How do innovations spread in news organizations? Research on this topic has so far been conducted primarily in democratic contexts. The paper by Anna Litvinenko and Florian Toepfl published in Digital Journalism explores how participatory newsroom innovations diffuse under authoritarian rule.

The article reconstructs the histories of comment sections on the opinion-leading online media in Belarus and Azerbaijan, the two authoritarian contexts, which varied maximally with regard to the outcome of the diffusion process.  The study identifies factors that have obstructed or fueled the diffusion process and discusses how inherently political journalism innovations diffuse in non-democratic contexts: 

Litvinenko, A., & Toepfl, F. (2021). The (Non-)Adoption of Participatory Newsroom Innovations under Authoritarian Rule: How Comment Sections Diffused in Belarus and Azerbaijan (1998–2017). Digital Journalism. https://doi.org/10.1080/21670811.2021.1888137