Managing Media Firms and Industries: What’s So Special About Media Management? Edited by Gregory Ferrell Lowe and Charles Brown

Abstract

This rich volume, edited and compiled by two former presidents of the European Media Management Association (EMMA)—Gregory F. Lowe, professor of media management at the University of Tampere in Finland, and Charles Brown, principal lecturer at the University of Westminster’s media management program—is an act of self-declaration. Brown and Lowe set out to contribute to the fermentation of the field—and start with a sobering analysis: Lowe writes that we cannot yet speak of a discipline, “because there are no characteristic theories or cohesiveness in a shared body of knowledge already proven to be both distinctive and important” (p. 12). Lowe and Brown host an exquisite selection of contributions, mainly by European and U.S.-based scholars, with the shared goal to help establish the discipline, by explicitly discussing the academic field itself and its premier venues, but also—quite extensively—by highlighting contemporary topics in media management research. The book is structured into four parts, each of which carries four chapters. The first section on scholarship and distinction assesses the status of the field. An overview study by Leona Achtenhagen and Bozena Mierzejewska, for example, compares different performance metrics of scholarly media business journals as a means to assess the maturity of the field. They conclude that too little theorizing has been done just yet. Another interesting contribution in this section is Brown’s elaboration of the usefulness of critical management studies for media management. He asks the relevant question of what it is that media management seeks to achieve in the first place. The book’s second section provides an overview about media governance in European settings. It investigates the questions of independence in public service media, of corporate social responsibility in the media, and, in Justin Schlosberg’s article, provides a plea for consideration of political economy perspectives in media management to analyze the crisis of institutional journalism—“structural decline and the funding crisis” (p. 167). Christian Nissen’s account and model of government influence in public service media is particularly insightful. As a former director general of the Danish public service broadcaster DR (Danish Broadcasting Corporation), Nissen concludes that the only sustainable solution to defend public service media against government influence is governments “being conceived accountable by their real owner: civil society” (p. 139). Section three emphasizes business models, entrepreneurship, and the distinct media economics that render a media management perspective worthwhile. Andreas Will, Dennis Brüntje and Britta Gossel’s chapter, for example, is a laudable proposal to emphasize entrepreneurship and new media business ventures in media management research, rather than the former focus on studying traditional mainstream media outlets. They criticize the field—rightfully—for being “still strongly influenced by perspectives inculcated in the era of mass media” (p. 204). The book’s fourth segment depicts the specifics of media as products and the audience. Philip Napoli, for instance, discusses the tripartite features of the audience as product, consumer and producer to illustrate “how media management is fundamentally different from management in other industries” (p. 272). Another chapter, penned by Annette Hill, INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL ON MEDIA MANAGEMENT 2018, VOL. 20, NO. 1, 78–79