Digitalizing Newspaper Journalism: Instituting and Negotiating New Temporalities in the Digital Workplace

Digitalization of the labour process has occasioned the emergence of new temporal orders at work. For newspaper journalists, it has resulted in a radical reorganization of newsrooms and the temporalities of news production, offering a key site for studying this process of temporal reordering. This article develops Orlikowski and Yates' (2002) concept of temporal structuring as an active and intentional process in which journalists have enacted the emergent temporal order. Drawing on observations of the temporal practices of journalists in a London-based newsroom, including 28 in-depth interviews, the article demonstrates how the temporal structuring conditions which shape journalists' action within the labour process emerge from the temporal ruptures and conflict resulting from digitalisation as journalists accommodated, negotiated and resisted the new temporal order. The role of objectification is identified as a strategy used by managers and workers to resolve these tensions.