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This study investigated four different economic level areas of China (Shanghai, Shandong, Shaanxi, and Guizhou) to analyze the eastern and western urban and rural media service status at different development stages. This set of data comes from the comparison of regional urban and rural areas and indicates the various aspects of differences in the survey area, including the media use habits, media resources, media consumer demand, evaluation of media services, the role of media in public life, public knowledge level, and so on. On analyzing data comprehensively, one thing can be found that there is a positive correlation between the public media contact degree and the public knowledge level. The media plays an extremely important role in public life and regional public knowledge gap between urban and rural areas exists. Furthermore, this gap is positively correlated to the media resources and media exposure. The trend of media using on mobile phone and computer in urban areas increases significantly greater than in rural areas. Then, how to narrow the urban–rural and regional public knowledge gap and reduce the negative impact of the digital divide will be an important urgent task.

Energy, as the most valuable concept of today, works with all disciplines, gains momentum, and increases all kinds of studies on energy and consciousness on the subject. The media provides the most rapid and effective awareness of energy, the requirements for efficient energy use, energy literacy, conscious use, and sustainability. At this stage, content related to all types of topics produced in the digital world gains importance. As communication is carried out with different target groups, public service announcements constitute an important place among the public affairs activities. Public relations can be defined as communication management. In this communication management style, strategic plans are made, and attitudes and behavior changes can be obtained through the target groups. It is aimed at delivering the content produced through mass media in public service announcements to individuals. The public is educated and made aware of the issues that are of concern to them. With these short announcements, information is provided on health, education, etc., and awareness is created for these issues. Public interests are taken as the basis for messages that do not have a commercial aspect and do not cover a very long time. In the study, the importance of public service announcements on energy efficiency is evaluated, and within the scope of the research, semiotic analysis will be made of the contents of the YouTube page of the Ministry of Energy and Natural Resources. At this point, the issues and indicators emphasized in public service announcements on energy will be analyzed.

Purpose – This chapter aims to show how media law strongly contributed to shape in Hungary what has been pictured as a U-turn. This illiberal trend was subsequently strengthened during the Covid-19 pandemic. Methodology/Approach – It considers that law also constitutes and not only orders political and social relationships. Law, including media law, has been in Hungary one of the main factors of change or rather of political-social construction. This chapter therefore moves from the study of positive law and analyzes Hungarian media laws within the theoretical framework of illiberal democracy, drawing from contributions to political science and socio-legal studies. Findings – This chapter demonstrated that media laws have outlined in Hungary a centralized regulatory system with broad powers, which lacks political independence, therefore encouraging self-censorship and limiting freedom of expression and pluralism. These laws contributed to shape the illiberal U-turn occurred in the country before the pandemic, but the coronavirus offered the occasion to reinforce government powers, giving the leeway to rule with no or minimum scrutiny for an indefinite period and further limiting dissent. The analysis enabled to argue that neither the media regulation established during the past decade nor the laws adopted during the Covid-19 pandemic are compatible with a modern democracy. Originality/Value – Based on existing literature, little research has been conducted on the appearance and endurance of non-democratic regimes, and supposedly even less within the context of the coronavirus pandemic which started only a few months ago, compared to the contributions available on democratization processes and democratic consolidation.

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.

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 focuses on clarifying the cooperation and convergence between tourism and audiovisual (AV) sectors in Hamburg and Riga. In light of increasingly easier and more accessible travel, the tourism sector is a growing trend in most countries and regions. To what extent does this affect cooperation with the AV sector? The chapter gives an overview of different types of cooperation in these regions and brings out the main obstacles for innovation. When describing the innovation systems, focus is put on institutional frameworks in these two regions. We end by arguing that raising the demand for innovation in the tourism sector is a real challenge and demonstrating that the public sector plays an important role in driving the cross-innovation processes between the observed sectors.

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.