We Were Innovators, but We Gave up: The Muted Digital Transition of Local Newspapers

Abstract

An important part of journalism is the capacity for continuous development and learning. Today, this mainly concerns technological innovation, and, for newspapers, it means the digital transition. This article explores how local media journalists perceive innovation in their newsrooms and, more specifically, how they handle the challenges of digital transition. The main angle is focused on individuals’ responses to innovation with a qualitative approach that uses in-depth interviews with local journalists in the Czech Republic. The findings, which are based on the typology of individual responses to the existential insecurity of technological innovation, resulted in similar findings as those of other scholars in terms of the characteristics of the types. Nevertheless, most of the responses from journalists at the Czech local newspapers ended in a rejection of the digital transition and nostalgic reminiscence for the old times.