Abstract
Content is King: News Media Management in the Digital Age is an international effort to summarize issues and ideas about how regional newspapers can compete with the Internet. Contributors include eleven scholars (United Kingdom: six, United States: four, Spain: one), with research and examples cited primarily from the United Kingdom, United States, and Finland. Editors Graham and Greenhill are U.K. business professors, whereas Shaw is a retired journalism professor (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill) and Vargo is assistant professor of public relations (University of Alabama at Tuscaloosa).
The contributions are in general disappointing. Chapter 3, “Disruptive technologies and community engagement,” by Vargo and Shaw, suggests that a “disruptive [news] media company” is possible. But just when the reader gets to that point where she might learn something new, the authors ask a lot of questions and give few answers. Vargo’s Chapter 10, “News organizations and online communities: The science of how to build effective social networks,” revisits two-step flow theory for social media and should be helpful to many for its intelligence and clarity. Most other chapters are even less worth reading.
Graham and Greenhill’s Chapter 8, “News consumption and cross-media synergies,” finally offers original social scientific research. It reports testing a model for how much synergy between print and online products of British newspapers affects “the average number of copies sold per day combined with the number of online subscribers.” They conclude, The model shows that synergy is generally weak in the NS [UK Newspaper Society database] sample and that, while there is some positive influence on the decline in circulations, this is not indeed sufficient to reverse the decline in circulations. This indicates that the difference between highly integrated firms and nonintegrated firms is not that strong, and this may in fact in reflect the speed of digital change confronting the industry and inability of news firms to deal with strategic and declining circulations.
Yes, or it could mean something else, including that Graham and Greenhill picked the wrong set of independent variables.
In addition to not telling us much of anything that hasn’t been out there for somewhere between five and twenty years, most (or all) of this book’s editors and authors seem completely unaware of virtually all the relevant professional and academic literature on media economics, media management, and journalism in the Internet age, probably because fewer than half the contributors teach or have taught in a journalism or media program. (Many chapters have shockingly few references.) The book offers no indication that any contributor worked in the news media. And while most business sources are on point, others range from irrelevant articles on utterly unrelated industries (e.g., health care) to perfunctory treatments of old shoes (Maslow’s hierarchy or Michael Porter’s strategy) from old (Understanding News, 1982) to older (The Community Press in an Urban Setting, 1952) to oldest (Principles of Economics: An Introduction, 1890).
Just being aware of certain facts would have greatly informed this book’s analyses. For instance, most U.S. newspapers’ total readerships have increased in the past 10 years when print and online readerships are added together; then duplication eliminated. (But one probably must read Editor & Publisher magazine to know this, and few academics on either side of the Atlantic do that.) Twitter is mentioned throughout this media economics and management book, but not the fact that under generally accepted accounting principles (GAAP), the company (10 years old in early 2016) has never made an operating profit and may well never do so. Apparently stuck in a Media Monopoly mind-set, contributors also seem utterly unaware that U.S. media conglomerates have been instead been breaking up, as Gannett, Lee Enterprises, Belo Corp., E.W. Scripps Co., Tribune, Time Warner, News Corp., and others either sold their television properties or split into a print company and a television company (each naturally claiming it was glad to dump the other). Contributors also seem completely unaware that in many smaller cities, citizens still literally cannot obtain local news from any source other than the closest newspaper. Or that citizens’ journalism contributions are still relatively minimal except for raw photos and video (which may be news, but isn’t journalism), that citizen comments on newspaper websites generally range from inaccurate to pointless to mean or profane, or that the most popular YouTube videos are on subjects such as pet cats.
Vargo (Chapter 10) is aware that a news item online (such as on Twitter or a corporate website) “may only be seen by a handful of people,” and that making something “go viral” is extremely difficult and unpredictable. (Thus, only daily newspapers and TV newscasts still predictably deliver, pardon me, mass audiences.) But other contributors sometimes seem more intent on describing the news media industry more as they or business textbook authors think it is or as the public perceives it, rather than as it really is.
Instead of Content is King, this reviewer still recommends the brilliant The Curse of the Mogul: What’s Wrong with the World’s Leading Media Companies, by Jonathan A. Knee, Bruce C. Greenwald, and Ava Seave (Portfolio, 2011), plus both of Mark Briggs’s books.