Confronting Development Barriers to Solve News-Market Failures: Theorizing Constraints, Resources, and Strategies For Worker Co-Operatives in the News-Sector

In an age of widespread news-market failures, can worker co-operators succeed where others have not? It’s difficult to say because co-operative studies scholars have long neglected news-markets. Rather, the news-industry’s structural crisis has only recently begun to bring worker co-operation’s role into focus. This paper therefore uses the five-barriers theory of worker co-operative development to answer the question of whether this entrepreneurial model can meet the societal challenge posed by journalism’s broad-based crisis. According to the five barriers theory, worker co-operatives typically face five generic challenges: cultivating worker-entrepreneurship, accessing capital, recruiting capable managers, building a culture of worker-ownership, and overcoming limits to growth. Considering these development barriers’ specific expressions in the news-sector and drawing from the international experiences of several successful innovations, the study argues against the prevailing fatalism toward journalism’s prospects. Rather, it claims worker co-operators may build the counter-cyclical capacity to solve news-market failures—if development barriers and innovative workarounds are rigorously considered. Although often contingent on prior innovation-decisions, examples for each barrier demonstrate how some news co-operatives have cleared these hurdles.