Making Media

Production, Practices, and Professions

Edited by
Mark Deuze and Mirjam Prenger

Amsterdam University Press

Cover illustration: Artwork by Wineke Gartz

Cover design: Gijs Mathijs Ontwepers, Amsterdam

Lay-out: Crius Group, Hulshout

ISBN 978 94 6298 811 8

e-ISBN 978 90 4854 015 0

e-ISBN 978 90 4855 070 8 (ePub)

DOI 10.5117/9789462988118

NUR 810

© The authors / Amsterdam University Press B.V., Amsterdam 2019

All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this book may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the written permission of both the copyright owner and the author of the book.

Every effort has been made to obtain permission to use all copyrighted illustrations reproduced in this book. Nonetheless, whosoever believes to have rights to this material is advised to contact the publisher.

Table of Contents

Introduction

1. Making Media: Production, Practices, and Professions

Mark Deuze and Mirjam Prenger

Production

Research

2. Media Industries: A Decade in Review

Jennifer Holt and Alisa Perren

3. Media Production Research and the Challenge of Normativity

David Lee and Anna Zoellner

4. Access and Mistrust in Media Industries Research

Patrick Vonderau

5. Cultural and Creative Industries and the Political Economy of Communication

Bernard Miège

6. The Platformization of Making Media

David Nieborg and Thomas Poell (with Mark Deuze)

Economics and Management

7. The Disappearing Product and the New Intermediaries

Chris Bilton

8. Value Production in Media Industries and Everyday Life

Göran Bolin

9. Transformation and Innovation of Media Business Models

Mikko Villi and Robert G. Picard

10. Shifts in Consumer Engagement and Media Business Models

Sylvia Chan-Olmsted and Rang Wang

11. Media Industries’ Management Characteristics and Challenges in a Converging Digital World

Paolo Faustino and Eli Noam

Policy

12. Global Media Industries and Media Policy

Terry Flew and Nicolas Suzor

13. Media Concentration in the Age of the Internet and Mobile Phones

Dwayne Winseck

Practices

Innovation

14. Making (Sense of) Media Innovations

Arne H. Krumsvik, Stefania Milan, Niamh Ní Bhroin, and Tanja Storsul

15. Start-up Ecosystems Between Affordance Networks, Symbolic Form, and Cultural Practice

Stefan Werning

Work Conditions

16. Precarity in Media Work

Penny O’Donnell and Lawrie Zion

17. Making It in a Freelance World

Nicole S. Cohen

18. Diversity and Opportunity in the Media Industries

Doris Ruth Eikhof and Stevie Marsden

19. Labour and the Next Internet

Vincent Mosco

Affective Labour

20. Affective Labour and Media Work

Eugenia Siapera

21. Affective Qualities of Creative Labour

Zelmarie Cantillon and Sarah Baker

22. A Business of One or Nurturing the Craft: Who are You?

Ilana Gershon and Mark Deuze

Professions

Music

23. Music in Times of Streaming: Transformation and Debate

Sofia Johansson

24. Popular Music, Streaming, and Promotional Media: Enduring and Emerging Industrial Logics

Leslie M. Meier

Television

25. Show Me the Money: How Revenue Strategies Change the Creative Possibilities of Internet-Distributed Television

Amanda D. Lotz

26. Flexibility, Innovation, and Precarity in the Television Industry

Paul Dwyer

Social Media

27. Creator Management in the Social Media Entertainment Industry

David Craig

28. #Dreamjob: The Promises and Perils of a Creative Career in Social Media

Brooke Erin Duffy

Public Relations and Advertising

29. Redefining Advertising in a Changing Media Landscape

Sara Rosengren

30. Perceptions and Realities of the Integration of Advertising and Public Relations

Dustin Supa

Digital Games

31. Game Production Logics at Work: Convergence and Divergence

Aphra Kerr

32. Reflections on the Shifts and Swerves of the Global Games Industry

Casey O’Donnell

Journalism

33. ‘It Never Stops’: The Implicit Norm of Working Long Hours in Entrepreneurial Journalism

Amanda Brouwers and Tamara Witschge

34. Transmedia Production: Key Steps in Creating a Storyworld

Ana Serrano Tellería (with Mirjam Prenger)

Conclusion

35. Making Media: Observations and Futures

Henry Jenkins, Elizabeth Saad Corrẽa, Anthony Fung, and Tanja Bosch

Author Biographies

Introduction

1. Making Media: Production, Practices, and Professions

Mark Deuze and Mirjam Prenger

Introduction

What does it mean to make media professionally? To be a journalist, a marketing communicator, advertising creative, or public relations practitioner? What is it like to work in film or television, to develop games, to be a musician, or manage a record label for a living? It is safe to say that the answers to these questions vary greatly. Whereas the various fields of cultural work used to be considered in terms of their specifics, contemporary scholarship acknowledges the great diversity and hybridization of practices and careers that make up formerly distinct professions in the media industries. Profound transformations are afoot in the areas of technology and digitalization, management and economics, culture and audience preferences, as well as in the role politics and policymaking plays in both enabling and constraining the ways in which media industries and professionals can do their work and earn a living.

This book aims to investigate, illustrate, and critically analyse how the various technological, political, economic, and social transformations are affecting the media industries as well as the people professionally making media. The goal is to provide those interested in studying media industries and production, and those considering a career in the media a clear grasp of the relevant topics and themes, as well as an understanding of what shapes media work. The authors gathered in this volume provide a comprehensive review of the scholarly research on making media, delving specifically into emerging themes such as the emotional quality of media work, the radical changes affecting the business operations of media firms, and ways in which precarity determines the lived experience of media professionals across a variety of media industries. In doing so, we endeavour to bring into conversation different domains of theory and practice in media industries: political economy and cultural studies; the sociology of work and psychology of professional decision-making; production and management studies.

In order to grasp the many developments shaping the creative work media professionals do, we have structured this book in three sections: production, practices, and professions. Media production considers issues at play within, across, and around the institutions and forces that create our media, our information, and our culture: management and economics, media policy, markets, consumers (Hesmondhalgh, 2006; Paterson, Lee, Saha, & Zoellner, 2015). Media practices involve the various ways in which media professionals make media (and, importantly, how they ‘make it work’ in the media industries): innovation, working conditions, affective labour. Media professions are those more or less demarcated fields of work that make up professional life in the media industries, including (but not limited to): journalism, advertising, marketing communications, public relations, digital games, television, music and recording, and social media entertainment.

Media production

Technology has always been an amplifier and accelerator of media industry trends, just as developments in media making have inspired and supercharged the development of technology. However, in recent decades there has been a marked shift from consumer electronics to information technology as the most powerful sectoral force shaping how media content gets produced, distributed, and experienced. At the heart of the changes within and across the media industries is the role of the internet, platforms, and connected devices such as smartphones. In only a short time these technologies and the businesses that thrive within these infrastructures – the so-called new intermediaries, from hardware manufacturers (Samsung, Apple) and software developers (Microsoft, Alphabet, Tencent) to platforms (Facebook, Google, YouTube) and online marketplaces and services (Netflix, Amazon, Spotify) – have uprooted and disrupted the ways in which legacy media operate. Generally, it is safe to say that these technologies and corporations have nestled themselves firmly in-between media users and producers, making each of them co-dependent on their products and platforms for formatting, distributing, accessing, and sharing media content.

As media institutions (and the people working across the media industries) adapt to this new reality, the values, expectations, and structures of the digital economy come to co-determine creative decisions and processes. Automation, data, and algorithms play an increasing role in all forms of media work, acting as demand predictors as well as content creators (Napoli, 2014). The digital technological context of media work means that more focus is placed on user-generated content and consumer engagement, as well as on generating (and using) data about users and consumers of products and services online.

As institutions across the media industries respond to (and, in part, join forces with) the new cultural intermediaries, they continue to computerize and digitalize all elements of the production cycle of making media. Sometimes, this means that entire divisions, departments or standalone companies are formed, and new professional roles emerge – such as content manager, engagement editor, data analyst, and digital editor. In other instances, the emerging technological context is implemented to primarily facilitate existing work and production processes – generally leading to job cuts and other ‘doing more work with fewer workers’ deleterious managerial interventions. To some extent, all of this means that the standard ways of doing things can change quite substantially in the industry, while, at the same time, some companies use newer technologies primarily to maintain and streamline existing structures and production cycles.

Key is that processes of disruption and consolidation co-exist, in essence liquefying and solidifying media production at the same time.

Media practices

In terms of the actual work of making media, the emerging technological context of media work diminishes the cost of the production of media. Media companies large and small struggle to adapt, as they tend to be stuck in ‘heavy’ material contexts consisting of expensive studio complexes and associated equipment, dedicated newsrooms, content management systems, and other proprietary software packages and hardware configurations designed for particular uses within specific companies and industries.

The immaterial context of media organization and management similarly comes under pressure from technological changes. Legacy media are historically oriented toward specific schedules associated with platform-specific production processes benchmarked by deadlines, around which other societal systems – such as companies, government institutions, and political parties – traditionally organize their operations (as expressed through press conferences, national and global release schedules of films and games, and routinized cycles in advertising determined by events and seasons). However, the digital realm introduces a new media logic, one that seems oblivious to industrial-age schedules or more or less predictable production cycles, forcing organizations to aggressively replace ‘analogue’ production practices with ‘digital’ ones. The digital economy tends to be sold as one that is ‘always on’ and therefore managing a permanent publication presence is of the essence to any media firm or professional wishing to stand out. In the process, new technologies (and associated values and practices) are introduced to manage an organization of work that is supposedly more flexible, nimble, and (most importantly) always ready to go.