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A Follower-Centric Approach to Leadership in the Newsroom: The case of El País
Abstract
This article analyses leadership in the newsroom of the Spanish newspaper El País as well as its impact on the craft of journalism more generally. Through 23 in-depth interviews, we try to elucidate how the newsroom constructs its leaders (in the newsroom, what does it mean to be a leader?), paying particular attention to the main skills considered to be necessary. According to our newsroom findings, not all heads of section or editors-in-chief are leaders, a fact that questions formal authority relations and proclaims expertise and know-how as discriminatory skills. This study emphasizes that the collective recognition of a leader is not an ultimate disposition, but can vary over time: consequently leaders who do not achieve the professional requirements of the newsroom can be denied the status, despite their expertise and experience. Our findings indicate that leaders at El País are those journalists (no matter what their positions) with strong capacities and skills (fundamentally experience, expertise and creativity) to manage form (relationships) and substance (contents) in the daily work of the newsroom. In short, journalists seen as leaders combine reiterated and strong qualities and merit, graphically reflected in the texts they have published for years in the newspaper.
... Second, extant studies on follower-centered approaches to leadership either focus on one culture (Chang et al., 2020;Goyanes & Gentile, 2018;Lee & Chen, 2019;Tepper et al., 2017) or compare different cultures (e.g., Arvey et al., 2015), assuming followers' experiences, perceptions, and evaluations of leaders' behaviors are static and constant across cultures. This study challenges this assumption by demonstrating the extent to which CIPs' leadership perceptions are shaped by the level of acculturation in the context of immigration, thereby contributing to the research on follower-centered perspectives of leadership from a cultural interface angle. ...
Despite the increasing participation of Chinese immigrant professionals in Australian workplace, they are still underrepresented in senior leadership positions and their perspectives have been overlooked in management and leadership research. Drawing on the literature on acculturation and leadership, this study explores the acculturation experiences of Chinese immigrant professionals (CIPs) and in turn their leadership perceptions, relative to a comparison group of Chinese Professionals (CPs) in China. We found that CIPs’ acculturation experiences influence their perceptions of ethics and respect for authority, but not their preference for participative decision making. Our study highlights the dynamic relationship between acculturation and key leadership issues from a follower’s perspective for immigrant professionals with a Chinese background. It extends current understanding of the cognitive outcomes of acculturation and has strong implications for cross-cultural leadership competency training, talent management and diversity and inclusion of minority workers.
... Prior scholarship typically describes disagreements between reporters and their superiors as an intrinsic part of the craft, to the extent that a number of scholars suggest that an editor has the strongest influence over media content (Goyanes and Gentile, 2018). Conflicts between workers in relation to their practices are common and normalized 'as if nothing ever happened' (Czarniawska, 2012). ...
The practice and structural conditions of the journalism craft provide fertile grounds for facilitating the emergence of conflicts in the newsroom. However, extant research on journalism studies have largely neglected the boundary conditions for their emergence and the individual and organizational mechanisms displayed to unravel them. Based on in-depth interviews with 40 Spanish journalists, we conceptualize newsrooms’ conflicts as the dark side of journalism and examine the structural and individual factors that nurtures their appearance. We also clarify the main strategies for conflict management, arguing that conflict resolution is typically based on informal mediation strategies, rather than institutionalized plans directly implemented by news organizations.
... As many media scholars have shown, news organizations everywhere are trying to adapt to a shifting media landscape that has upended processes of news production, audience consumption and revenue creation (Ekdale et al., 2015). In this continually changing business environment, news organizations have adjusted their strategic direction, structures and staffing levels to stay competitive (Goyanes and Gentile, 2017). Mass layoffs, reduction of resources for reporting and the closure of large and small newspapers are arguably the clearest effects of the industry crisis. ...
In this article, we investigate the effects of uncertainty on job expectations in a news organization (El Mundo) facing fierce financial turmoil and several redundancy plans. Drawing on in-depth material (27 interviews and non-participant observation), we show how the declining news and media landscape is hampering the configuration of good employment prospects. In order to manage this harsh reality, we argue that journalists draw upon emotional resources (specifically what we conceptualize as presentism, a form of limiting and defusing concern for prospects by focusing on the present) and social ones (in particular, support from their colleagues). By implementing these responses, journalists can navigate the turbulent waters of uncertainty and be focused on the development of their craft. Our findings address how the negation of future employment expectations, associated with the uncertain media environment, makes journalists naturalize their current professional conditions and, therefore, assume that their professional future should maintain the status quo (continuous orientation). That makes them reflect on the privilege of plying their trade in a prestigious newspaper and getting paid to do so despite the severe crisis in the industry (relativistic orientation).
The present study focuses on a manager’s understanding of leadership and how this guides – or does not guide practice. The paper reports an empirical in-depth study of a middle manager in an international manufacturing company. We link our discussion to both – the mainstream leadership studies, which assume that managers have a solid type of leadership behavior, and authors with a meaning-oriented, linguistic approach to leadership, in which language, self-awareness, and behavior are linked. The present study suggests that leadership attempts can vary, be divisive, and that a manager’s advocacy efforts are driven by a multitude of different, partly opposing, forces, meaning a decoupling of ideas and behavior in leadership practice. The paper raises the question of whether managers’ meanings of leadership correspond with what they do in practice.
Breaking down the walls of the traditional newsroom, Rebuilding the News traces the evolution of news reporting as it moves from print to online. As the business models of newspapers have collapsed, author C. W. Anderson chronicles how bloggers, citizen journalists, and social networks are implicated in the massive changes confronting journalism. Through a combination of local newsroom fieldwork, social-network analysis, and online archival research, Rebuilding the News places the current shifts in news production in socio-historical context. Focusing on the Philadelphia Inquirer, the Philadelphia Daily News, Anderson presents a gripping case study of how these papers have struggled to adapt to emerging economic, social, and technological realities. As he explores the organizational, networked culture of journalism, Anderson lays bare questions about the future of news-oriented media and its evolving relationship with "the public" in the digital age.
Making News at The New York Times is the first in-depth portrait of the nation’s, if not the world's, premier newspaper in the digital age. It presents a lively chronicle of months spent in the newsroom observing daily conversations, meetings, and journalists at work. We see Page One meetings, articles developed for online and print from start to finish, the creation of ambitious multimedia projects, and the ethical dilemmas posed by social media in the newsroom. Here, the reality of creating news in a 24/7 instant information environment clashes with the storied history of print journalism, and the tensions present a dramatic portrait of news in the online world.
This news ethnography brings to bear the overarching value clashes at play in a digital news world. The book argues that emergent news values are reordering the fundamental processes of news production. Immediacy, interactivity, and participation now play a role unlike any time before, creating clashes between old and new. These values emerge from the social practices, pressures, and norms at play inside the newsroom as journalists attempt to negotiate the new demands of their work. Immediacy forces journalists to work in a constant deadline environment, an ASAP world, but one where the vaunted traditions of yesterday's news still appear in the next day's print paper. Interactivity, inspired by the new user-computer directed capacities online and the immersive Web environment, brings new kinds of specialists into the newsroom, but exacts new demands upon the already taxed workflow of traditional journalists. And at time where social media presents the opportunity for new kinds of engagement between the audience and media, business executives hope for branding opportunities while journalists fail to truly interact with their readers.
This article focuses on the complexities of managing multi-platform strategies in the complex and highly dynamic environments of contemporary media markets. Based on a comparative case study of two Nordic media organizations, the article identifies and articulates two sets of practices through which strategy is managed in the continuously changing print and online environments. While the practices that guide strategy development of print publishing tend to be content driven, brand constrained, commercially steered, and top-down monitored, strategizing for online platforms tends to be more technology driven, brand inspired, interactive, and entrepreneurial. For multi-platform media organizations this type of situation is challenging because the incremental and radical innovations that they pursue are platform specific, instead of aiming at exploitation and exploration on both platforms. To succeed in the market, the article argues, multi-platform media organizations need to develop strategies and organizational practices that allow them to be truly ambidextrous—to pursue both incremental and radical change—on all platforms.
This article explores managerial changes at two basic levels, i.e., the task of managing and the resulting impact on the role of management. It begins by discussing the coming convergence, digitization, and industry change that directly impact the newsroom. The authors then deduce the main, functional shifts that will occur in the central management duties as well as the transitional skills that newsroom managers will need to develop. More importantly, it sets the stage for examining new roles and attitudes that newsroom managers and their organizations will find strategically and tactically essential—if somewhat cumbersome and not all together welcome.
Schumpeter’s trope of ‘creative destruction’ aptly describes current transformations of news media whose business models are adjusting to the twin challenges of digitization and the Internet. While most production studies focus on the journalistic labour process, based on current empirical research in the UK press and access to key decision-makers, this article presents case studies of the strategies pursued by the Financial Times and The Telegraph in migrating from print to digital. It shows how new conceptions of the news business are being articulated by managements and how production is being reshaped and increasingly driven by data analytics, and poses questions about the impact of these changes on journalistic practices.
The field of media management has grown frenetically. Over the past ten years a rash of courses have sprung up all over the world, two journals have been established, as well as two professional associations for academics working in the field. Yet despite—or perhaps because of—this fast growth it remains a confused field, particularly concerning its scope, purpose and methods. This paper addresses these issues in three ways. First, it analyses the current state of play in the field, with specific reference to the theoretical orientations of key players in the field and the implications these have had for scholarship output to date. Second, it adopts the perspective of the media organization and identifies which aspects characterise, or even differentiate, the management task in this context. Finally, by synthesising these contextual insights with research emphases to date, it makes recommendations for future work in the field, both in terms of theoretical perspectives and methodological orientations.