While it is difficult and perhaps even futile to “find creativity” in an idea development process, this paper argues that it can be fruitful to examine the idea developers and gatekeeping editors that frame the process in a domain such as television which has a relatively large amount of repetition and serialisation (McIntyre, 2012: 120). The purpose of this paper is to analyse how a television channel’s strategic goal of making experimental programmes affects their idea development process. The paper’s empirical material consists of two months of on-off observations of idea development sessions as well as a gatekeeper study where I interviewed six different local gatekeepers at the Danish public service broadcaster’s youth channel, DR3, and youth content department, DR Ung. The paper’s theoretical approach is a combination of research on gatekeepers in news journalism (Shoemaker, 1991; Shoemaker and Vos, 2009; White, 1950) and in creativity research (Amabile, 1996; Csikszentmihalyi, 1988; Csikszentmihalyi, 1999). This approach is united with the concept of discerned savvy (Draper, 2014: 1126) which describes the knowledge that media workers acquire about the preferences of their superiors which they then use to narrow their idea development accordingly. Similarly,
the concept of industry lore (Havens and Lotz, 2016: 162) is utilised to describe the organisationally accepted myths and common sense perceptions of which industry practices are good and bad in the idea development process.
The findings in this study point to how the channel’s strategic goal and self-perception of being continuously experimental becomes difficult to operationalise for the media workers in the idea development sessions. Despite their dependency on their ability to develop ideas, the media workers in this case still express strong feelings of self-management and independence and narratives about autonomy as mentioned in other previous research contributions (Hesmondhalgh and Baker, 2011; Taylor and Littleton, 2012). However, having experimental television as their strategic goal affects their perception of the idea development process where many of the participants express the group’s inability to generate experimental ideas that are satisfactory in their own opinion. Instead, they tend to follow industry lore and their
knowledge of their superiors’ taste. Eventually, the DR3 editors are most pleased with an idea for a show that combines dating with travelling which is similar to several existing DR3 programmes and they commission this idea instantly. However, the DR3 editors never see this choice as contradictory to their
strategic goal to experiment as it satisfies a need by filling an empty slot in an upcoming schedule and gives continuity to their channel brand.
Based on this analysis, the paper’s theoretical ambition is to conceptualise the strategic dilemma between creating a coherent channel brand while making experimental programmes and to discuss the self-perceptions and sociological negotiations between idea developers and gatekeeping editors in television.