How big data analytics affect decision-making : A study of the newspaper industry

Sammanfattning: Big data analytics is a topic that is surrounded by a lot of enthusiasm and hype among both researchers and practitioners and is quickly being applied in different industries. The purpose of the thesis is to investigate the emerging technology of big data analytics and how it affects decision-making. In order to investigate this, we conducted empirical research in the newspaper industry, which is an industry that is going through a crisis with decreasing revenues, old business models collapsing, and loss of traditional news jobs, which is causing the industry to turn to big data analytics as a way of staying competitive. A nationwide newspaper, a nationwide targeted newspaper, and a local newspaper were studied in order to find similarities and differences between them and conduct an industry analysis. The findings indicate that the further the organizations have come in their work with analysing and disseminating big data analytics, the bigger was the effect on the decision-making. It was found that decision-making is becoming more transparent, accurate, efficient, and to some extent faster. Furthermore, big data analytics had outcomes on the roles in the studied organizations. It was found that the editors are becoming more like hybrids between analysts and editors, and journalists are given more responsibility and becoming more like multijournalists.