Time, Change, and the American Newspaper

The authors propose that the newspaper industry must begin to view change as more than just something it must react and adjust to. Newspapers and students of newspaper publishing need a comprehensive understanding of change that goes beyond the advice of trade publications, consultants, corporate puffery, executive dogma, employee interests, and local market whims. The new millennium demands a new way of thinking-a model from which to view change. This book offers newspaper change as a process with causes, phases, and cycles. It is concerned not just with the future, but also considers a newspaper’s past and contends that the newspaper that understands the role of time in change is the newspaper that succeeds. In this volume, newspapers are examined as unique organizations, but are also placed in the general, larger context of all organizations. This permits the process of organizational change to be analyzed in non-newspaper industries and companies: the nature of change, the change process, rationale for organizational changes, resistance to such changes, and initiation and implementation strategies. Next the book discusses the causes of newspaper change, how newspaper change takes shape, and when it does not work. This discussion sets the stage for three detailed case studies: new technology, product, and people roles as change agents in newspapers. The book concludes with perspective-providing treatises on the impact of change–or the lack of it–on the contemporary newspaper industry and the subsequent impacts of newspaper change on society; future directions of change and of newspaper decision-making processes as they pertain to change; and suggestions for changes in newspaper structures and thought processes.