Mart Ots

Efficient Servants of Pluralism or Marginalized Media Policy Tools?: The Case of Swedish Press Subsidies

For more than 30 years, Sweden’s media policy has relied on positive incentives to promote diversity. That is, competition law has rarely been used to prevent dominant newspapers from acquiring smaller ones, but rather press subsidies have been used to increase survival rates and promote independence among the latter. Internationally, the broad trend toward concentration in newspaper markets has been of concern to policy makers, and the Swedish model has attracted considerable interest as a possible path to a more heterogeneous media landscape. However, over the last decade, ownership distribution on the newspaper market has started to change at an accelerating pace, and Swedish media policy stands at a crossroad—to increase reliance on subsidies or to make way for something new. The arising questions regarding how to reshape media policy have several parallels to the ongoing international debate. This case study explores the performance of subsidies from the perspective of pluralism and discusses alternative political responses and future policy directions.

Media Brand Cultures: Researching and Theorizing How Consumers Engage in the Social Construction of Media Brands

In this chapter we acknowledge the branding process as an interplay between brand owners, consumers, popular culture, and other stakeholders. This interdependence between management practices and the external environment is becoming increasingly evident, not the least in the field of media. In a world of social and participatory media, consumers are given more and more opportunities to interact with, and through, their favorite brands. On the one hand these interactions may be signs of deep and sincere appreciation, while at the same time making brands more and more difficult to control or direct from a managerial point of view. This has led brand managers and researchers to identify a need for new insights into the cultures of brands. The research on consumer culture that has evolved over the past decades has the power to provide guidance. This chapter offers an introduction to researching and theorizing how consumers engage in the social construction of media brands and points out a handful of promising research areas.

The Shifting Role of Value-Added Tax (VAT) as a Media Policy Tool: A Three-Country Comparison of Political Justifications

Media policy schemes around the world are seemingly shifting character. As budgets for direct subsidies are under increasing pressure, the role of indirect tools, such as tax reductions, are growing in relative importance. This article explores the political justifications of value-added tax (VAT) as a media policy tool, and how longitudinal shifts indicate broader changes in the media systems. Based on a document analysis of newspaper VAT development in three countries with similar historical policy models—Finland, Sweden and Norway—the article identifies and describes the dynamics between four major policy positions; transparency, pluralism, harmonisation and financial austerity.

What Is So Special About Media Branding? Peculiarities and Commonalities of a Growing Research Area

The view of media products as brands, a genuine economic construct driven by commercial interests, has gained relevance in media economic research. It is demonstrated by a rising number of publications in this field. Therein the efforts to define the term media brand seem to be an ongoing debate in the literature between scholars in the areas of communication, marketing and public relations (McDowell, 2006). From an audience’s perspective we may understand a media brand as a construct carrying all the connotations of the audience in terms of the emotional, stylistic, cognitive, unconscious or conscious significations.

Competition, Collaboration and Cooperation: Swedish Provincial Newspaper Markets In Transition

Abstract A wave of mergers has reshaped the Swedish newspaper market over the past decade. Competition has been gradually replaced with collaboration, block-building and alliances. In 11 out of 15 cities with more than one daily newspaper, a single owner controls the entire market. Based a mail survey and a short case study, this paper asks how newspapers on these markets balance professional areas of competition and collaboration, without compromising strategic differentiation, customer confidence and journalistic independence.

Just doing it: theorising integrated marketing communications (IMC) practices

Purpose This paper aims to elaborate on the concept of “integrated marketing communication (IMC) practice” and provide an empirical exposition of how integration is enacted in the lifeworlds of marketing practitioners, drawing from the “practice turn” in management studies. Although IMC is a well-known conceptual idea in academia, there is insufficient theorisation of what it means “to do” IMC. Despite broad acceptance for IMC, there has been scant application of available organisational and sociological theories to illuminate actual IMC practices in the field. Design/methodology/approach The paper introduces practice theory as a lens through which to study and analyse IMC practices. Using qualitative coding and interpretative analysis, the framework was operationalised and applied to a two-year organisational ethnography encompassing IMC planning activities in at a leading Swedish retailer. Findings Findings demonstrate how practitioners develop explicit and implicit strategies to enact strategic integration. The study conceptualises IMC as a set of interrelated practices, or routinised behaviours, which are repeated and organised by some social or formal rules and conventions. In the ethnographic context of the study, “IMC as practice” is exhibited in the forms of routines, material set-ups, rules and procedures, cultural templates and teleoaffective structures. Originality/value The paper proposes a novel set of theoretical and methodological tools that can be used to understand how IMC lives as a set of practices inside organisations. It specifically conceptualises the link between mental and objectified, materialised and routinised activities that has previously been escaping the sphere of theorisation. By creating language and tools to capture hitherto unmodellable phenomena, the paper opens many new avenues for future research.

Sweden: State Support to Newspapers in Transition

Newspapers in Sweden have traditionally held a strong position in the media landscape. They have long been in the centre of public debate and stood out as dominant sources of local and regional news coverage in the country. Readership figures are still among the highest in the world, and until the 1990s, when the audiovisual sector was deregulated, the newspaper industry enjoyed an unrivalled position also on the advertising market. However, during the last decade, the shift has been dramatic. Competition from commercial Internet and TV companies has since cut deep into the newspaper advertising market share, and circulation figures dropped relentlessly year by year.

Media business studies as we see it: why does it matter, for whom, and how do you get published?

To the delight of the renewed editorial team, the Journal of Media Business Studies (JOMBS) receives an increasing number of submissions every week. Given the growing interest in the study of media business, whether from the angle of economics, management, strategy, organisation studies, marketing, consumer behaviour, innovation and entrepreneurship or other contributing disciplines, this editorial aims to clarify how we look at the field and wish to move the journal forward. In particular, we want to address a few questions that we believe are central for those who wish to publish their research with us and thereby contribute to the academic discussion. This article gives a more elaborate explanation to the aims and scope of JOMBS.

Creating Loyalty Towards Magazine Websites: Insights from the Double Jeopardy Phenomenon

For years, magazine publishers have been developing their online presence, pursuing a range of different goals and strategies for their websites. One of the key questions in creating online presence is whether to allocate resources on developing the offline print brand and expect brand equity transfer to the online environment or to allocate resources on developing the online brand for new audience. In this paper the authors propose an application of double jeopardy approach for assessing this issue. Finnish secondary data is used to test two competing research hypotheses. The analysis reveals that the magazine publishers who have been able to build market share in online environment seem to have more loyal customer-base in their websites. Market share of printed magazine does not predict loyalty towards magazine websites.

Market Structure and Innovation Policies in Sweden

The Swedish media policy system stems from the Nordic idea of the welfare state, where the state has an obligation to enlighten its citizens and ensure equal social- and cultural possibilities for all. Similar to its Nordic neighbours the Swedish news media industry is characterised by financially strong and relatively large public service institutions that enjoy high levels of public confidence and trust in society. At the same time there is a developed commercial media sector that is protected by the rules of press freedom. In fact, the Swedish press freedom act, installed in 1766, is the oldest of its kind in the world. Historically high newspaper readership figures are now declining in Sweden like the rest of the western world. At the same time the decline of traditional media usage has been shifted into early adoption of internet services, where Sweden (alongside its Nordic neighbours) today have some of the world’s highest levels market penetration of mobile broadband.