Cold comfort : lessons for the twenty-first-century newspaper industry from the twentieth-century ice industry
First cut from frozen lakes and later manufactured on an industrial scale, ice was, in the nineteenth and early twentieth century, big business. The arrival of domestic refrigeration spelled the end of this industry. The rise and fall of the ice industry offers lessons to the modern newspaper indust...
| Main Authors: | , , |
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| Other Authors: | |
| Format: | Journal Article |
| Language: | English |
| Published: |
2019
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| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | https://hdl.handle.net/10356/82292 http://hdl.handle.net/10220/47990 |
| _version_ | 1826130293437759488 |
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| author | Duffy, Andrew Ling, Richard Seyler Westlund, Oscar |
| author2 | Wee Kim Wee School of Communication and Information |
| author_facet | Wee Kim Wee School of Communication and Information Duffy, Andrew Ling, Richard Seyler Westlund, Oscar |
| author_sort | Duffy, Andrew |
| collection | NTU |
| description | First cut from frozen lakes and later manufactured on an industrial scale, ice was, in the nineteenth and early twentieth century, big business. The arrival of domestic refrigeration spelled the end of this industry. The rise and fall of the ice industry offers lessons to the modern newspaper industry, which faces a similar threat. Drawing an analogy between the ice and newspaper industries in terms of innovation and organizational learning, we look at how both are/were hampered by investment in technology and identity, and affected by devolution of control into consumers’ hands. Based on this, we suggest that the newspaper industry would benefit from links with heterogeneous rather than isomorphic partners to counterbalance routines that obstruct change, and just as refrigeration forced a reconceptualization of the concrete “ice” into the abstract “cold,” newspaper organizations can re-imagine themselves around the services and values they provide, rather than the product of “news.” |
| first_indexed | 2024-10-01T07:54:06Z |
| format | Journal Article |
| id | ntu-10356/82292 |
| institution | Nanyang Technological University |
| language | English |
| last_indexed | 2024-10-01T07:54:06Z |
| publishDate | 2019 |
| record_format | dspace |
| spelling | ntu-10356/822922020-03-07T12:15:49Z Cold comfort : lessons for the twenty-first-century newspaper industry from the twentieth-century ice industry Duffy, Andrew Ling, Richard Seyler Westlund, Oscar Wee Kim Wee School of Communication and Information DRNTU::Social sciences::Journalism Newspapers Innovation First cut from frozen lakes and later manufactured on an industrial scale, ice was, in the nineteenth and early twentieth century, big business. The arrival of domestic refrigeration spelled the end of this industry. The rise and fall of the ice industry offers lessons to the modern newspaper industry, which faces a similar threat. Drawing an analogy between the ice and newspaper industries in terms of innovation and organizational learning, we look at how both are/were hampered by investment in technology and identity, and affected by devolution of control into consumers’ hands. Based on this, we suggest that the newspaper industry would benefit from links with heterogeneous rather than isomorphic partners to counterbalance routines that obstruct change, and just as refrigeration forced a reconceptualization of the concrete “ice” into the abstract “cold,” newspaper organizations can re-imagine themselves around the services and values they provide, rather than the product of “news.” Published version 2019-04-05T03:57:13Z 2019-12-06T14:52:39Z 2019-04-05T03:57:13Z 2019-12-06T14:52:39Z 2017 Journal Article Duffy, A., Ling, R. S., & Westlund, O. (2017). Cold comfort : lessons for the twenty-first-century newspaper industry from the twentieth-century ice industry. Media Industries Journal, 4(2), 22-43. doi:10.3998/mij.15031809.0004.202 https://hdl.handle.net/10356/82292 http://hdl.handle.net/10220/47990 10.3998/mij.15031809.0004.202 en Media Industries © 2017 The Author(s) (Published by Michigan Publishing). This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 3.0 License. Please contact mpub-help@umich.edu to use this work in a way not covered by the license. 22 p. application/pdf |
| spellingShingle | DRNTU::Social sciences::Journalism Newspapers Innovation Duffy, Andrew Ling, Richard Seyler Westlund, Oscar Cold comfort : lessons for the twenty-first-century newspaper industry from the twentieth-century ice industry |
| title | Cold comfort : lessons for the twenty-first-century newspaper industry from the twentieth-century ice industry |
| title_full | Cold comfort : lessons for the twenty-first-century newspaper industry from the twentieth-century ice industry |
| title_fullStr | Cold comfort : lessons for the twenty-first-century newspaper industry from the twentieth-century ice industry |
| title_full_unstemmed | Cold comfort : lessons for the twenty-first-century newspaper industry from the twentieth-century ice industry |
| title_short | Cold comfort : lessons for the twenty-first-century newspaper industry from the twentieth-century ice industry |
| title_sort | cold comfort lessons for the twenty first century newspaper industry from the twentieth century ice industry |
| topic | DRNTU::Social sciences::Journalism Newspapers Innovation |
| url | https://hdl.handle.net/10356/82292 http://hdl.handle.net/10220/47990 |
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