This preface (Media Industries in the Digital Age) is intended for prior readers of our book Understanding Media Industries who are wondering how this book compares. For readers unfamiliar with that volume, we recommend that you skip this preface and start reading with the Introduction.
At a 2003 press conference for the reboot of Battlestar Galactica, actor Edward James Olmos was emphatic. He implored the critics in attendance not to watch the new series if they were eager for a series faithful to the 1978 original or couldn’t handle Starbuck reimagined as a woman. The assembled critics snickered at Olmos’s pleading with them not to watch in defiance of the promotional ritual, but it was a wise and strategic move in setting audience expectations.
Similarly, we advise readers seeking the third edition of Understanding Media Industries (UMI) that this is not your book. Much like UMI, this book is designed to provide the spine or general foundation for an introductory media industries course, but its priorities and context are different. The foremost priority in this book is constructing an approach to media industries that incorporates “legacy” and “digital” media sectors in the integrated way they now operate. While such integration is now feasible, the state of media industry operations remains too unsettled to write about with certainty. It will probably be unsettled for the remainder of our working lives, but it seems likely that there will be significantly more resetting of the playing field in the next three to five years, particularly for video industries. Writing a text with the depth and detail of UMI is a long and tedious task, and while an update for UMI is urgently needed for our teaching, too much continues to change too quickly to justify the time needed for a more comprehensive account of a fleeting moment.
This book is shorter and meant to be augmented to suit the needs of different courses. Different departments span different media and learning goals, and a lot of national peculiarities require specific attention that make it difficult to anticipate all needs. Our plan is to keep teaching UMI concepts that are less developed here in the lectures and discussion activities we’ve always used. Widely shared examples and cases have grown more challenging given media fragmentation and the international breadth of our readers. This has led us to focus more here on “the business” rather than relying on American examples of everything. The cultural bits have always become outdated most quickly.
There is significant new conceptualization in these pages. One part of the digital and legacy integration comes from suggesting we not think exclusively in terms of a complex-professional media era but view it as a mode that now coexists with a formation that can be categorized as a simple-professional mode of operation. Given that “platforms,” the “digital economy,” and the “creator economy” are now concepts that extend well beyond media into industries as wide ranging as health care and manufacturing that require very different considerations, we are deliberately precise in identifying these distributors as “media monetization services” crucial to enabling simple-professional modes of media rather than discussing “platformization” generally. Finally, we turn a critical media industries lens on the tools of digital advertising and anticipate how differences in digital ad serving may lead to different implications for streaming video than advertising had for linear video. The book covers a wide range of topics that are organized in chapters of somewhat varied length.
From the vantage point of 2024 we see a lot of variation and co-existence rather than new things killing off the old. But the robust choice among and within media sectors has spread attention and consumer spending across companies to an extent that affects budgets for media making and formal employment. Media sectors may not “die” in the way some forecast, but the need to resize for today’s conditions weighs heavily on older sectors and the future opportunities in simple-professional media making.
