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The purpose of this research is to explore how an industry is represented in multimodal public media narratives and to explore how this representation subsequently affects the formation of public sense-giving space during a persisting crisis, such as a pandemic. The question asked is: how do the use of multimodality by public service media dynamically shape representations of industry identity during a persisting crisis?

This study made use of a multimodal approach. The verbal and visual media text on the restaurant industry during the COVID-19 pandemic that were published in Finland by the public service media distributor Yle were studied. Data published between March 2020 and March 2022 were analysed. The data consisted of 236 verbal texts, including 263 visuals.

Three narratives were identified– victim, servant and survivor – that construct power relations and depict the identity of the restaurant industry differently. It was argued that multimodal media narratives hold three meaning making functions: sentimentalizing, juxtaposing and nuancing industry characteristics. It was also argued that multimodal public service media narratives have wider implications in possibly shaping the future attractiveness of the industry and organizational members' understanding of their identity.

This research contributes to sensemaking literature in that it explores the role of power – explicitly or implicitly constructed through media narratives during crisis. Furthermore, this research contributes to sensemaking literature in that it shows how narratives take shape multimodally during a continuous crisis, and how this impacts the construction of industry identity.

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 usage of sport stadia for public service is increasingly common and may come in different forms. In the COVID-19 pandemic, this included sport entities hosting mass COVID-19 vaccinations at their stadiums. The purpose of this study was to examine the branding effects of a COVID-19 mass vaccination center as communicated by (1) a sport entity (i.e. stadium and its two teams) and (2) the public.

The authors analyzed the entity's social media messages related to the mass vaccination center for the three groups, the stadium and its two sports team tenants (N = 48) while comparing the public's social media content about the vaccination center (N = 187). An empirical material coding analysis was conducted.

The sport entity's posts revealed 12 codes, five categories and two themes communicated about their brand: In this together–community impact and showcasing brand attributes. The public posts analysis revealed 21 codes, eight categories and four themes, creating brand awareness, establishing/reaffirming brand attributes, affective response and in this together–community response.

The identification of the two organization themes and four public themes provided an initial examination of the mass vaccination efforts' impact on the sport entity's brand. With the rise of stadia being utilized as public service venues (e.g. voting centers and disaster shelters), the results of the study can provide guidance to communicating the host team's brand during these times. Results also suggest the public perception of such service reflected positive opportunities for brand exposure and subsequent effects for the teams.

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.

This paper aims to shed light on the impact of personalized news media on the shared issue agenda that provides democracies with a set of topics that structure the public debate. The advent of personalized news media that use smart algorithms to tailor the news offer to the user challenges the established way of setting the agenda of such a common core of issues.

This paper tests the effects of personalized news use on perceived importance of these issues in the common core. In particular, the authors study whether personalized news use leads to a concentration at the top of the issue agenda or to a more diverse issue agenda with a long tail of topics.

Based on a cross-sectional survey of a representative population sample (n = 1,556), we find that personalized news use does not lead to a small common core in which few topics are discussed extensively, yet there is a relationship between personalized news use and a preference for less discussed topics. This is a result of a specific user profile of personalized news users: younger, more educated news users are more interested in topics at the fringes of the common core and also make more use of personalized news offers.

The results are discussed in the light of media diversity and recent advances in public sphere research.

This paper contributes to the ongoing debate about algorithmic news dissemination. While, currently, much attention is reserved for the role of platforms as information gatekeepers in relationship to the news media, maybe their ability to enable or hinder the audience in discovering and distributing news content is part of what really characterizes their influence on the market place of ideas.

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.

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.

This chapter concludes the section on cross-innovation practices between audiovisual (AV) media industries and the health care sector. It suggests that the main case studies discussed in this section – Estonia in general and Aarhus Region in Denmark – tell of two different trajectories on how the emergence of cross-innovation systems can be facilitated by policies. Local policymakers in Aarhus have worked systematically to raise awareness and facilitate contacts between AV media and other sectors and this has resulted in an active start-up scene at the intersection between the media and the health care industries. Estonia, which is focusing on traditional cultural policymaking, has not recognised similar dynamics. Yet, Estonia may be still better prepared for the (global) platformisation of e-health services with its national e-governance systems, while Denmark’s health-related e-services remain fragmented and ripe for platformisation by multinationals, potentially undermining local cross-innovation systems.

This study operationalizes risks in stakeholder dialog (SD). It conceptualizes SD as co-produced organizational discourse and examines the capacities of organizers' and stakeholders' practices to create a shared understanding of an organization’s risks to their mutual benefit. The meetings and online forum of a German public service media (PSM) organization were used as a case study.

The authors applied corpus-driven linguistic discourse analysis (topic modeling) to analyze citizens' (n = 2,452) forum posts (n = 14,744). Conversation analysis was used to examine video-recorded online meetings.

Organizers suspended actors' reciprocity in meetings. In the forums, topics emerged autonomously. Citizens' articulation of their identities was more diverse than the categories the organizer provided, and organizers did not respond to the autonomous emergence of contextualizations of citizens' perceptions of PSM performance in relation to their identities. The results suggest that risks arise from interactionally achieved occasions that prevent reasoned agreement and from actors' practices, which constituted autonomous discursive formations of topics and identities in the forums.

This study disentangles actors' practices, mutuality orientation and risk enactment during SD. It advances the methodological knowledge of strategic communication research on SD, utilizing social constructivist research methods to examine the contingencies of organization-stakeholder interaction in SD.