News Collaborations and Social Actors: The Translation of Fieldwide Ideas to Local Levels

This study takes a supply-side inhabited institutional perspective on journalism innovation by looking at the roles played by varied field-level actors, or meta-organizations, that inhabit the journalism field. Specifically, the study examines roles played by meta-organizations in the rise of local news collaborations at local sites. Meta-organizations-e.g., professional associations, foundations, training/research centers, and trade publications-are organizations that act at the level of the metajournalistic field to theorize, legitimate and promote new ideas; they may then help translate ideas to varied local sites and translate lessons learned back to the journalistic field. Results of a directed qualitative analysis of meta-organization texts indicate a tendency by news collaborations to embrace the aims of the meta-organizations that support them. Meta-organizations frame problems in ways that shape news collaboration goals, often in ways that are useful to meta-organizations, consistent with recent research on journalism foundations. Findings also show that collaborations receiving support from diverse local organizations engage in more impromptu and varied activities at local sites, while collaborations supported by collectives of interconnected, high-status meta-organizations tend to follow scripted paths in terms of their practices and in terms of lessons learned.