Why do journalists hate change?

tl;dr: The headline is clickbait. Journalism and Journalists have often been at the forefront of economic, technological, and social change. Those who claim otherwise are often trying to impose change rather than collaborate to achieve it.

Longer answer: “Why do journalists hate change?” is a recurring critique of newsroom culture, typically aimed at staff who show less enthusiasm than managers, editors, or executives demand for the latest tool, technology, or strategy.

The trope came up twice today in the trade press:

1) Bari Weiss insisting to a newsroom of veteran journalists that they should just get on board with her plans to remake CBS news.
2) Staff at McClatchy are struggling to find any specific value in most uses of AI after the company deployed it in some inauspicious experiments.

Here is the secret: no one likes change, in which

1. They have no personal agency.
2. Their personal best interests are likely to be harmed.
3. They perceive the likelihood of success to be low.

In most industries, corporate-led innovation is assumed to focus on cost reduction rather than the creation of new social or economic value. In journalism, the challenge is compounded by the profession’s strong mission-driven ethos and embedded ethical codes.

All of which makes journalistic resistance to change a challenge to diagnose: is it rational or irrational? Is it a heroic defense of ethics and values against feckless corporate bean counters—or a reckless refusal to face the future?

I highlight that tension in my courses and textbook: two chapters are focused on innovation, and a third examines the pressure on mission and ethics in the crucible of technological change.

An example I bring up in class: in 2019, the Youngstown Vindicator closed after 150 years, leaving a county of 200,000 residents with no daily newspaper. The operation had not made a recent profit, but the loss to the community was greater.

In contrast, the short-lived short-form video platform Quibi launched in April 2020 with $1.75 billion in venture capital funding and closed nine months later. Was any individual consumer or broader community harmed in this massive destruction of investor capital? No. No one cared then or remembers it now.

Journalism is a complicated business. It needs to make money to sustain itself, but by design, the mission will always come first. This means any people, strategies, tools or technologies that appear as a threat to the values of journalism will be treated as such. Resistance in these cases is seen as rational and honorable because ‘destroying journalism’ to ‘save journalism’ is not a strategy that makes sense to anyone in a newsroom.

Does this make change in news organizations extraordinarily difficult? Almost always. But the solution is not in the casual dismissal of journalists’ concerns; it is to recognize the prioritization of community, ethics, and values as a necessary cost of doing business in journalism.