World Media Economics and Management Conference 2016

In the digital age, private and public legacy news organizations have lost the unquestionable license to operate, which challenges their legitimacy. It has been argued for the past 15 years that legacy news media organizations “will need to adjust” in order to “thrive, or even survive” (Compaine, 2000, p. 55). While research and practice have focused on adapting and inventing news products according to the standards of the digital era, communicative legitimacy management has received insufficient attention. This paper develops a theoretical framework for researching communicative legitimacy management and judgment in times of environmental change. It calls future research to assess the effects of changes in the organizational environment onto organizational instruments of strategic communication to retain or regain legitimacy and legitimacy judgments by stakeholders. We match managerial and institutional perspectives allowing a comprehensive multiple-theory conceptualization of legitimacy management through different communicative strategies and develop a model relating legitimacy management of news media organizations, their environment and their stakeholders, or, publics. Future research on communicative legitimacy management of news media organizations should focus on (1) organizational legitimacy perceptions and reactions manifesting in instruments of strategic communication on a meso level and (2) on individual legitimacy judgments of the publics on a micro level. This paper therefore relates to the WMEMC CfP topic “strategic management in media organizations”.