Collaboration among ecosystem complementors is often formally orchestrated by a central firm. While the role of such orchestrators is well-documented, however, our understanding of how complementors adapt when the central firm may fail to maintain the collaborative structure is limited. This paper proposes that an orchestrator in crisis may lead to “orchestrator bypass”: the move towards direct, informal collaboration among complementors that circumvents the central firm. Utilizing a dataset of 5.2 million news articles, the paper provides empirical evidence for orchestrator bypass by tracking citation patterns – the collaborative use of content via referral to other organization’s articles – in the Danish news ecosystem from 2005-2021. The crisis endured by the central Danish news agency from 2008-2015 allows documenting how formal collaboration via the news agency was in part replaced by informal collaboration, i.e., a higher reliance on direct citations between complementors, leading to a more decentralized ecosystem structure. The temporary shift toward informal collaboration illuminates complementors’ adaptive capacities despite the imminent failure of the ecosystem orchestrator.
