Private and public ownership in the drive toward digital innovations in newspaper newsrooms

This research explores the impact of ownership on innovations in U.S. newspaper newsrooms by constructing a structural equation model (SEM). The study, using an online survey (N = 1,063), found that social media triggers a paradigm shift—newspapers owned by publicly held, for-profit companies excel in social media innovations and create more social media friendly innovations milieus than newspapers owned by privately held, for-profit companies. Journalists from the publicly held newspapers engage with audiences more on social media than privately held newspapers. The more journalists engage on Twitter, the more they tend to have a negative attitude toward social media. However, the more journalists at publicly held newspapers engage on Facebook, the more they tend to hold a positive attitude toward social media, opposite of journalists at privately held newspapers.