Mikko Villi

There has been a growing interest in the institutional logics of journalism in recent years (e.g., Belair-Gagnon, Lewis, and Agur 2020; Fincham 2023; Hilker, Schaetz, and Lischka 2026; Koivula, Saa...

This study challenges the view of professional identity in journalism as role-based, arguing that journalists are more than their roles. Drawing from management and organization studies, we explore how the processes of identity work and meaningfulness negotiation coevolve over the course of journalists’ careers. Through analysis of 30 Finnish journalists’ interviews, we identify three narrative identities—artisans, advocates, and stewards—and explore the coevolution patterns of identity work and negotiation of work meaningfulness associated with them. Our findings refine the distinction between roles and identities in journalism and offer practical insights for individual well-being and management issues in media organizations.

Presenting audiences and journalistic work in quantitative terms has become an established practice in news organisations. The use of audience-generated data as a measurement for journalistic performance is not without problems as questions arise about the extent to which datafied logics generate accurate representations of qualitative, complex, and pluriform journalistic work. In this article, we examine how journalists in a public service media organisation approach analytics by looking at the extent to which they engage in what we call data-related job crafting. We also study how their level of engagement with job crafting relates to their perceptions of their work environment and occupational well-being. The study is based on a survey with 121 journalists working for a Nordic public-funded media organisation. We show that in today’s datafied news media environment, opting out of the use of analytics manifests itself as a kind of private, tacit compliance; it is connected to work-related malaise but not related to the avoidance of analytics extensively at an organisational level. We argue that this reflects the institutionalisation of audience analytics in news organisations, which has made opting out more of a gesture than a real possibility. We conclude the article with a reflection on how the institutionalisation of analytics is challenging the central social justification of public service media.

This research delves into the dualistic nature of datafication, revealing its capacity to both illuminate and mask realities within media organizations. Datafication, the strategic use of data in organizations, offers insights into, and transforms, how work and individual outcomes are perceived and evaluated. This study examines how data-centric practices—embodied in metrics, rankings, and algorithms—can skew the playing field, creating scenarios where workers may feel (un)fairly (dis)advantaged or (mis)represented. The findings indicate that while data can provide valuable insights fostering cooperation and learning, it can also create competition and apprehension among journalists. Through the concept of “coopetition” we show how media professionals employ data opportunism to leverage information while also grappling with data skepticism amid potential misinterpretations and increased competition. Hence, the findings contribute to the research on datafication by demonstrating how workers utilize interpretative flexibility depending on what the data and metrics make visible.

The Nordic countries have been regarded as so-called “media welfare states.” Despite the large amount of public money used on press subsidies over the decades in the Nordic countries, there is not much academic research on the financial performance of the newspaper publishing industry in these countries. This study examines the “media welfare state” approach to public support for newspapers and the financial performance of newspaper companies in three Nordic countries: Finland, Sweden, and Norway. Our data consists of the key financial figures of newspaper publishing companies in the aforementioned countries from 2005 to 2019. Based on our analysis, we argue that direct press subsidies in Sweden and Norway have not been able to prevent a decrease in the number of titles and, importantly, have resulted in a number of subsidy-dependent news outlets unable to survive on their own income. By contrast, the Finnish newspaper publishing industry has been in a better financial situation in terms of almost all indicators and throughout the review period, despite Finland abandoning direct press subsidies in the 1990s.

Tässä raportissa perehdytään suomalaisten journalistisen työn tekijöiden ammattiarvoihin, -etiikkaan, työoloihin ja käsityksiin journalismista. Työ perustuu kansainväliseen Worlds of Journalism Study (WJS) -projektiin, jossa selvitetään säännöllisesti journalismin tilaa eri puolilla maailmaa (WJS 2022a). Ensimmäinen kysely tehtiin vuosina 2007–2011, jolloin mukana oli 21 maata ja 2 100 journalistia. Suomi liittyi projektiin vuonna 2013 sen toisessa aallossa. Siihen osallistui vuosina 2012–2016 kaikkiaan 67 maata ja yli 27 500 journalistia. Tässä raportissa keskitytään projektin kolmanteen aaltoon, joka on käynnissä vuosina 2021–2023. Mukana on yli 120 maata eri puolilta maailmaa. WJS-projektin kantavana ajatuksena on käsitys journalismista diskursiivisena instituutiona. Tämän ajatuksen mukaan journalistit käyvät jatkuvaa neuvottelua keskenään ja muiden toimijoiden kanssa siitä, mikä on journalismin paikka yhteiskunnassa ja miten journalismia tulisi tehdä. Näiden neuvotteluiden tuloksena journalistit määrittävät ammattinsa rajoja, jotka ovat jatkuvassa liikkeessä. WJS-projektissa selvitetään kyselytutkimusperiaatteella sitä, kuinka journalistit eri maissa hahmottavat omat tehtävänsä ja rajansa tiettynä ajankohtana. Kyselyitä vertailemalla ja toistamalla voidaan hahmottaa journalismin kehityskulkuja eri paikoissa ja eri aikoina. (WJS 2022b.)

Recent scholarship has argued for media organizations’ need to radically innovate to ensure their survival in the future. This study deploys the innovative learning culture (ILC) framework to qualitatively study innovation and learning in a legacy public service media organization. While innovation and learning are linked, the learning processes of professional journalists have received only little attention. Through an analysis of a development network operating in a public service media organization, we identify characteristics of ILC in the network and how those characteristics manifest in practice, as well as examine contextual factors that shape ILC. Our findings indicate that innovation and learning processes in the network are shaped by journalistic practice, technology and platforms, and organizational strategy. Importantly, the organization’s technological environment is seen to encourage mimicry in learning and innovation processes, leading to exploitative rather than explorative innovation. The study contributes theoretically to ILC by providing an organizationally situated understanding of the framework that accounts for institutional tendencies in media innovation.

Editorial: New Forms of Media Work and Its Organizational and Institutional Conditions | Editorial | Media and Communication