Media Industries: History, Theory, and Method

Certainly policy shifts, the rise of new technologies, media consolidation, and the growth of niche markets have dramatically altered how media are produced, distributed and consumed. Yet we think it is important to move past the broad generalizations that are often made in top down approaches to consider more precisely how and why these changes have taken place.

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On the one hand, looking closely at media industry history can lead one to look at the present more closely, forcing one to question the latest marketing or journalistic claims about how "this new technology will change the way media is produced" or how "this new corporate strategy will reshape how media is consumed. On the other hand, contemporary developments can also lead us to reexamine and rethink historical processes in a new light.

In recent years, talk of the rise of "convergence" has led many media historians to look back at what were previously conceptualized as "distinct" media forms not just film and television, but also comics, music, radio, magazines and newspapers. This has led some, including Christopher Anderson, Michele Hilmes and Tom Schatz, to reassess the relationships between these different media forms and the companies producing and distributing them. Michele Hilmes, in particular, was one of the first to do this in her book, Hollywood and Broadcasting. Her essay in our collection builds upon many of the ideas she proposed earlier in her career, considering how recent developments might lead to new directions in media industries scholarship.

I think one way media industry scholarship can play a significant role in the creation of media policy is in the framing or reframing of certain issues. Academics from many disciplines have used their work to affect how issues like competition, diversity, violence and intellectual property can be understood and framed in policy discourse e. Scholars like John McMurria and Thomas Streeter have written about the power structures, discourse and ideologies that have guided policy making at the outset, offering additional historical examples of how humanistically-oriented research can contribute to policy analysis.

While it has traditionally been social scientists that have been the most visible in policy-making circles, there are a few notable exceptions; I think it is in the best interests of humanities scholars to increase these numbers, make it a priority to network and take a more activist role in affecting the parameters or at least the considerations of policy. Only then will terms like "access" and "competition" have more nuanced definitions that incorporate the critical social, political and cultural issues which can otherwise disappear from the discussion.

What do you see as the most important disagreements that emerge between the contributors to the book? I wouldn't necessarily see them as disagreeing with each other per se, but I did note some hostility by many writers towards a certain reductive tradition of political economy that paints the industry in particularly broad strokes. This goes back to a general resistance toward a "monolithic" perspective on the media industries Alisa mentioned above.

The reason we did not see much direct disagreement is in part because each author was given a specific task: The essays were not written or designed to be in conversation with one another as much as they were intended to help establish the various components and contours of what a field called "media industry studies" might look like. As part of that collective project, the essays remained somewhat contained and focused instead of debating the relative merits of different approaches to industry study.

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Some authors wound up putting themselves into dialogue with one another unwittingly, such as those writing the essays on the Global Michael Curtin , the Regional Cristina Venegas and the National Nitin Govil. However, even in those essays, I found that rather than disagreement, the pieces offered new ways to think about these concepts in relation to one another.

Venegas, for example, theorized transnational and local media flows in relation to Latin American cinema. While looking at trade relations, economic alliances, cultural policies and industrial histories, she presented the regional as a valuable theoretical tool but also discussed the region in relation to the global, the national, and the local.

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Similarly, Govil offered a complex discussion of how "thinking nationally" actually creates avenues for thinking globally and locally as well. While their considerations were different - Govil looked at piracy, diasporic media and cultural citizenship and Venegas looked at government policies, industry initiatives and market behavior across Latin America, for example - they were pursuing similarly expansive conceptual projects that are tremendously useful for scholars of national, regional and global media industries.

I think that the media reform movement has done a great deal to educate the public about this issue, but we have a long way to go. One of the most common misunderstandings might be over the ways in which media concentration is "regulated.

Media Industries - History, Theory, and Method (Hardcover)

When it comes to policing the business of entertainment, there is no one-size-fits-all policy. Regulation also operates much differently than common sense would dictate. Those focusing r Internet-induced changes in social interaction, and the changing definitions and roles of labor in the on creative industries 4 have also analyzed the realms of architecture, art and design, performing arts, I , i digital era. Meanwhile, shifting hierarchies of taste and value in popular culture are having a profound impact on media products and strategies; one need fashion, and software, among others.

We have decided to narrow longstanding conceptions of"old" media are changing our focus to primarily audiovisual media with the rapidly in the new millennium. It is therefore eters were determined by the disciplinary cohesion our belief that media industry studies should be and shared academic traditions of these media, as mapped and articulated as a distinct and vitally well as the degree of commonality or overlap important field unto itself.

By no means technological growth, and global exchange, and we do we consider industries such as music, publishing, believe that the time is right for such an intervention. These essays represent the academic traditions and common threads defining early imaginings of what the field of media industry media industry studies while also illustrating how studies might look like. It is not an histories, and culture could enable more productive exploration of specific media industries in any scholarship.

Another goal is to situate this discipline particular locale. Rather, it is an open conceptual within a humanistic context; while some of the discussion about the many ways that media industry methodologies and models explicated here are more research has been undertaken in the past and what commonly employed by the social sciences, we interdisciplinary models, methods, and visions it believe that the textually oriented concerns of film might embrace in the future.

It is also a recognition and media studies could be enhanced and enlivened of the fact that, while the world does not necessarily by a broadened base of analysis without threatening need another field of study, one has indeed emerged. To that end, the essays in this book attend to constructs of Defining Media Industry Studies This list could easily methodological paradigms that not only engage with be expanded to include music, newspapers, book the past but also offer ways of thinking about media publishing, and even telecommunications.

Scholars industries in the present and presumably future who write about "creative industries" and "culture landscape of convergence. For the purposes of our in the process ofdescribing and analyzing the media discussion, what is particularly significant is an essay industries. Enlightenment as Mass The discussion that follows emphasizes both the Deception. In looking back on are conceptualized by scholars in a number of ways. They believed the commercialized media studies approach.

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In the process, we ideolQgy perpetuated by mass media systems indicate ways in which future work on the media contributed to a depoliticized populace and to their industries can further engage in a transdisciplinary willingness to accept the current social and political conversation about the converging global media status quo.

From their point of view, Hollywood landscape. Their interest was media industries and the ways these texts might less in the radical social change pursued by the impact audiences.

These views and methods stituted art e. Second, Notably, much mass communication scholarship they assumed a monolithic media industry when in viewed communication via the "transmission fact, as Michele Hilmes and Cynthia Meyers show model" of"who says what to whom to what effect. This attributed a tremendous direction of much of the initial work on the media amount of power to the media, combined with industries. To this day, viewers and radio listeners. For example, prominent books like David emerged another strand of scholarship on the media Croteau and William Hoynes' The Business c1 Media industries out of the social sciences.

This area, which and Robert McChesney's The Problem oj the Media was labeled as "mass communication" by the s," are centered on deficiencies in news coverage and differed from the Frankfurt School in terms of its the continuing expansion of consumer culture. Thus, while this section has dealt illustrate, concepts developed during the s and with foundational and historical approaches to the s continue to shape the research questions study of the media industries, what follows is a and approaches of scholars across the humanities sketch of influences and analyticaUrameworks that and social sciences.

The essays by Thomas Schatz and Victoria Johnson on film and television and Analytical Frameworks industry history reveal the degree to which such Sociology and anthropology views on mass culture and mass communication were produced within specific Fordist economic, Mass communication and mass culture perspectives political, and social circumstances13 e. Hollywood from the "bottom up. Changes tures variably enabled or constrained newsroom in the industries, the texts they produce, and the staffs. A number of ously. Who structure and microeconomic e. Over more than 30 years, Tunstall has study of media industries.

This study is distinguished by the represents an extraordinary effort to address matters degree of access he had to prominent US television of policy and economics across a range of media executives, writers, and producers, as well as by the industries including newspapers, publishing, radio, depth and breadth of his analysis.

Since the late as uncertainty and change. In addition, as explored in the next section, economists, as will be explored below in more these studies provide useful counterpoints to the detail. A significant portion ofthis work has focused kinds of institutional analyses undertaken by media on the arena of telecommunications,24 but there is economists. This work includes The Story of the economics, but recent work on the economics of Films, a series oflectures at Harvard's business school creative industries most notably that of Richard in the s compiled by Joseph P.

Kennedy; Mae Caves suggests how this disciplinary divide can be Huettig's study, Economic Control if the Motion overcome with artful analysis and an emphasis on Picture Industry; and Michael Conant's Antitrust in the conceptual issues. Economists have provided media industry sible ways in which media economics can be applied studies with models for discussing both the to a study ofthe media industries that are sensitive to macroeconomic e.

Political economy and cultural studies Rather, each author identifies ways that a media One ofthe most prominent ways in which the media industry studies approach might be integrated with industries have been studied is through the lens of other modes of cultural and institutional analysis.

This perspective, its present-day "critical" orientation developed in which emerged during the s and s, has the post-World War II period. Vincent Europe and the US. These views helped motivate local activism the way in which resources are allocated, how they and impact policy-making in many countries around favor some at the expense of others, and how greater the world - a point Cristina Venegas explores in equity can be obtained throughout society.

As depth with her essay. The frameworks often serve as the baseline from which European strand described by Graham Murdock later analysis proceeds. In fact, this perspective is objective of scholars working out of this tradition also prominent in the North American strand of involves the pursuit of social justice. Social justice is critical political economy as forwarded by scholars a central goal of several contributors in this collection such as Herbert Schiller, Ben Bagdikian, Robert as well, including John McMurria, Toby Miller, McChesney, and Edward Herman.

Thompson, and Stuart Hall, helped world. This line ofresearch is criticized by authors in develop scholarship that was taken up in the study of this collection for being reductive, simplistic, and the media industries during the s. Scholarly efforts to incorporate political economy Meaning is made - and by extension, cultural power and cultural studies have been widely attempted in is' exercised - throughout the processes of making the last couple of decades.

Notable work comes no means the only ones to explore the role of media from Naomi Klein and David Bollier, who look at industries in a cultural context. Bill Moyers' Journal regularly explores such courses circulating among various stakeholders at topics as concentration of ownership and bias in given historical moments.

Given the proprietary news reporting from a liberal perspective.

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The essays by Thomas digital media many have shifted their focus to a Schatz, Victoria Johnson'; and Cynthia Meyers are wider menu of issues including intellectual property examples of how such data can be effectively rights, network neutrality, democratic Internet employed in constructing historical analyses. A influence broader cultural conversations.

Lessig as prominent example of this work is Ken Auletta's well as media scholar Siva Vaidhyanathan have Three Blind Mice , which provides a look inside recently generated a great deal of academic and media corporations and the operations of their news public discussion about the intersection of digital divisions during a period in s when they were technologies and intellectual property law with their in the midst of a radical structural transformation. In film The humanities-based study of film and television studies, the auteur theory has been applied most has offered industry analysis far more than merely an extensively toward exploring the relative influence object of study or a disciplinary residence from of the director; with television studies, scholars have which to work.

In fact, film and television studies focused more on the role of the writer-producer. There is a rich ing from this field in such limited space, Michele tradition of work in film studies that explores how a Hilmes' chapter is dedicated to exploring this more range of players - from industry to audience, critics fully. As the other sections of this introduction strategies for reducing risk, ritualizing production, indicate, film and television studies have also drawn managing audience expectations, and codifying from' other areas e.

A central site of analysis for film and television These include media-specific surveys of particular studies remains the text. As a methodology or focal companies and institutions, interactions between point, textual analysis has not been associated with cultural regulators and industry, and examinations of industry studies per se. However, many foundational the launch ofnew technologies. Mandisa Pantin rated it it was amazing Apr 25, Mike rated it liked it Feb 05, Jessica rated it really liked it Oct 21, Phil Oppenheim rated it it was amazing Feb 11, Jenni rated it really liked it Oct 18, Dawn rated it it was amazing Jun 28, Froda rated it really liked it Oct 15, Mae Ann rated it really liked it Aug 11, SP added it Oct 16, Ugur marked it as to-read Sep 10, Randy added it Jan 31, Charmanderley added it Feb 20, Michael marked it as to-read Jul 17, Dan added it Aug 31, Redbaerd is currently reading it Dec 24, Oedipa marked it as to-read May 03,