Forming a Value Network - Analyzing the Negotiations Between Actors in the E-Newspaper Case

We have studied a two-year project aiming at exploring the potentials of the e-newspaper, i.e. a news service published with e-paper technology. Different actors have interests in this process, e.g. newspaper publishers, device producers, readers and advertisers. These actors are forming value networks by negotiations of interests and positions. The contribution of the paper is twofold: firstly we show how the value network created around e-newspaper is dependent on the convergence of different actors and their interests; secondly our theoretical contribution is to show how actor network theory (ANT) can be used in combination with other theories - in this case genre theory - to analyze emergent value networks. ANT captures the general process of how the value network takes form, while genre theory captures the domain specific context of e-newspapers, and how this structures negotiations between different stakeholders who want to form the e-newspaper genre.