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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and the theory of the firm to argue that the traditional economic model of depending on casual sales for survival is outdated.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.

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.

A reason why industry incumbents seldom survive technology transitions is their strong reliance on an efficient, but inflexible organizational system. We studied three digital transformation initiatives that created fast progress in a struggling newspaper group by working against the industry logic and established thinking in the area. This chapter argues that management succeeded in introducing a new strategic practice through these transformation initiatives. We focus on three factors contributing to the success: complexity management, short time development of a long-term vision, and the introduction of impossible goals.

In this article, I propose a theory of network opportunity emergence. The core of the argument is that as an overall industry network structure becomes centralized, opportunities emerge for new entrants. As the institutional environment evolves toward a centralized network flow structure, innovators can identify newly emerged rich resource niches that serve as the perfect breeding ground for an entrepreneurial start-up. While the framework is an aggregate level conceptualization of market opportunities, it also identifies specific actionable opportunities at a very micro level. Examples from the networks of the airline industry illustrate the logic. I conclude by discussing the innovation and entrepreneurship implications for a wide variety of industries and network tie types, calling for utilization of the framework to answer a broad variety of research questions.

Researchers continue to seek understanding of industrialization as a state managed process. How to create and implement new industries based on advanced knowledge is on the policy agenda of many advanced nations. Measures that promote these developments include national capacity building in science and technology, the formation of technology transfer systems, and the establishment of industrial clusters. What these templates often overlook is an analysis of use. This chapter aims to increase the understanding of the processes that embed new solutions in structures from an industrial network perspective. The chapter describes an empirical study of high-technology industrialization in Taiwan that the researcher conducts to this end. The study shows that the Taiwanese industrial model is oversimplified and omits several important factors in the development of new industries. This study bases its findings on the notions that resource combination occurs in different time and space, the new always builds on existing resource structures, and the users are important as active participants in development processes.

This paper seeks to provide an understanding of the relationship between the management control policy of emerging economy (EE) firms and the knowledge transfer with the acquired firm, as well as the mechanism by which specific management control policy facilitates knowledge transfer with the acquired firms.

Employing an organizational learning theory, this paper examines the knowledge transfer from acquired firms to acquiring EE firms through multiple-case study of three EE firms.

Based on organizational learning theory and the results of case studies, this paper finds that the cooperation and willingness of employees in the acquired firm and language barriers are the main factors influencing the relationship between management control policy and the parent company’s knowledge transfer process.

This study sheds light on cross-border knowledge transfer to EE firms from an organizational learning perspective and broadens the understanding of post-acquisition knowledge transfer in an emerging market context.

This study suggests that the low-level management control facilitates knowledge transfer from acquired firms. This is especially true when the parent company from the EE has limited learning experience and faces substantial language barriers between itself and its acquired firm.

This paper extends existing research by exploring how low-level control of acquired firms in developed markets facilitates knowledge transfer of EE firms after cross-border acquisition. Future research can extend this line of research by examining the knowledge transfer mechanism of EE firms through qualitative and quantitative methods.

COVID-19 affected all global activities. The print media industry was one of the affected fields. This research investigates the challenges and opportunities that COVID-19 brought to the Ethiopian newspapers. Political Economy of Media theory is used to analyse data obtained from documents and in-depth interviews with managers of two leading media houses; the government-owned Ethiopian Press Agency (EPA) and the private Capital newspaper. The findings show that print media faced two key challenges. First, their circulation decreased due to the COVID-19 as a result of the economic recession. This was compounded by the second challenge, based on the fact that not only don’t these newspapers own printers, they also lack a established formal distribution infrastructure. As a result, they still had to pay highly for printing while selling copies at a reduced price. However, media hybridisation, innovative projects, and sponsored pages helped the newspapers stay on the market. This study recommends that newspaper publishers run their printing machines, expand the media technology, change the attitude of print journalists, and capacitate them to utilise media hybridisation as important solutions.

As deep as we’d like to think that journalism is already embedded in the Internet way of doing things, some destructive basic print-era practices are still present in news production. One of them is that news organizations are autarchic entities – they produce most of their content internally. As in the real economy, this inevitably leads to a huge waste of resources – exactly what news organizations cannot afford to do. And, as in the real economy, the answer is commerce. News organizations need to pool resources by creating a syndication network that will push each member to produce only content that cannot be produced by others or outsourced to others – while acquiring all the rest. This will lead to bigger revenues from selling content as well as production cost reductions that exceed the increased costs of buying content.

This chapter examines the role that resource support and decision autonomy play in the successful launch of corporate entrepreneurial initiatives. Specifically, this study assesses whether entrepreneurial initiatives receiving higher levels of support from top management and more resource contributions in key functional areas actually have higher levels of performance. Additionally, this study investigates whether or not the entrepreneurial initiatives that receive greater decision autonomy in the same critical functional areas will experience higher levels of performance. Hypotheses arguing these points are tested using data obtained from the Internet divisions of major metropolitan newspapers. This allows for the discovery and evaluation of an opportunity (i.e., the Internet) to be held constant, so that a better understanding of the exploitation stage of the entrepreneurial process might be obtained. Results suggest the importance of resource support and decision autonomy to initiative performance, but with more importance being placed on the marketing functional group for resource support and the accounting and legal functional areas for decision autonomy.