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Extant discussions of news media innovation have largely focused on the impact of media technologies, market forces, and audience reception. This article examines how political dynamics in transitional societies shape news media innovation. It argues that, in such contexts, news media innovation can be understood as a contingent outcome driven by changing state-society relations, mediated by organizational factors, and punctuated by critical political events. The empirical analysis focuses on Hong Kong between the year 2012 and 2022. Based on in-depth interviews with 30 journalists from online and mainstream media organizations, this article illustrates how increasing pressure on press freedom and the growth of political contention inadvertently fed into the growth of online media, though the degree of innovation exhibited by specific outlets was influenced by organizational culture. Significant political events reconfigured media innovation by bringing about unexpected market support and major shifts in the state's media control strategies. General theoretical implications are discussed.
Chan et al. (Wed,) studied this question.