Affording Immediacy in Television News Production: Comparing Adoption Trajectories of Social Media and Satellite Technologies

Abstract

Scholars have added nuance to debates about technology’s effects on journalism by exploring how news organizations adopt technologies. Extending this work, this article argues that technological adoption occurs at the intersection of technological affordances, journalism practice, and internal power relations. It uses interviews and observations with over 100 journalists at eight mainstream television news organizations in the United Kingdom and Canada to compare the adoption of social media and satellite technologies and their affordance of immediacy, a central television news value. Adoption trajectories and use of each set of technologies are found to vary in three respects: the extent to which they afford and shape immediacy; top-down versus bottom-up investment strategies; and effects on news-gathering and transmission practices.