Unlocking the Newsroom: Measuring Journalists’ Perceptions of Innovative Learning Culture

Abstract

Thorough understanding of how “outside the box” ideas in the newsroom can be triggered and fostered is fundamental to grasp innovation in journalism, but is still largely uncharted territory. Comprehension of its key elements would enable news organisations to reinvent themselves and improve chances for survival. In this article we develop an instrument to investigate if and how newsroom workers and management perceive an Innovative Learning Culture (ILC). This survey enables us to locate which aspects of ILC are bottlenecks or foster creativity and innovation processes. First we focus on how the different aspects of ILC are perceived: which aspects are experienced to foster or hinder an overall ILC. In a second step we analyse how respondent characteristics influence perceptions of these processes. In combining these two steps, the survey can be used as a key to “unlock” the newsroom with respect to its creative and innovative potential. We validated the survey in the newsrooms of two Dutch national quality newspapers, each with a different history, culture, audience and size. Findings show that they have similar perceptions of which ILC-aspects typically foster or hinder ILC in their newsrooms. We discuss the outcomes and provide suggestions for future research.