How Commercialism Degrades Journalism (original) (raw)
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De Gruyter eBooks, 2013
The advertising industry and the media industry have long been tied together to reach their main objectives. The advertising industry used media as ad vehicles to embed and transport their ad messages and the media needed advertising money to finance and subsidize their activities. Additionally the advertising income of media outlets depends on economic changes-be they cyclical or structural. Journalistic media seem to be more affected by cyclical downturns than other media types, and they seem to be at least as much affected by structural changes than other media. Structural changes in advertising as well as the possibility to combine advertising in new ways, lead to a loss of advertising money for journalistic media. While advertising money is still important in the financing of journalistic media, at the moment the future of this funding source is unclear. Most likely, advertising revenue will not be large enough to finance newsrooms that are designed to make important contributions to democratic societies.
The Economics of Journalism and News Provision
Mouton de Gruyter Handbook of Communication Science, Timothy Vos, ed., 2018
This chapter reveals how economic perspectives provide insights into journalism as a product, practice, and institution and how it is a factor in the changing environment of journalism. It reveals why the economics of journalism and news production are central to comprehending contemporary business and financial issues facing news organizations, developments of new forms of news provision, and what is happening to journalism in the twenty-first century. The chapter discusses how the characteristics of journalism and coverage choices affect economic value and consumer choice. It reveals how technologies and requirements for production and distribution are affected by economics and how these affect sustainability of journalism on different platforms. It explores how the business arrangements surrounding journalism are influenced by economic factors and how the development of new distribution methods alters competition and competitive positions of newspapers, news magazines, and television news. It shows how new economic factors in digital news operation make it challenging to construct economically feasible business arrangements. The chapter shows how insights from the economic perspective provide unique understanding of journalism, news enterprises, and the environment in which it takes place.
The Political Economy of News Media and Journalism
The Political Economy of News Media and Journalism, 2024
The political economy of news media and journalism critically examines the structures, processes, and democratic role of journalism within society. It is focused on the power relations that shape the production, distribution, and consumption of online, print, and broadcast news media. The field originated from classical Western political economy in the 17th century. Western media political economies of journalism can be traced back to the early 20th century, with the Frankfurt School's culture industry approach and Dallas W. Smythe's radical media approach. Scholars like Armand Mattelart and Jesús Martín-Barbero developed political economy of communication and culture approaches on the Global South. These traditions were informed by Marxian critiques and mainstream economic perspectives. Since the mid-20th century, radical media political economies of journalism have encompassed three key strands:corporate ownership and control; labor and standpoints of resistance; and platform capital and labor. By comparison, the cultural-industries school has analyzed the distinctiveness of individual sectors within journalism, including their structural and creative-labor characteristics. A subset of this school, the infomediation approach, highlights the impact of digital platforms. Unlike the cultural-industries school, radical media political economists often link their research to industry impact. These approaches draw on theoretical perspectives, including liberal pluralism, Marxism, and conflict theories, to analyze the commodification of journalism and social relations. Methodologically, these approaches typically draw on qualitative social science or humanistic methods to analyze media companies, governmental interventions, media production, labor, and resistance. Some political economists also use industry-level statistics to track media ownership concentration, the financial state of media markets, individual companies, and labor market trends. Future research should examine the financialization of journalism, its impact on funding models, the integration of generative artificial intelligence into the labor process, and a wider range of advocacy and activist organizations and practices.
The Commercial Era for Local Journalism is Over. What Comes Next
People living under oppressive regimes rarely take press freedoms for granted. But for those living in liberal democracies and accustomed to capitalist economics, losing such freedoms seems like a distant concern. Here in the US for example, despite the oft-rehearsed truism that democracy requires a free press, we rarely pause to consider whether journalism is receiving the requisite institutional support-or whether government has an affirmative duty to ensure that a press system exists at all. To the extent that we ever think about these relationships, most people living in market-driven societies assume that capitalist laws of supply and demand will always sustain local journalism. Few are attuned to detect market failure or consider what policy interventions are necessary to sustain the kind of journalism that is rarely profitable, but that democracy requires.
The year journalism and capitalism finally divorce
"It is capitalism that incentivizes the degradation of our news media-disinvesting in local journalism, weaponizing social media to capture our attention and data, and devaluing media workers' labor conditions."
Journalistic and Commercial News Values
Nordicom Review, 2002
Why do some events fill the columns and air time of news media, while others are ignored? Why do some stories make banner headlines whereas others merit no more than a few lines? What factors decide what news professionals consider newsworthy? Such questions are often answered-by journalists and media researchers alike-with references to journalistic news values or 'news criteria'. Some answers are normatively founded; others are pragmatic and descriptive. In the present article, I submit that editorial priorities should not be analyzed in purely journalistic terms. Instead, they should be seen as efforts to combine journalistic norms and editorial ambitions, on the one hand, with commercial norms and market objectives, on the other. Commercial Enterprise and Patron of an Institution News media have a dual nature. On the one hand they represent a societal institution that is ascribed a vital role in relation to such core political values as freedom of expression and democracy. On the other hand, they are businesses that produce commodities-information and entertainment-for a market. At the same time, because their products are descriptions of reality that influence our perceptions of the world around us, news media wield influence that extends far beyond the marketplace. Who controls the media is of significance to every member of society. As figures like Rupert Murdoch, Silvio Berlusconi and the new Russian media barons remind us, control of the media is a key to political power. And while many venerable industries wither and die (or undergo profound metamorphoses) the consciousness industry-as writer Hans Magnus Enzensberger (1974) dubbed the media and other actors in the communication sector-is rapidly expanding. Newspapers, radio programs and television transmissions differ with respect to how consumption of them affects our perception and understanding of reality. As Graham Murdoch observes: By providing accounts of the contemporary world and images of the 'good life', they play a pivotal role in shaping social consciousness, and it is this 'special relationship' between economic and cultural power that has made the issue of
In this essay, I attempt to shed light on Michael Schudson’s theoretical and political position vis-à vis commercialism as a shaping force of journalism. I document and analyze Schudson’s criticisms of market pressures on journalism, his criticisms of other critics of commercialism whom he sees as going too far, and then, the limits of the position he stakes out for himself—which is effectively, given his position as the authoritative synthesizer of the sociology of news, a position for journalism studies as a whole. In homage to Schudson’s classic alliterative model of “How Culture Works,” through five magic “R” words (rhetorical force, resolution, retrievability, retention, and resonance), I argue that the letter “C” unites the five reasons why Schudson is reluctant to overemphasize commercialism’s negative effects on journalism. It’s Complicated. There are Countervailing forces outside of the market and even when there are not, the market itself is self-Contradictory. Don’t underestimate the power of Contingency. And if all else fails, blame it on Culture.
By providing historical context for the recurring regulatory retreat in the face of structural problems in the news media, this study examines the policy discourse that continues to define the US journalism crisis and government’s inability to confront it. To contextualize this pattern, I compare two historical junctures, the first occurring in the 1940s, exemplified by the Hutchins Commission, and the second occurring in the more recent policy debates during the years 2009–2011, exemplified by the Waldman Report. Both of these historical moments represented a societal response to a journalism crisis, and both entailed deeply normative discussions about the role of media in a democratic society and government’s role in managing that relationship. A comparison of these historical case studies brings into focus recurring weaknesses in liberal reform efforts. Specifically, it highlights what I refer to as the “discursive capture” reflected in common assumptions about the proper relationship between media and government, and how this American paradigm is constrained by an implicit market fundamentalism.