Adapting to The Changing Landscape Of Online Media: Experiences, Challenges and Tactics Among Professional Content Producers and Media Companies

Digitalization and social media platforms have changed the way content is produced, distributed and shared online. Media companies and professional content producers have struggled to find a sustainable online business model and have experimented between for a fee and for free -models. Simultaneously, media audiences have been increasingly spending their time and consuming content on social media platforms. To content producers, social media platforms have primarily been an outlet for promoting their content, creating word-of-mouth, attracting an audience to a content producer's website and a place to build an online community around the content. Today however, social media platforms are playing an even more substantial role. ln this thesis, I investigate media organizations to map what is and has been done, by whom and why in the context of social media platforms in order to identify different adaptation tactics and to provide a rich description of the adaptation process. My focus is the actions of professional content producers and media companies as they experience how individuals are getting media content and information in several forms and through various online channels, not all of which are controlled by media companies. However as bloggers are a key actor in the social media sphere and a competitor of media companies, l also study these individual content producers. The insights gained from interviews with professional content producers, nethnography and participant observation are mapped through the lens of neo-institutional theory (Greenwood & Hinings, 1996) and are used to explain the experienced challenges and actions taken for preparing for the future and describe the implications of these actions for the media landscape. This research furthers knowledge on how intraorganizational dynamics identified within the analyzed companies and amongst the professional bloggers have had an enabling effect on the type of changes they have undergone. More specifically, through this mapping l describe whether these media companies and professional content producers have experienced convergent or radical change. This dissertation contributes to literature on organizational change as well as on social media platforms and media digitalization.