Affording flexibility: Transforming information practices in online newspapers

This is a study of innovation in information practices. It examines changes in gathering, processing, and delivering editorial content when online papers develop new material realizing the World Wide Web's distinctive potentials as an information environment. Since these processes are socially organized and undertaken using a multiplicity of artifacts, I conceptualize the construction of content as co-evolving with organizational and technological transformations. Drawing from work in sociology and history of technology, communication and media studies, and economic sociology, I aim to answer three questions. What new ensembles of communication strategies, technical choices, and organizational processes have unfolded in the passage from ink on paper to pixels on the screen? Why have events evolved in certain ways and not in others? What broader implications do these innovations present for understanding the construction of information on the Internet? I undertake ethnographic case studies of three contemporary projects by online papers in which original content was created on a regular basis, and conduct archival research of newspaper industry's trade publications from 1969 to 1998 to place these cases within the context of alternatives to print newspapering in the United States.; I show that recent innovations in information practices by online papers exhibit multiple ensembles of communication strategies, technological choices, and organizational processes. I suggest that these novel ensembles challenge some key boundaries structuring the construction of content in print newspapers, making visible their taken-for-grantedness, and sometimes leading to new borders. I also argue that such multiplicity results from enacting different technological frames orienting the appropriation of the Web's information potentials. I contend that this diversity of frames may signal that perhaps the unfolding of this media artifact is not following the usual trajectory from multiplex to unitas characteristic of sociotechnical innovation, but one of proliferating options. Thus, I conclude by considering the possibility that online newspapers are evolving into what I call “flexible media”: an emergent, locally stable, and inclusive ensemble of communication, technology, and organization, able to enact the benefits of different information practices and artifacts, yet capable of avoiding the costs of being locked-in into any particular option.