ABSTRACT
This chapter aims to advance the theory of innovation in journalism. Based on the results of our three-year international research project, JoIn-DemoS, we specify the concepts of change, transformation, and innovation and outline their links and relationships. The findings show how individual innovations affect journalism at any or all of the micro-, meso-, and macrolevels and how these levels are linked to one another, e.g., through journalistic culture. Furthermore, the innovations selected for our study can strengthen those quality factors that make journalism so special and distinct from other communication forms. The democratic value of innovations in journalism lies in their occasional enhancement of the advantages offered by digital media, but mostly, they aim to reduce the threats to democracy posed by the digital media universe. Innovations bring depth and variety instead of accelerating the rapid speed of news, and they emphasize original reporting instead of pushing the often-criticized churnalism that only rehashes prepackaged material.
