Reflections on a Quarter Century of JME Publication

Abstract

The Journal of Media Economics was an impetuous and mad idea, born out of frustration and desires to promote more research on economic issues affecting media. The frustration part came naturally. Media and communication journals were only marginally interested in papers dealing with economics and existing media economic scholarship was too undeveloped to produce papers of interest to economic journals. The desire to promote and improve media economic research was prompted by the realization that many media issues and challenges could not be answered by the dominant social science research perspectives and would only be well understood by employing economic theory and methods. As we established the Journal a quarter of century ago, neither I nor its editorial board had an inkling that the field of study would grow so rapidly or that the Journal would play such a central role in its expansion. The field had been growing for a decade when the Journal was established in 1988. By today’s standards, the Journal was crudely designed and printed, but at the time it was on the leading edge of desktop publishing and on-demand printing. The biggest challenge was obtaining sufficient quality content, but it soon began attracting submissions from media, business, and economics scholars who created a body of knowledge that advanced the field rapidly. As editor I gained an advantage of seeing where the field was going long before its new directions made it to print. In its initial years the Journal focused on issues involving business and regulatory economics, primarily because those were the most developed areas of inquiry among scholars with an interest in media at that time. Structural studies using IO approaches, demand and consumption studies, resource allocation studies, financial performance studies, and market power studies became common, as were essays showing how to apply economic concepts to media analysis and media policy. Authors were particularly interested in the effects of new media and new entrants—at that time the spread of cable television and then telco entry into cable provision. The Journal matured as the field of media economics developed and interest in the issues involving media expanded to researchers in economic departments, as well as those in media and business schools. Although market issues remained a central theme, research about choice and behavior of consumers and companies flourished, incorporating concepts of risk, trust, and transaction costs. Research also began expanding from microto macroeconomic issues and economic modelling, which had been absent in earlier years of the Journal, began to appear and offer explanatory power. Articles began addressing issues of network economics, market