MAINTAINING LEGITIMACY IN A DIGITAL AGE A Case Study of Offside Press AB

Abstract

This paper investigates how journalistic organizations maintain legitimacy in a digitalization era using Offside Press AB and its three publications: Offside, Filter, and Skriva as the case study and explores how legitimacy is maintained through various strategies to respond to digitalization. Drawing on Suddaby et al.’s (2017) framework, the study identifies three key legitimacy strategies: conforming, decoupling, and performing and examines how these unfold across secondary themes such as shifting content from analog to digital, employing standard revenue models, interacting closer with the audience, establishing their niche, resisting time pressure to prioritize storytelling rather than speed and levaranging AI for data gathering and illustrations. A qualitative methodology was employed, using semi-structured interviews and a Gioia-informed (Gioia et al., 2013) coding process to analyse empirical findings. The findings suggest that legitimacy is a dynamic and multi-layered resource: organizations simultaneously align with institutional norms (e.g., digital formats and subscription models), resist dominant digital pressures (e.g., platform-driven speed), and selectively adopt innovations to signal relevance. The study contributes to legitimacy theory by highlighting how these strategies operate and are shaped by both technological and cultural shifts. Lastly, it adds to the Information Systems literature by emphasizing how legitimacy is negotiated in relation to digital tools and platform logic.