Exploring innovative learning culture in the newsroom

Culture has been viewed as the biggest obstacle to change in the legacy media newsroom. Older as well as recent literature points out that professional culture typically hinders newsroom innovation processes, and newsrooms in transformation often seem to find culture clashes on their path. These transformational problems, however, appear to be viewed predominantly from a management point of view. By looking at journalism culture from the broader perspective of a learning culture which fosters innovation, including both management and newsroom workers, a more nuanced picture can be presented. In this article, the concept of innovative learning culture is introduced to provide a different lens through which drivers and obstacles of innovation in the newsroom can be observed. Furthermore, innovative learning culture can be used in empirical research to gain insights in the learning and innovation processes of professional journalists, a strikingly under-researched area. As such, innovative learning culture as a concept fills gaps in the empirical as well as in the more theoretical literature, which may enhance future newsroom research.