The Media Economy. Albarran, Alan B. (2010). New York: Routledge. pp. 201.
With everyone looking for the business model that puts the economy back in media economy, books with that title raise great hope. The difficulty in writing a book about the media economy is that the ecosystem is so fluid that any attempt to describe it is in danger of becoming a history and not a model for the future.
Alan B. Albarran’s The Media Economy is a good description of how macroeconomic principles can be used to understand and analyze media firms and industries. It provides a framework to standardize the analysis of a media company in the way that other firms are analyzed. The book provides a discussion of economic theories and principles and applies them to media organizations. However, it is more of a basic economics text than it is a discussion of the uniqueness of a media economy.
Albarran defines media economy as “the study of how media firms and industries function across different levels of activity (e.g., globalization, regulation, technology, and social ASPECTS) through the use of theories, concepts, and principles drawn from macroeconomic and microeconomic perspectives” (p. 3). This definition confines the analysis to the traditional media industries that have been disrupted by the entrepreneurial economy that results when everyone can be a publisher.
A key part of understanding the media economy is making sense of what is disrupting it and reshaping it. This book does not provide that analysis. The economy of media firms has been thoroughly disrupted by those firms’ decisions to offer their content free online and by the fact that an army of individuals also provides free content. How do we understand and analyze a media economy where individuals in their apartments around the world are disrupting it by creating new free products? What does this mean for the bottom line of the NBC’s or Verizon’s or newspapers of the world?
The “Issue of Free” receives about one page of discussion in this book. The issue of free is simply too powerful and too complex for that cursory treatment. Similarly, the operation of the media economy as part of the distributed social networking economy must be discussed if one is to understand the media economy in the entire media ecosystem.
The book is organized well for teaching about macro influences on media firms. The author is a professor of radio, television, and film, and the director of the Center for Spanish Language Media at the University of North Texas, as well as the former editor of the Journal of Media Economics and the International Journal for Media Management. Albarran discusses key economic concepts in chapters devoted to markets, technology, regulation, finance, labor, and multi-platform distribution. This book lays a useful foundation for those who want to understand or create business models that build upon a knowledge of what has and what has not worked for media firms.
Other issues affecting our understanding of the media economy are not just those in the media field. Each week, new technologies and new products find uses as communication tools. Facebook, Twitter, or FourSquare were designed as tools for social networking. Additionally, however, they are being used as tools to spread news and information. They have become an essential part of the media economy—not only because of their large individual valuations, but also because of how they continue to disrupt the revenue streams of the firms that are the main unit of analysis of this book. Studying the media economy means we also need to study the technology economy.
As innovators keep disrupting and changing the way we communicate, the successful firms become those that can ingest these disruptions without killing them. Innovations need a specific culture in which to thrive, and often that culture is quite different from the one that maintains the established media firm. How media organizations adapt to change and create a culture that supports change is a key element of their survival. If we want to know what media organizations will be around in five to ten years, because they had a business model that survived disruption, we need to look at those organizations that have created a culture that supports and encourages constant change.
GARY KEBBEL
University of Nebraska-Lincoln