focus on the correlation of moral principles, rather than on the single norms and codes.

      3 Relativism: There are no universal or absolute ethical principles, so that performance depends on the conditions in production, social, cultural, political factors, etc., as well as the personal approach of everyone. Since this view considers that ethics is purely subjective, based on individual interpretations, any decision can be ethically correct if one justifies it according to their own beliefs.

      My proposal about the ethics of journalistic innovation relies on three essential aspects that shape professional decision-making: the ethics of the ends, the ethics of the procedures, and the ethics of the values, following insights from scholars such as Friend and Singer (2007), von der Pfordten (2012), Ward (2018), and Ward and Wasserman (2010), among others.

      The ethics of the ends are based on the question: Why do I do this?—that is, what do I intend to achieve with this project, product, or service? It could be a matter of investigating an issue, exposing corruption, expanding knowledge, acting in a responsible manner, or being accountable to society. Ethical goals could be related to the right to information, formulated in article 19 of the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The ends also relate to freedom of expression, the right to privacy and honor, professional secrecy, and public service, and they deal with ethical problems such as sensationalism, misinformation, and data manipulation (Suárez-Villegas and Cruz-Álvarez, 2016a, p. 7).

      Procedural ethics focus on the question: How do I do it? What processes do I follow to carry it out? The ethics of the procedures raise the constant and recurring question of whether the end justifies or not the means that are used (von der Pfordten, 2012). Journalists’ practices include verification processes, collaboration with third parties, confidentiality with sources, digital image manipulation, etc., which demand transparency and accountability.

      The ethics of values, ultimately, raises the question: What principles guide my work? The list of values is very broad: truth, respect, trust, credibility, justice, accuracy, equanimity, solidarity, dignity, honesty, professionalism, impartiality, etc. According to the work of Kovach and Rosenstiel (2001, p. 24), based on interviews with hundreds of journalists in the United States, these principles should rule in the profession:

      Seeking the truth; loyalty with citizens; a verification discipline; independence in regard to those who are informed; exercise control of power; become a public forum for criticism and commentary; offer suggestive and relevant information, as well as comprehensive and proportionate; and respect the individual conscience of the professional.

      How can we evaluate the ethical consequences of innovations? Moreover, how can media ethics help us in this task? The report “Good and bad innovation: what kind of theory and practice do we need to distinguish them?” by Geoff Mulgan (2016) deals with the ambivalence of innovations. For example, the use of surveillance technologies to increase productivity and safety in the workplace also can generate a high level of stress in the workforce, as well as limitations to their privacy. Examples of negative innovations, such as concentration camps for mass extermination, can be extreme but most innovations have both positive and negative consequences. We can better address this ambivalence if we define the concept of innovation in journalism and its practical implications.

Defining Journalism Innovation

      Scholars are paying a growing attention to the culture of innovation in news organizations (Dal Zotto and van Kranenburg, 2008; Küng, 2013; Sádaba, García-Avilés, and Martínez-Costa, 2016). However, the literature on media innovation tends to focus on adoption, implementation, and diffusion of products and technologies, with little emphasis on the design, development, and management stages of innovation (Dogruel, 2014). Research has largely ignored the question of how journalists learn in the newsroom and how they implement innovation (Porcu, 2017). The role of newsroom managers in innovation strategies is usually invisible and empirical measurements of in-house innovation within the media are scarce (Bleyen et al., 2014). As Weiss and Domingo (2010, p. 1158) put it, a deeper theoretical framework is needed regarding “the actors, dynamics and factors involved in the processes, theories that acknowledge the changing nature of journalism.”

      Innovation “combines discovering an opportunity, blueprinting an idea to seize that opportunity, and implementing that idea to achieve results” (Anthony, 2012, p. 17). Translated to the media industry, this means that innovation must involve something more than the repetitive cycle of everyday news production. For this study, we define journalism innovation as:

      the capacity to react to changes in products, processes and services using creative skills that allow a problem or need to be identified, and to be solved through a solution that results in the introduction of something new that adds value to customers and to the media organization.

      (García-Avilés et al., 2018, p. 29)

      This definition, provided