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For several hundreds of years printing has been the only effective channel for spreading mass communication. During the 1900s several new media channels have been invented and, with the addition of the Internet, this has both changed the way media is consumed and has increased the competition between different channels. This qualitative case study of 37 firms reports on how relationships are used in the printing industry to relieve some of the impact of the competitive forces from new, and easily accessible, media as a means for marketing and, furthermore, on the impact on the printing industry as an industry. The results from the case study show that there are both internal and external effects of forming relationships and those vertical, as well as horizontal, relationships are of great importance to create a sustainable competitive situation for the printing industry. Relationships are used to increase both the strategic flexibility of the firm and the flexibility of the print media channel. Furthermore, the study illustrates that the printing industry, and print as a medium of communication, is drifting gradually away from the actual customer due to the new paradigm of value creation.

The chapter discusses the characteristics of audiovisual (AV) media sectors in the Baltic Sea region. Therein it focuses on the specifics of media industries in small countries in the region as they are challenged in ways notably different from large countries with large domestic markets for media content. It discusses the differences between the AV media industries in the Nordic and Baltic countries and suggests that while in the first case long-term welfare society policies and conscious policy-driven system building have conditioned growth and international success then also in the second case innovation policy rationales have facilitated recent growth and dynamics. It then discusses the specific challenges, especially platformisation to small media industries in contemporary globalising media markets, and suggests that opportunities to resist these challenges may be in local inter-sectoral cooperation, that is, in building cross-innovation systems.

This chapter interrogates the economic impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on print newspaper industry in Zimbabwe. COVID-19 affected the global economy due to various lockdowns and travel restrictions imposed by governments in attempt to stop the spread of the virus. This severely affected media houses, especially newspaper companies that depended on sales as their potential customers stayed home. The pandemic came against the backdrop of constant changes affecting the print media industry. Digitalisation and the resultant fragmentation of the audiences affect the way audiences consume media products. Against this milieu, this chapter investigates how these changes affected or shielded media houses from the economic impact of the COVID-19 pandemic. Two leading newspaper companies in Zimbabwe, Alpha Media Holdings and Zimbabwe Newspapers Group (1980) Ltd are used as case studies. The chapter deploys both the critical tradition to the study of media economics (political economy of the media) and the theory of the firm to argue that the traditional economic model of depending on casual sales for survival is outdated. The chapter documents the adverse effects of the pandemic on journalism practice highlighting how the impact was more pronounced in the privately owned newspaper companies than in government-controlled ones.

This chapter explores the development of advertising regulations governing food advertising to children in Australia since the 1940s. By introducing the advertising and marketing self-regulatory system, the Australian Government is taking a neoliberal approach, advocating for the free market to initiate and sustain the country’s economic development, instead of greater government regulation. By examining the primary and secondary literature, such as government reports and research, and newspaper and academic articles, this chapter outlines different regulatory initiatives adopted by both the government and food industry to limit food and beverage advertising to children on television and online, in order to prevent obesity rates increasing in children. This chapter synthesizes and critically evaluates food industry and public health studies, government and non-government reviews, and other research studies to evaluate the influence of self-regulation on Australian television food advertising within the neoliberal context since the 1990s. It contributes to the literature on food advertising regulations for children in Australia by offering evidence of how the government, public health authorities and the food industry have attempted to keep pace with changes in the advertising, marketing and media industries by developing and reviewing advertising codes. It identifies the loopholes that exist in these self-regulatory codes and concludes that Australia’s current advertising regulatory arrangements are failing to protect our children from unhealthy food marketing on television, especially on relatively under-regulated online platforms such as social media and branded websites. The issues identified in this chapter could aid the food and beverage industry, as well as the self-regulatory system, to offer comprehensive and applicable solutions to combat Australia’s obesity crises by implementing new legislations that align with different marketing practices.

Despite an increase in research that examines the media's selection of protest events for coverage, two areas of study have been left undeveloped. First, the type of protest examined is limited to common forms of the demonstration (march, vigil, rally). A second drawback of this literature is its focus on mass audience newspapers. The goal of the current study is to address these two issues by comparing coverage of a previously ignored form of protest, the strike, across two different media sources, the mass audience New York Times and the Daily Labor Report, a newspaper which targets industry and labor leaders and garners its revenue from subscriptions, not advertising. Due to specific differences between the two newspapers (primarily readership and revenue base), it is expected that certain strike characteristics (industry) will play a greater role in the New York Times’ selection of strikes than in the Daily Labor Report. Using government data to construct the population of events, I find that both newspapers select strikes in a manner that resembles coverage of other forms of protest. Important variables include size, length, and disruptiveness. The main difference between the two newspapers is the New York Time's attention to strikes in industries that affect the public and consumers and its strong regional bias. These findings indicate that not only do similar media selection processes work for both protest and strikes, but also that, despite some differences, media type did not affect selection greatly.

This chapter presents the many premises of this book. It first discusses the book’s central questions and lays out the design of the large multi-national and multi-method study, carried out across Northern Europe. It also places the book at the interdisciplinary space between contemporary innovation economics and cultural and social theory. It then discusses the complex set of social processes that have conditioned the phenomena that the book studies – how and why are the contemporary audiovisual media industries co-innovating and converging with other sectors including education, tourism and health care? Within this framework, it discusses the effects of the broader individualisation and mediatisation processes, of media convergence, of the emergence of cross-media or transmedia strategies, of the evolution of the service and experience economies and of the emergence of creative industries policy frameworks.

This chapter establishes the conceptual and analytic framework for the book. It relates not only to much of the existing work in evolutionary and institutional economics, but also to work in cultural science and cultural semiotics domains as well as in media convergence and transmedia studies. The central concept it first deploys is ‘innovation systems’ as applied in national, regional, international and sectoral contexts. It then builds on the general theory of economic evolution by Kurt Dopfer and Jason Potts and reviews the tools this theory provides to carry out a meso-level analysis of industries co-innovating and converging. It then proposes a new concept – ‘cross-innovation’ – to refer to the emergence of new structures and ‘rules’ at the boundaries of existing industries.

Industry platforms can alter relations among exchange partners in such a way that the industry structure is changed. The focus of much industry platform research has been on how platform creation and leadership offers advantages to the most central firms, but platforms can also be advantageous for small specialist firms that compete with the most central firms. We examine book publishing as an example of an industry in which the central players – large publishing firms – are losing power to self-publishing authors because the distributor Amazon has a powerful platform for customers to communicate independently, and the non-publishing platform Twitter also serves as a medium for readers to discuss and review books. Our empirical analysis is based on downloaded sales statistics for Amazon Ebooks, matched with Amazon reviews of the same books and tweets that refer to the book or the author. We analyze how Ebook sales are a function of publisher, Amazon reviews, and tweets, and we are able to assess the importance of each factor in the sale of book titles. The main finding is that Amazon reviews are powerful drivers of book sales, and have greater effect on the sales of books that are not backed by publishers. Twitter also affects book sales, but less strongly than Amazon reviews.

The following is an introductory profile of the fastest growing firms over the three-year period of the study listed by corporate reputation ranking order. The business activities in which the firms are engaged are outlined to provide background information for the reader.

The fast-changing, highly competitive and technology-driven business environment forces established firms to continually search for new business opportunities and innovative ideas. In reaction, corporations such as Google, Microsoft, Cisco and Bertelsmann have launched new corporate venture capital (CVC) units or have intensified existing CVC activities. This chapter examines the structure, patterns and investment focus of telecommunication, IT, consumer electronics and media & entertainment firms’ CVC investments by conducting a data-mining project based on the Thomson Reuters Private Equity database. The data-mining project reveals the increasing importance of CVC activities as a strategic development tool to address the requirements of the increasing costs, speed and complexity of a technology-driven industry since the bursting of the Internet bubble. Therefore, following chapter is one of the first CVC studies to describe and compare CVC investments of the last CVC wave across industry sectors.