Twenty-First-Century Media Industry

The Twenty-First-Century Media Industry: Economic and Managerial Implications in the Age of New Media examines the role that new media technologies are having on the traditional media industry from a media management perspective. Consumer behaviors and consumer expectations are being shaped by new media technologies. They now expect information on-demand and on-the-go as well as at their finger-tips via the Internet. In order to stay relevant, traditional media managers and practitioners are adapting to these consumer demands and expectations by developing new business models and new business philosophies to stay competitive. The contributors to this volume explore the business strategies being implemented by some media industries such as newspapers and the recording industry who are struggling to not only remain competitive and profitable, but also to survive. The Twenty-First-Century Media Industry provides an intriguing examination of how traditional media industries are adapting to new media technologies and evolving in the twenty-first century.

The 21st Century Media Industry is well worth reading not only for its broad scope, but for the timeliness of the chapters. Readers of this book will come away with a clear conceptual map of the changing media landscape as well as a detailed understanding of the challenges of the years ahead in forging a new business model, or set of business models, for media operating in the digital age., Predicting the future of the media industry at this juncture may sound audacious, yet this volume does so, and the future it presents is auspicious. The 13 chapters—all by US academicians and media scholars with impressive credentials—address possible approaches to media management, new technologies and innovations, and the implications of various media: recorded music, print, journalism, cable and broadcasting (including radio), cinema, the Internet, mobile telephones. Media have saturated modern society for the past 50 years. The opening essay, coauthored by Hendricks (Stephen F. Austin State Univ.) and Susan Smith, notes that "the latter half of the twentieth century saw an explosion in the communication industry [with] personal computers, satellites, cable television, cell phones, digital and high definition television, DVDs and the World Wide Web." But, the essay goes on to observe, the change is not in the media per se but rather in the "delivery systems." That the book does not offer an exact definition of the term "new media" is only right, given that in the 1450s the printing press was a "new medium." Summing Up: Highly recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty.

John Allen Hendricks is the director of the division of communication and contemporary culture and professor of communication at Stephen F. Austin State University.