Interdependent Autonomy: How Digital-Native Media Adapt to Compound Constraints in Flawed Democracies

This study investigates how digital-native media adapt their practices, organizational models, and community relationships when operating under the compound constraints characteristic of flawed democracies. Using a mixed-methods design structured around a case study of La Silla Vacía and Colombiacheck, two Colombian digital-native media outlets, the research integrates a mapping of 46 outlets in the Colombian digital ecosystem, content analysis of 701 articles published by both outlets (189 in depth), and 18 interviews with media ecosystem actors. The analysis identifies four interrelated adaptive dimensions, structural, methodological, territorial-digital, and relational, that respond to specific tensions between immediacy and rigor, digital reach and territorial presence, editorial independence and financial sustainability, and community engagement and journalistic objectivity. These dimensions converge in the concept of interdependent autonomy, the central theoretical contribution: editorial independence is preserved not despite but through the strategic diversification of alliances with other media, academia, civil society, and international cooperation. The findings demonstrate that in flawed democracies adaptation operates as a constitutive process, where compound constraints catalyze innovations that transcend the Colombian context for the understanding of journalism under democratic fragility globally.