How Media Ownership Matters

Ownership has always been assumed, in both scholarship and public discussion, to be a key factor affecting the production of news. But it's also something extremely hard to study systematically. How Media Ownership Matters is the finest work to date on this subject, rigorous and complex at the same time engaging and accessible. It's a wonderful contribution to the political economy of news. * Daniel C. Hallin, Distinguished Professor Emeritus and Distinguished Professor of the Graduate Division, Department of Communication, University of California, San Diego *
Everyone seriously interested in the links between media ownership, funding models, and investment in news reporting should read this book. It is a major advance of our understanding of media ownership and how it matters, bringing extensive evidence and analytical clarity to an area all too often either ignored or reduced to polemics. * Rasmus Kleis Nielsen, Director of the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, University of Oxford *
How Media Ownership Matters takes political economy scholarship out of its overdetermined focus on media consolidation. With a cross-national, empirically driven analysis of institutional, political, and cultural logics of the news industry, this book will be foundational to anyone hoping to understand not just how but why media ownership matters. * Nik Usher, Associate Professor of Communication, University of San Diego *
Highly recommended for collections in journalism and mass communication graduate programs. * R. A. Logan, Choice *
Benson, Hessérus, Neff, and Sedel have produced a landmark study that reframes the debate on media ownership for the twenty-first century. ..this volume stands as a significant and enduring contribution to communication scholarship, offering a nuanced framework that will inform and challenge future research on the structural forces shaping contemporary media systems. * Murat Akser, International Journal of Communication *
How Media Ownership Matters is full of interesting stories from those on the front lines of trying to conduct journalism and also earn revenue. ... The taxonomy of different kinds of ownership is capacious enough to include digital natives as well as public television and the result is a richly detailed portrayal of news outlets in the world today. * Anya Schiffrin, Journalism *
The book's real advance is to move from ownership as a single variable to 'ownership complexes', defined as 'configurations of ownership forms, audiences, and funding mechanisms' oriented toward producing particular kinds of news. ... How Media Ownership Matters offers a convincing integration of ownership and media power ... In that sense, it sits productively alongside canonical accounts such as Manufacturing Consent (Herman & Chomsky), The New Media Monopoly (Bagdikian) and Media Concentration and Democracy (Baker) ... It will be especially valuable for scholars in political economy, comparative media systems, and journalism studies, as well as for practitioners and policymakers seeking a sharper empirical language for how ownership, funding, and audience strategies shape newsroom capacity and journalistic performance. * Hendrik Theine, International Journal of Press/Politics *
A good book is one that helps us think better, and I am convinced that this is the case with How Media Ownership Matters. Consolidating years of research by its lead author in association with several colleagues, this manuscript already reads as a classic that continues a tradition of critical studies on media ownership. * Tales Tomas, Journalistica *