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Greece provides another, although timid, example of how financial crisis and the technological advancements have affected national media systems. In the media sector, the recent financial crisis brought major losses of advertising revenues, while telecommunication companies have entered the field providing the Greeks with triple play services at lower rates. But in one way or another, the main players have remained the same. This chapter aims to describe the new conditions in the Greek media sector and to highlight the consequences of the fiscal crisis in terms of sales, profit losses, decreased advertising spending, salaries and emerging costs. It will also attempt to document that although important players in the field lost power, although media changed hands, the majority of media owners still come from other sectors of the economy, principally in shipping, energy, constructions and sports.

This chapter draws conclusion from the analyses presented in the preceding chapters.

Everyday life and everyday communication have undergone large changes in the pandemic crisis. The conclusion asks in what kind of society we want to live and how we want to communicate in the future. It poses the question of what kind of Internet we want and need in the future in post-pandemic times. Commontopia is presented as the potential future of communication and society.

This paper provides a brief historical sketch of cable and telephone regulation in the USA, the purpose of which is to demonstrate the legacy that precedes contemporary debates over competing models of digital networks, and to question the justifications offered for regulating such networks as private property with no corresponding public service obligations.

The paper relies on historical research to examine the rationales that have been used for cable and telephone regulation, based on the use of legal documents (statutes, regulations, court rulings).

The historic justifications that have been used to protect telecommunications from competition amounts to what is known as “corporate welfare”. Today's cable and telephone networks, and the accumulated wealth of the corporations that own them, would not have been possible without the willingness of regulators to favor particular firms and business models, and to protect these firms from competition under the rationale that these networks are “natural monopolies”.

Today's digital networks have been built on the wealth and market dominance that was made possible by protection from competition and the guaranteed rates of return that regulation permitted. Consequently, the property rights that have been afforded to network owners should be accompanied by responsibilities, namely, in the form of public service obligations.

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.

Major disasters make very newsworthy stories – not only because they are unusual events but because of the human interest angle. No matter how horrific the circumstances, the public seems to be fascinated by other people′s misfortunes and the press and broadcasting media know it. The manner of coverage and reporting often leads to criticism that the media were intrusive and lacking in sensitivity, as in the live filming of the Hillsborough disaster. The press and broadcasting agencies argue that they have a right to report and comment on matters of public interest. Moreover, they feel that matters of discretion and good taste should be left to them. This calls for good relationships between the authorities and the media. The aim should be to give accurate information and assist reporters where possible, provided that the judicial process is not compromised, operations are not hampered and there is no invasion of privacy. In return, there are many ways in which the media can help the authorities, for example by broadcasting messages, providing photographs and newsreel film to assist enquiries and training personnel as spokespersons. Such co‐operation is likely to be achieved through sensible policies and good, workable press arrangements.

This qualitative study examines the influence of media development in Iraqi Kurdistan after nearly a decade and a half of donor country-funded professional journalism training in a period following an oil boom and bust, influence of a transnational terror organization, and a recent vote to secede from the rest of Iraq. The study builds out a typology of economic, political, bureaucratic, legal, cultural, and societal capture, and applies it in an analysis of data from in-depth, semi-structured interviews that were conducted in the two largest cities in Iraqi Kurdistan.

The global Covid-19 pandemic is posing considerable challenges for governments throughout the world and has and will have a significant influence on the shape of peoples social and economic life and wellbeing in the short and longer term. This opinion paper discusses the current health policy response adopted in England to control or manage the epidemic and identifies the key sociological and political influences which have shaped these policies. Drawing on the theoretical approach set out in his recent book, which emphasises the interplay of powerful structural and economic interest groups, the author will consider the influence of the key players. Government policy has tied itself to scientific and medical evidence and protecting the NHS so the key roles of the medical profession, public health scientific community and NHS management and their respective and relative powerful influences will be discussed. The government needs the support of the public if their policies are to be successful, so how have the government addressed maintaining public trust in this “crisis” and how much trust do the public have in the government and what has influenced it? The strong emphasis on social distancing and social isolation in the national government policy response to Covid-19 has placed an increasing public reliance on the traditional and social media for sources of information so how the media has framed the policy will be considered. One policy aim is for an effective vaccine and the influence of the drug industry in its development is discussed. Finally, the role of the state will be discussed and what has shaped its social and economic policies.

Outreach in libraries has traditionally been considered the realm of public services, where librarians interact one-on-one with our patrons at the reference desk, run social media accounts, and other activities of a similar vein. In today's evolving library world, it is time to challenge outreach in its traditional sense and consider technical services work and its associated duties as outreach. This article delves into technical services work (including cataloging, archival processing, shelf maintenance, etc.) and how the results (bibliographic records, metadata, authority control etc.) are in themselves outreach.

Labs are meant for the creation of new products and services or to overcome innovation challenges (Carstensen & Bason, 2012). Media labs, besides the name, go beyond the media industry concepts to respond to technology, communication, and economic changes (Bisso Nunes & Mills, 2021). For that, they integrate public spaces, media, arts, and tech. In short, media labs are organizational structures that allow for experimentation and development, and facilitate open innovation and individual and organizational learning. Many media labs are focused on accelerating media involvement in functional and experimental innovations and rise in a context unrelated to the temporality of media content production, on a systematic innovation approach. But media labs also represent great diversity. In this chapter, we explore key elements of the media lab phenomenon: history, definition, evolution and appearance globally and in Latin America, emergence beyond the media industry, and, by the end, final thoughts about media labs' roles amid future organizational and technological transformations.