About the book

The Innovation Trap asks why three decades of sustained experimentation have left journalism’s underlying problems unresolved. News organisations have repeatedly turned to new technologies and business strategies as revenues have fallen and relationships with audiences have shifted. Generative AI continues a decades-long search for ways to respond to journalism’s economic and institutional pressures.

The book treats innovation as a method of inquiry into the assumptions that shape newsroom practice and professional authority, as well as the funding and distribution systems on which journalism depends. How a problem is defined shapes whose needs are recognised when change is pursued.

Historical analysis and case studies trace digital journalism from the rise of online news in the 1990s to the present. Cases come from North America, Europe, Latin America and other parts of the Global South. They include the pivot to video, the influence of Google and Meta, Colombia’s La Silla Vacía, South Africa’s Daily Maverick and India’s Khabar Lahariya.

The Innovation Trap reframes innovation as inquiry into why journalism keeps returning to familiar answers. It offers a way forward by challenging inherited assumptions and starting with the needs of the communities it seeks to serve.