Media labs: Constructing journalism laboratories, innovating the future: How journalism is catalysing its future processes, products and people

Abstract

Over the past decade, media labs have become an increasingly visible structure to create, catalyse and diffuse innovation within, and beyond, journalism. In this article, we offer insights into the multiple forms media labs can take, and how innovation in the media field is being organised through labs. As such, we focus on innovation processes and practices rather than innovative outcomes. Drawing on 45 semi-structured interviews with media labs around the globe, conducted between 2016 and 2018, this exploratory study explores the multifaceted nature of the media lab concept across academia, legacy media and independent structures. To help better understand the many different manifestations of the media lab construct encountered in our study, this article adopts a purposefully interdisciplinary approach spanning open innovation, institutional and social theories to illuminate and sense-make the global lab phenomena. First, we unpack the media lab construct by detailing the where, what and how of the media labs surveyed in this study. We then suggest that the many forms and functions of labs reveal a complex and nuanced picture of an innovation landscape. We trace this across the ways in which media labs perceive their own roles, and how they relate to wider networks and ecosystems that they engage with, specifically the extent of the openness of their activities. Ultimately, we suggest that media labs are in part shaped by mimetic, coercive and normative isomorphism: media labs are a replicated structure and signifier for innovation but do not exhibit absolute replication: they still retain local variation and mutation, which is influenced by localised factors or influences that are unique to them. They take myriad forms, are located across industry and academia, open, interdisciplinary and, for the main, focus on immediate innovation using user-centred innovation approaches.

Media Work as Field Advancement: The Case of Science Media Center Germany

“…The concept of field advancement helps to capture and understand the activities of new organizations that seek to not only repair traditional journalism by compensating for emerging deficits and stimulating quality media production ("field repair"), but also to innovate in and renew journalism, thus securing pathways to a better future for the profession. Therefore, SMC does not solely resemble field repair organizations such as ProPublica, but also incorporates certain organizational features of specific media labs, structures built to create, catalyze, and diffuse journalism innovation (Mills & Wagemans, 2021).…”

“…Unlike other field repair organizations, which are generally seen as limited in improving and innovating journalism due to their close collaboration with traditional actors (Konieczna, 2018), SMC can bridge this barrier by combining field repair with field advancement under one organizational structure. When we look at its field advancement arm, SMC tends to resemble parts of an (academic) media lab, i.e., an organizational structure specifically built for journalism innovation (Mills & Wagemans, 2021).…”

Media labs: journalistic innovation, evolution and future according to experts

“…Of the 28 European labs identified by Zaragoza-Fuster and García-Avilés (2022), 20 are still active. RAI's lab, for example, closed a year after its creation, whereas others have been restructured and have been trying different approaches (Nunes, 2020;Mills, 2021;Mills;Wagemans, 2021).…”

The lab, the space and the meetup: locating technological experimentation in everyday life

“…Looking at the discourse in innovation and change not only in academia, but also in professional practice, the lab is nowadays considered a central place of innovation: setting up an innovation lab is seen as a first step of change not only in journalism [Hogh-Janovsky & Meier, 2021;Mills & Wagemans, 2021], but in other industries, public administrations [McGann, Blomkamp & Lewis, 2018] [Greve, De Vita, Leminen & Westerlund, 2021. The positive connotation of lab even goes beyond the context of innovation, in that it is not uncommon to refer to cafés or music venues as labs to emphasize their experimental nature.…”