Media labs, a new professional field for journalists?

[Shishirgano9]

In partnership with the WAN-IFRA Global Alliance for Media Innovation (GAMI), my PhD thesis [1] examines the roles, challenges and outcomes of media innovation labs, primarily through quantitative research based on a 32-question survey. This is a complementary approach to the Media Innovation Mapping project, WAN-IFRA’s qualitative effort to better understand these spaces of innovation and experimentation, and to provide examples of best practices in media innovation around the world.



Media Innovation Mapping, WAN-IFRA

Creating a database of media labs was necessary to finland mobile database understand the scope of the project: we identified over 100 media innovation labs worldwide. However, the types of media labs seem to differ across regions. While North America and Europe seem to have a majority of academic and/or corporate labs, Latin America showed a growing number of independent labs. In this region, labs seem to exist mainly in universities and as independent labs, with corporate labs not being so popular.