ABSTRACT
Scholars and practitioners observe the growing relevance of journalism innovation research. This chapter reviews and structures research on innovation in journalism and builds a theoretical framework that forms the basis for the international research project Journalism Innovations in Democratic Societies (JoIn-DemoS). Building on the corpus of literature, this chapter identifies gaps in the research and develops a definition of innovations in journalism. While the literature provides clear evidence for an unambiguous definition of innovation in journalism, this study needed to develop a distinction between the concepts of change and transformation, which are important backgrounds to innovation. The underlying basis is a normative understanding of journalism in democratic societies, which defines media systems and journalistic culture as framing preconditions for innovations in journalism.
