Media Management Matters: Challenges and Opportunities for Bridging Theory and Practice

This edited volume explores media management as engaged scholarship, building a bridge between theory and practice and discussing research collaboration between academia, policymakers and the media industry. In addition to advancing the scholarly discipline, it also questions, investigates and discusses the practical value of the research undertaken, showing how media management research can provide actionable, practice-relevant knowledge to decision makers throughout the media industry.

The volume is broken into two parts: a section reflecting on the need for collaboration between research and practice, and a section overviewing specific projects that aim to deliver administrative value to stakeholders. The international research projects presented here span topics such as digital transformation, business models in news and digital journalism, media entrepreneurship and start-ups, ad-blocking, location-based services, audiovisual consumption preferences, the sustainability of small television markets, co-located and clustered industries and digital privacy. Incorporating under-used methodological approaches, such as action research and ethnography, Media Management Matters brings suggestions for how scholarship might be promoted outside academia. Simply put, this book aims to demonstrate why media management matters.

Featuring an international roster of contributors, this collection is essential reading for scholars and practitioners of media management, business and policy.

Ulrike Rohn is Professor of Media Economics and Management at Tallinn University, Estonia, where she works at the Baltic Film, Media, Arts, and Communication School (BFM) and the Centre of Excellence in Media Innovation and Digital Culture (MEDIT). She served as the President of the European Media Management Association (emma, 2016–2020), and is co-Editor of the Springer Series in Media Industries and Associate Editor of the Journal of Media Business Studies. Dr. Rohn’s research interests include, among others, audiovisual policies, media business models and international media strategies. Latter research interest has led to her book publication Cultural Barriers to the Success of Foreign Media Content: Western Media in China, India, and Japan (2010).

Tom Evens is an Assistant Professor at research group for Media, Innovation and Communication Technologies (imec-mict-UGent) at the Department of Communication Sciences at Ghent University, Belgium. He teaches in media economics, business model innovation and technology policy. He specialises in the economics and policies of media and technology industries, and has published widely on the media business. He is the lead author of The Political Economy of Television Sports Rights (2013) and Platform Power and Policy in Transforming Television Markets (2018). He served as the Deputy President of the European Media Management Association between 2017 and 2019. He is a member of several editorial boards and has been consulting several governments and media organisations on strategy and public policy issues.