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Innovation Journalism

Innovation journalism refers to reporting about the people, processes, practices and politics associated with innovation, be they related to computer technology trends, health and medicine, or the development of new products, markets, and industries. Other examples of innovations covered by the media include new business models, business process improvements (such as Six Sigma), and intellectual property.

It includes coverage of risks and opportunities that emerge when money and innovations cross language, national, and industry sector boundaries. Innovation journalism can be quite broad in that it covers technical, business, legal, and political aspects of innovations as well as innovation systems. An innovation system refers to the flow of technology, information, interactions, and money between people, enterprises, organizations, universities and governments focusing on new technologies, products and services, or simply new ways of doing things. These systems may be local (such as universities, research institutes, and regulatory agencies), regional (such as Silicon Valley, California, or Research Triangle Park, North Carolina), national, and even sector based (for instance, nanotechnology).

Development

In the early twenty-first century, innovation journalism covers a wide range of audiences through scientific magazines such as MIT's Technology Review, industry publications such as PC Computer, and the business/technology sections of mainstream newspapers. Many national news media, like the Wall Street Journal, have opened local news offices in Silicon Valley. Venture capital magazines such as Red Herring and Wired are headquartered there.

The concept of innovation journalism is not new, however; reporting on entrepreneurship, free enterprise, new technologies, and so on has been around for a long time. The convergence of business, politics, and technology with entertainment to reach wider audiences beginning with the dot-com era of the late 1990s, however, marks a change in innovation journalism. Innovation has a lot more to it than just technology; it is about management systems that drive growth, social systems and cultural trends, and government management. Consequently, traditional newsbeats, which only focus on particular aspects of innovation, treat innovation as a subtopic and miss the full story. Innovation journalism, on the other hand, is a newer beat that spans science and technology trends, intellectual property, research funding and finance, technical standardization, industrial production processes, marketing of new technologies, business models, politics, cultural trends and social impacts, requiring a greater range of news sources. Innovation journalism brings news of technology commercialization to a diverse audience often neglected in traditional journalism. Competitor organizations use innovation journalism to adjust their own product and marketing strategies. Potential investors, including venture capitalists, use innovation journalism to receive timely information in order to direct their capital and resource investments. Channels of distribution use innovation journalism to anticipate changes in technology and to influence the way those changes come to market. When innovations are of great potential value, researchers often work in secret; without the information that innovation journalism provides, their efforts are duplicated or they fail to learn from the trials and errors of earlier innovations or competitors. In such an environment, systems operate less efficiently.

Challenges

Innovation journalism is not without its limitations. For one, whether news stories about innovation journalism are a product of hard-news reporting or information subsidies from analysts and marketers is debatable. Recent debacles such as the dot-com collapse in the late 1990s, the Enron scandal, and the mortgage crisis of 2008 have led to criticism of the media for overly optimistic reporting. Big business has historically complained that the news media have an antibusiness bias in their reporting. This is not so with innovation journalism, which reveals a positive media bias demonstrated by a consistently optimistic tone and focus. Consider that Enron was listed among Fortune Magazine's Most Admired Companies for years because of its innovative practices, and described by Nieman Reports as “the business media's poster child.” Yet some have argued Enron's “innovative” business model and some of its financial innovations were at the heart of its failure. The Media Tenor Institute in Bonn, Germany, reports that out of all the attributes and news topics they monitor, innovation is consistently regarded as the most positive.

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