Challenges and Opportunities for Journalistic Innovation in the Big Data Era: Evolution and Role of Media Labs

The continuous advance of digitalization and convergence processes in the media companies allowed, more than two decades ago, to begin to forge a different business and entrepreneurial strategic vision, focused on promoting innovation from systemic perspectives. From now on, innovation has been assimilated as one of the main assets in accordance with the new times, resulting into a requirement for quality journalism and, therefore, a necessity for the survival of the media. The chapter examines how this media innovation is a necessary engine to promote adaptations and solutions to media problems in a context of permanent change (García-Avilés et al., The Journal of Media Innovations 5, 2019; Hogh-Janovsky and Meier, Journalism and Media 2:361–378, 2021)—or, as some authors state, to a “clearly disruptive information ecosystem” (Herrera-Damas and Satizábal-Idarrága, Profesional de la Información 32, 2023). It also revises how this idea of innovation has been operationalized in practice in technical and editorial terms, but with a transversal approach, from the so-called Media Labs, defined as units or departments dedicated to research, experimentation, development, and implementation of innovations (Salaverría, Profesional de la Información 24:397–404, 2015).