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DIGITAL INNOVATION DURING TERROR AND CRISES
Terror attacks are moments of chaos and destabilization. From a journalistic perspective,
terror attacks disrupt everyday news work where journalists find themselves struggling to
restore order and report the event at hand as accurate and speedy as possible. From the
perspective of the affected audience, journalism fills vital functions in making sense of the
attack, by responding to a complex and rapidly changing mix of social needs. In this article,
we explore how such disrupting events as terror can contribute to newsroom innovation in
terms of journalistic processes, journalistic products, and even journalistic genres. We use
the terror attack and massacre in Norway on 22 July 2011 as a case study, as it to a large
extent forced journalists to think outside the box in order to meet the audience’s informational
and rhetorical needs. The study shows that innovation is tightly connected to the development
of the rhetorical situation through three phases: shock, start-up, and transformation. The
analysis is based on qualitative interviews with journalists who covered the attack, as well as
a rhetorical exploration of the evolving situational context and the texts that were created in
response.
KEYWORDS crisis communication; digital innovation; genre development; online
journalism; rhetorical situations; terror coverage
Introduction
Friday afternoon, 22 July 2011: A right-wing, white, male Norwegian terrorist parks a car
with a bomb near the large government building in Oslo. At 3:25 p.m., the bomb explodes,
severely damaging the building, as well as other buildings nearby. Eight people are killed.
Two hours later, the terrorist begins a massacre at the Labour Party’s youth camp at Utøya
island, killing sixty-nine people, mostly teenagers. The whole nation is shaken to its roots.
This is the worst mass-killing on Norwegian soil in peace-time, and it seems to have come
right out of the blue. Among the damaged buildings are major newsrooms, including
Norway’s leading tabloid, VG. While desperately trying to publish running updates of what is
happening, often in improvised facilities, experienced journalists soon start questioning
themselves whether traditional news reporting is sufficient to make sense of this national
trauma.
The Norwegian terror attack 22 July 2011 adds to an increasing number of Islamic and
right-wing terror events all over the globe, all inevitably followed by intense media coverage.
Journalism studies of such moments of death and destruction demonstrate that journalists first
tend to concentrate on strategies for reporting the often chaotic event itself, then on coverage
that aims to contribute to society’s recovery (Riegert and Olsson 2007). The case, and its
aftermath, poses intriguing questions related to how journalists best can respond to their
audience’s needs, when the situation at hand is uncomparable to any previous experience.
Moreover, it is essential whether potentially new solutions and ideas survive the acute crisis
and give rise to more long-term journalistic innovations.
In the present study, we explore how the Norwegian tabloids VG and Dagbladet
responded to the 22 July terror attack. Building on qualitative interviews and examples of
innovative texts, we apply a rhetorical perspective to understand exactly how the distinctly
innovative features of this tabloid coverage could be understood as a response to shifting (and
unprecedented) situational exigences. The analysis is oriented towards digital challenges and
solutions.
Since the implementation of digital technology practitioners and academics have
discussed practical and financial challenges for journalism in the future (Pavlik 2001, Küng
2009). Currently, studies of innovation via interdisciplinary collaboration between journalists
and technology are on the rise. For example, Lewis and Usher (2014, 2013) explore the
benefits of collaborations between journalists and technologists like grassroot hackers, while
Nyre et al. (2018) suggest a model for how journalists can make use of—and money from—
academic prototypes developed at universities. On a more abstract level, Westlund and Lewis
(2014) have developed a theoretical model for analyzing the agents of media innovations
beyond the traditional actors like journalists, technologists and business people. Inspired by
actor-network theory, they discuss the complexity of media innovation activities, or “patterns
of action through which an organization operationalizes and manifests its different
institutional logics and strategic ambitions” (22). Among the implications are that
technological actants and even audiences could be important drivers of innovation. Further,
Gynnild (2014) has addressed the liquid boundaries between journalists and programmers,
pointing out the need for an innovative mindset amongst all “news professionals” (727). She
finds that computational exploration that challenges the traditional ideas of journalism also
triggers innovative thinking and behaviour among the actors themselves, meaning that
exploring technological possibilities simultaneously expands the creative range of journalism.
In other words, journalistic innovations cannot be studied without taking into account
the complexity of intertwined contextual features, including the particular situational context.
In this study we examine whether sudden and disruptive events like crises can increase the
awareness of media organizations regarding gaps or problems within existing routines and
thereby trigger processes of innovation. In doing so we aim to contribute to previous research
by seeking a better understanding of innovation processes that arise during traumatic times in
news media organizations.
From Crisis to Innovation
Amongst crisis scholars, crisis induced learning is a well researched topic (Deverell 2009).
According to crisis management scholar Roux-Dufort (2007, 109), a crisis “opens up a
window of understanding of the past and of the future”. According to this view,
organizational crises are not characterized by the abandonment of meaning but rather by the
arrival of a “wave of meaning” with associated possibilities for organizational change and
transformation (110). Despite a growing body of literature on technological changes to
journalistic practice in the wake of digitization, few scholars have framed their inquiries in the
context of innovation, particularly following crises (Carlson 2015). Indeed, innovation is said
to have had an impact during times of crises; however, research has then mostly focused on
other types of organizations such as various business and public sector organizations, rather
than news organizations (Steensen 2010).
In order to better understand how crises, either on a macro-structural level or a more
localized one, can lead to innovation, it is necessary to go back to the origins of innovation
research. The concept of innovation arose in Joseph Schumpeter’s seminal contributions to
economic theory, through which he defined innovation as “the setting up of a new production
function” (1964 [1939], 62). Schumpeter also pointed to the natural link between recession
and innovation (1964 [1939]). In addition—and, in this context, more importantly—he was
the first person to distinguish between invention and innovation. While the former concept,
according to Stöber (2004, 486), refers to a technical process, the second refers to the
economic and social acceptance of the product of that technical process. This distinction is
important to the practice of journalism, which has experienced fundamental technological
shifts as well as the challenge of having new products (for example, online news) be accepted
economically and socially. Stöber (2004) thus argues that innovation is the “social
institutionalizing” of inventions—new media, that is, is not a consequence of technical
invention but follows upon a two-stage process consisting of adaptation and then exaptation
(484–485). Stöber uses the example of bird evolution to illustrate this process. In the first
stage, feathers were “invented” by evolution to keep birds’ early ancestors warm (adaptation).
In the second stage, in turn, the feathers made it possible for these animals to develop the
ability to fly and, eventually, to become birds (exaptation). This two-step process might even
be followed by a phase of diffusion: flying allowed birds to spread all over the Earth (487).
Likewise, media inventions (step 1) might facilitate media innovation (step 2), which, under
the right circumstances, might spread widely in the guise of a new genre, for example.
Keeping in mind Stöber’s perspective, we will frame innovation here in line with
Storsul and Krumsvik (2013, 14), as the implementation of a new idea or a new theoretical
model in a market or social setting. Newsrooms innovate by implementing existing
knowledge in new contexts and thereby creating new text norms, routines, devices, and so on.
Storsul and Krumsvik (2013, 16–17) discern five media-related innovations that they label
“four Ps and one S”: Product innovation refers to developments in media products, from
abstract text patterns to physical devices like tablets or mobile phones. According to Storsul
and Krumsvik, genre innovation belongs in this category. Process innovation has to do with
how media products and services are produced and distributed. When a newsroom under
actual attack has to evacuate and then improvise new ways of producing journalism, this is a
kind of process innovation. Position innovation means that a media company introduces
strategic changes in order to reach a new target group or rebrand itself with a different image.
Paradigmatic innovation is a change in the mindset, values or business models of a
company—for example, when a type of content marketing shifts from being considered
unethical to being considered a legitimate source of income for a news publisher. Last, social
innovation captures changes “that meet social needs or improve people’s lives” (Storsul and
Krumsvik 2013, 17), such as when a particular social group starts using social media to
negotiate and otherwise confirm its identity.
While one could argue that Storsul and Krumsvik’s taxonomy takes a broader view
of innovation than do the aforementioned definitions of Schumpeter and Stöber, the
journalistic innovations we address in the present article confine themselves to product and
process innovations, due to the nature of the case studied. In the following theory sections, we
will first elaborate on how newsrooms traditionally cope with sudden crises in terms of
innovation. Thereafter, we will discuss how the rhetorical perspective comes into play, and
present the concept of the rhetorical situation.
Crisis and Change
Traditionally, there has been limited interest in journalistic changes and innovation related to
crisis events. Rather, journalistic organizations have been thought of as routine driven, which
in turn encourages theoretical frameworks based on “organizational functionalism”—that is,
an interest in structures and bureaucracy rather than in journalists as actors in their own right
(Cottle 2000, 22). This approach has also dominated research that deals with news work
during crisis events. In Tuchman’s (1972) words, news organizations cope by “routinizing the
unexpected”. Tuchman also foregrounds the fact that news work fundamentally depends on an