I seek to understand transformation in media industries by interrogating the tensions of change at the intersection of professional institutions, organizations, and digital technologies.
Viewing institutions as taken-for-granted structures, I frame professional dynamics as driven by both external forces (e.g., societal, technological, regulatory, economic pressures) and individual action within organizations. Thus, I examine processes of media transformation from a multilevel perspective, focusing on the impact of emerging digital technologies on connections between individuals, organizations, and the industry at large. My research is grounded in key theories from communication, journalism and media studies, and management and uses an array of methods to interrogate the ways media industries respond and adapt to changes in the broader environment. I emphasize social network analysis and other methods of statistical analysis like topic modeling, and incorporate qualitative research such as in-depth interviews and textual analysis in order to provide a more nuanced understanding of the phenomena that I examine.
As a whole, my research on media transformation uses a multi-level perspective to interrogate change over time. Through four key focal areas, including professional transformation, diversity, equity, and inclusion, methodological advances, and audience analytics,I explore the factors that shape the overall functioning of media industries and the change mechanisms through which these factors are constituted as institutions. The aggregate body of work I produced advances the field of media management and communication in three key ways: First, my research extends existing theory examining transformation to better capture the complexity of rapid processes of institutional change in response to developments in digital technology. Second, my work imbues research on institutional change in media industries with a multi-level perspective that integrates macro-level processes of transformation with individual entrepreneurial agency. Third, my research develops new methods for studying professional transformation and organizational diversity policies.
Professional Transformation
My primary area of scholarship focuses on professionalization; or, to put it simply, what it means to be a current and future media professional. I established an institutional perspective for understanding the impact of rapidly developing digital technologies on professional transformation in media. As a PhD student working with Dr. Matthew Weber at Rutgers University, I received grant funding from Columbia University’s Tow Center for Digital Journalism to better understand the roles and skillsets that comprise modern news media organizations (2016-2018). Together, we established a network histories perspective of the news media profession to model the complexities of evolving news media careers.
In applying social network analysis to an examination of thousands of professional news media employment histories, I quantified hiring patterns and the emergence of new professional roles in news media. The resulting article demonstrates important differences between traditional employment patterns and those of employees in jobs requiring new skills and knowledge of new technologies (Kosterich & Weber, 2019). Indeed, work in news organizations has expanded beyond the traditional bounds of the journalism profession, from reporting and editing—narrowly defined—to incorporate skills related to data, analytics, and management of various media platforms (i.e., journalists that I deem “news nerds”). As the number of new news nerd jobs increased over time, the number of new traditional journalist jobs continued to decrease.
In addition, I co-wrote a book chapter expanding on the practical implications of these findings for an edited volume on Journalism Research in Practice, which helped ensure the work found its industry audience (Kosterich & Weber, 2020). With Dr. Weber, I was also invited to write a piece specifically focusing on the rise of data and platform-based media jobs and the implications of that trend for media managers in the Columbia Journalism Review (Weber & Kosterich, 2018). The piece was then picked up and covered by several other popular trade outlets including Nieman Lab and PRNews.
Subsequent work continues to investigate the impact of digital technology on the media profession, specifically by interrogating the evolving intersection of media and computer science. I explore the journalistic decisions made in code and the degree to which code and algorithms filter and prioritize news (Weber & Kosterich, 2018). Computational advancements such as algorithms provide media organizations with new tools to incorporate into their institutionalized production and distribution processes; yet their use has complex, interwoven implications for the profession. This work disentangles the impact of algorithms on information sharing and access in the context of news media.
More recently, I expanded this body of work on professionalization to focus on the challenges facing managers of news media organizations as they adapt to the organizational and professional complexities of this digital landscape. In a sole-authored piece, I examine media manager strategies for dealing with institutional change in the journalism profession and the news media industry at large (Kosterich, 2020). I demonstrate that media managers can benefit from investing in the training of news media professionals for more digital and technologically advanced positions, as opposed to hiring from outside the field in related areas such as technology. This shift in hiring strategy impacts long-term survival of organizations facing institutional change. In this vein, I have two more articles on the rise of product managers under review.
I began work on a pilot study that recently received funding through Fordham’s Faculty Research Grant (Kosterich, 2020-2021) to analyze professional change from the perspective of hiring managers themselves. In this study, I utilize topic modeling on a collection of media industry job postings in order to examine the topics (i.e., skillsets and experiences) required of media professionals and how they evolve over time. I plan to utilize the findings from this pilot study as the foundation for a larger grant proposal that seeks to assess these patterns at scale, and thus provide crucial insight into the future of media work and media professionals – the implications of which are crucial for both scholarship and practice as in industry managers and university program administrators.
My aggregate work on professional transformation provides insight into the mechanisms that drive institutional change in a profession—from environmental triggers, to the influence of managerial decision-making, to the actions of sole entrepreneurs. My most significant research project to date is my recent book, News Nerds: Rapid Institutional Change and Professional Journalists (October, 2022; Oxford University Press). In this book, I further examine institutionalization patterns of new forms of professionals within the broader media environment and demonstrate that early and rapid change processes impact the long-term survival of a profession. The research in this book expounds upon institutional theory and finds “news nerds” (i.e., the new, techno-intensive media professionals) as an augmentation of the traditional media profession—the former neither displacing the latter, nor failing as a fleeting fad; but instead, co-existing as an augmentation of the professional field.
Diversity, Equity, & Inclusion
In addition to my book, my most recent projects are around diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) in media industries. My first project in this area takes a novel approach to computational social science and applies it to the ever-pertinent issues of DEI. This project examines the relationship between a media organization’s CSR communication on diversity and its commitment to diversity in practice by applying topic modeling to a corpus of hundreds of media firm diversity statements. In doing so, this research specifically contributes to three major scholarly conversations: (1): broadening the understanding of the relationship between an organization’s CSR communication and their internal stakeholder practices in general, and taking one of the first steps in responding to calls for an investigation of this relationship in the context of diversity practices of media organizations; (2): providing a large-scale textual analysis of CSR communication of US news organizations to show which CSR communication on diversity is institutionalized and what factors might explain a firm’s decision to implement diversity practices in ways that differentiate it from its competitors; (3): integrating the scholarship on CSR communication, media, and management by furthering understanding of the factors that determine successful implementation of diversity practices, which would prove useful as organizations seek ways to institutionalize their CSR communication and evaluate their commitments to diversity initiatives and other organizational priorities. An article from this project was recently published in Journalism and Mass Communication Quarterly.
Methodological Advances
To facilitate research on macro-level transformation, I established a network histories approach. This novel method applies a social network perspective to digital trace data in an effort to interrogate individuals’ professional work histories, the emergence of new organizations and the ties between them through their staffers’ employment histories, and changes in media institutions over time. Funding from Columbia University’s Tow Center for Digital Journalism helped support the early development of this novel method, which I continue to utilize in a variety of research extensions.
Building on earlier findings, for example, I utilized a network histories approach to examine the changing role of news media professionals to better investigate those involved in media operations (Kosterich & Ziek, 2020). Together with Dr. Paul Ziek, I call for a reorientation of the categories of workers involved in media creation to account for the professionals that play an active role in maintaining the infrastructure that physically creates and disseminates newspapers on a text-by-text basis. The results of this research highlight the newswork that occurs in the concealed world of media operations and prove how digital transformation and associated societal trends impact this professional area as well.
Further, I published a sole-authored manuscript in Digital Journalism, one of the top journals in the field, that applies the network histories method to investigate the media industry’s emergent role of product manager (Kosterich, 2021). Product managers bring new skillsets into the industry by helping to bridge the divide and align the priorities among editorial, business, and technology departments. I frame media’s product managers as institutional entrepreneurs to better understand how actors can promote change and reengineer an industry’s longstanding professional boundaries by systematically analyzing network histories that encompass hiring patterns, training backgrounds, degree of professionalization, and organizational field structure. This article was published in a special issue of the journal on the business of digital media.
As far as research in progress, I have an article with three like-minded co-authors on the importance of attending to the ways in which developments in digital technologies have affected the types of people who do the work of media and communication production, the ways they know their audiences, and, ultimately, the content they produce (Kosterich, Saffer, Weber, & Kreiss, R&R). Together, we draw on theory and our own research to argue that in order to better understand communication, scholars must understand the production of communication. We make this argument in order to outline new methods and measures for studying the professionals that produce communication. I thus introduce network histories as a novel method that emphasizes the use of a social network perspective paired with digital trace data of employment histories to examine how hiring patterns, media professionals, and organizations are evolving over time. The article will provide researchers with a roadmap to implement network histories in studies of professional and organizational transformation; it outlines key research questions and central methodological questions for researchers to address.
Audience Analytics
Building a multilevel understanding of transformation in media as a response to digital and technological change, my early scholarship focuses on the impact of social media—specifically in the television sector. In this work, I establish an institutional theory perspective for understanding macro-level transformation in audience analytics. Working with Dr. Philip M. Napoli, I delineated a process of institutionalization to model the development of social media-based audience analytics as a supplemental currency in the television audience marketplace (Kosterich & Napoli, 2016).
Subsequently, my work continued this macro-level focus and examined the impact of social television analytics on evolving conceptions of the audience (Kosterich, 2016). This article provides specific insight into the types of content that perform well under a social television analytics regime based on audience engagement relative to those that succeed under a traditional ratings regime based on audience exposure in an effort to address the changes and challenges fostered by an era of big data for television’s media managers. This article was published in a special issue of the International Journal of Media Management on Big Data and Media Management and was a Top 10 article of 2016.
Together with Dr. Philip M. Napoli, I wrote a book chapter building upon the findings in both of these journal articles (Napoli & Kosterich, 2017) for an edited volume by Dr. Jonathan Gray, Dr. Cornel Sandvoss, Dr. C. Lee Harrington, and Dr. Henry Jenkins. The chapter explores the impact of social media-based audience analytics on notions of media fandom. Together, these articles and book chapter address the changes and challenges within television media fostered by an era of social and digital evolution.
As far as research in progress, I am working with two Fordham colleagues (Dr. Bozena Mierzejewska and Dr. Ronen Shay) and an industry partner (Danny Kim of Whip Media) to examine audience ownership of multiple streaming services. Indeed, the increased competition in the U.S. streaming video market has demonstrated a strong willingness for consumers to adopt multiple services within a single household. Our unique industry partnership will allow us to determine which user-generated streaming bundles exist in the marketplace, identify if a specific bundle composition is most common, as well as explore the factors that lead to a specific platform being preferred over others.
Future Scholarship
Future scholarship will cross sector and organization levels as I plan to look deeper into the future of work and the impact of the changing nature of media professionals and job roles. My immediate research pipeline encompasses two large areas of work. The first is an extension of my work on CSR and diversity in media that explores media professionals’ perspectives on industry trends with regards to diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) efforts throughout the industry, specifically how the industry is responding to recent crises of diversity throughout the media industry, and firm priorities in the context of these industry-wide trends. Therefore, the current study will focus on the individual, i.e., the internal stakeholders that are charged with creating and disseminating news and information. Instead of just bringing to light the tensions and sources of the crisis of identity, the study will look to identify the institutional logics that actors draw on to guide the sense-making process used to respond to the crisis.
The second area of my upcoming research agenda is an expansion on my “future of work” project. I completed a pilot study that received funding through Fordham’s Faculty Research Grant to analyze professional change from the perspective of hiring managers themselves. I utilized topic modeling on a collection of media industry job postings in order to examine the topics (i.e., skillsets and experiences) required of media professionals and how they evolve over time. This pilot study was accepted to the 2023 Academy of Management conference.
I plan to utilize the findings from this pilot study as the foundation for a larger grant proposal that seeks to assess these patterns at scale, and thus provide crucial insight into the future of media work and media professionals – the implications of which are crucial for both scholarship and practice as in industry managers and university program administrators. The goal is to comprehensively examine the processes by which certain emerging job roles come to be taken for granted in a profession, while other job roles that emerge during disruptive periods falter as fads or quickly become obsolete. To bring these plans to fruition, I am in the process of preparing a grant proposal submission to the National Science Foundation. Findings from this research will develop a new understanding of how critical job sectors and professions evolve in response to changing environmental conditions.
Allie Kosterich 