This paper explores the implementation of service-orientated strategies within newspapers using SDL and servitisation as theoretical departure points. This perspective helps to interpret the advancements and barriers in the current marketing innovation activities in the industry. Based on the exemplary case of the award-winning Svenska Dagbladet, we show that use is made of servitisation and SDL to the extent allowed by some strategic determinants of institutional nature. While some components of SDL have been implemented successfully others–customisation, resource development and coordination, and dialogue-based marketing communication–present managerial opportunities to increase value co-creation. But for this to happen the industry may need to consider changes in some of the institutional components of qualitative news that today act as institutional limits to innovation.

This paper examines why strategy innovation is rare in the regional news industry. It integrates the knowledge-based view of a firm, path-dependence theoretical perspective and the field of business model studies to interpret the historic emergence, formation, and current lock-in of legacy regional newspapers. The historic case of the provincial press in England is analysed to consider how, in an industrial context of relative simplicity and certainty, path-dependent formation processes are led by knowledge integration mechanisms.

This article explores the role of leadership and the effects of different types of personnel planning, hiring, and development in publishing companies. Based on three case studies from the German newspaper industry, it finds the human resource planning is increasingly relevant to media firms, that many hiring practices lack sophistication and strategic orientation, and that development activities are relatively weak. The article suggests that greater attention to human relations activities should assist companies in coping with the dynamic environments currently faced by media firms and in preparing firms to develop and change as media markets are altered.

This study joins the scholarly discussion that uses strategy in media management and provides a developed framework of strategic issues. This paper assists organisations in overcoming uncertainty by helping them construct issues and not impose the opportunity or threat labels on ill-defined issues. Based on a qualitative case study of two newspapers that represent an industry in disruption, this paper extends the existing conceptual framework on strategic issues by providing an additional strategic issue label, amorphous issues, that captures the uncertainties organisation members face during periods of disruption. Moreover, this paper also illustrates how the construction of issues can change over time. This emphasises the dynamic nature of strategic issues construction, which more closely aligns with the disruptive environment in which many contemporary organisations operate.

This paper explores consumer behavioural patterns on a magazine website. By using a unique dataset of real-life click stream data from 295 magazine website visitors, interesting behavioural patterns are noted: most importantly, 86% of all sessions only visit the blogs hosted by the magazine. This means that the visitors short-circuit the start page and are not exposed to any editorial content at all, and consequently not to any commercial content on those pages. Sessions visiting editorial content, commercial content or social media links actually represent only 1% or less of all sessions recorded. Consequently, the online platform gives very limited support for the business model. Our data questions the general assumption that online platforms are key components of a contemporary magazine’s business model.

In the Nordic countries, alternative methods of how to finance public service broadcasting are now being discussed. A number of alternatives have been suggested as alternatives to maintaining the traditional license fee system, the main alternative being to replace it with a tax or with a so called media charge. This study concentrates on the debate in Sweden in comparison to the other Nordic countries. In Sweden a new public service-committee of inquiry was appointed 2011, with the task of considering the psb-financing system.

This paper explores the intersection between sustainability and social media activity by studying how user-generated content (UGC) creation enacted and communicated social sustainability in times of restricted social interaction. The context is Wuhan in China, a city that implemented a 76-day lockdown in the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic. Based on a sample of 187 short videos created and posted by Wuhan residents on Douyin (TikTok) during the lockdown, this paper answers this question - how did UGC creators produce short videos on social media to facilitate social connections with others? UGC creators' video-making practices are conceptualised in the typology of Evoking, Performing, Collaborating, and Narrating, and each practice enabled creators to connect and socialise virtually with others, thus contributing to all participants' social sustainability in a pandemic. This study contributes to media management scholarship by adding knowledge to the understanding of two areas: the productive role of media audiences, especially their content production practices and logics; the nature of short videos as media products.

The growth of media eocomics scholarship globally has increased the need to understand its development both at international and national levels. This paper focuses on development of research in China. Applying a meta-research method, the paper reviews 1257 studies. It identifies three unique features of Chinese media economics research, and it concludes that despite of challenges, with unique country characteristics and great market potential, there is a foreseeable prosperous future in the field in the years to come.

This article explores the context and competing interests in media ownership policy, arguing that the current environments create regulatory uncertainty that harms both public and private interests. It explores challenges and conflicts that constrain policy, contemporary policy trends,  the role of economics in creating conditions that are the impetus for policy, and needs for novel approaches in addressing ownership concerns in the contemporary environment.

Book Review of 'Understanding the Global TV Format' by Albert Moran with Justin Malbon (Bristol, Intellect 2006) (ISBN 1-84150-132-8)

During the last decade, new technologies, such as the Internet, mobile phones and more recently the new reading devices, have posed new challenges for the magazine publishing industry and will continue to do so. Here we explore commonalities among magazine publishers in the forefront of integrating new media into their businesses. We approach this by combining two streams of management literature: dynamic capabilities and decision making. A case study of four innovative magazine publishers has been conducted where the practices related to business development and their underlying decision making logic have been analyzed.

The field of media management has grown frenetically. Over the past ten years a rash of courses have sprung up all over the world, two journals have been established, as well as two professional associations for academics working in the field. Yet despite—or perhaps because of—this fast growth it remains a confused field, particularly concerning its scope, purpose and methods. This paper addresses these issues in three ways. First, it analyses the current state of play in the field, with specific reference to the theoretical orientations of key players in the field and the implications these have had for scholarship output to date. Second, it adopts the perspective of the media organization and identifies which aspects characterise, or even differentiate, the management task in this context. Finally, by synthesising these contextual insights with research emphases to date, it makes recommendations for future work in the field, both in terms of theoretical perspectives and methodological orientations.

This study contributes to emerging research on management of organisational tensions in the media industry. We approach the topic by utilising the concept of ambidexterity, which has hardly been applied to media organisations. The goal of this study is to provide a capability-based approach to organisational ambidexterity. Thus, we offer a new approach for analysing media management by operationalising ambidexterity with operational and dynamic capabilities.

The study analyses what kinds of tensions ambidexterity creates between managerial operational and dynamic capabilities. The empirical analysis is based on interviews with top-level managers at the Finnish Broadcasting Company, Yle, during 2013/14. The approach is qualitative. The results are presented by using our theoretical approach of combining exploration and exploitation (ambidexterity) with sensing and seizing (dynamic and operational capabilities).

This article addresses the critical role of creativity as a core resource in media work. Drawing on an empirical analysis, the study produces a new understanding about the significance of creativity in media organisations and their management. It identifies three critical aspects of creativity, i.e. co-operation willingness, experimental atmosphere and supportive practices, and discusses three corresponding managerial focus areas. Thus, this article offers both theoretical contributions in relation to critical creativity in media work and practical implications for managing creativity as a strategic resource in media organisations. 

This article examines how change as a media management phenomenon is approached and understood in the research fields of media management, media business and media economics. By means of a systematic literature review and problematising methodology, the article unpacks the ways in which change as a phenomenon is comprehended in the extant research and elaborates on the implications of various schools of thought on the development of the research area. The findings of the study illustrate how different paradigmatic, contextual and pragmatic ways of understanding change are reflecting the current thinking and discussion about transformation in the media industry. As a contribution, the article adds to media management research by reviewing, identifying and critically reflecting on the dominant views of change in the area.

Esports represent an increasingly influential and innovative component of the global media business landscape. The ever-evolving ecosystem of dynamic new media is driven by a heterogeneous array of stakeholders that co-create value in online and offline spaces, often described as servicescapes, where innovations are increasingly influential in diverse areas including entrepreneurial business models, media, sports, entertainment, culture, and consumer engagement. In this research, a semi-systematic literature review was undertaken focused on the intersection of the esports ecosystem, servicescapes and innovations. Four clear directions for future research, with questions specific to esports, servicescapes and media were identified. Scholars can utilise these findings to enhance understanding of innovation from the servicescape perspective, with relevance for scholars engaged in business, marketing, and media.

This articles explores how factors present at the startup of online news enterprises influence their development and sustainability. Using entrepreneurship and management literature as a base, it presents and analyzes three case studies in which different arrays of organizational factors were present and how they affected the first three years of the organizations' activities. It reveals that "formational myopia"-pre-existing expectations and organizational objectives based on the entrepreneurs' past experiences-played important roles in their development and that the abilities of the firms to adapt their strategies and practices after establishment were crucial to their sustainability.

This article explores the institutional roles of industryassociations, employing institutional theory to identify and characterizethe roles of leading associations in the newspaper industry. Using fourleading newspaper associations as cases, the authors explore associationfunctions evidenced through interviews with their key executives. Thepaper finds that the association leaders tended to emphasize normativefunctions, while associations’ operational executives tended to focus onmimetic and coercive functions.

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.

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.

Media and advertising markets have a number of characteristics that affect how firms are competing and collaborating, how new firms enter the markets, and how new products are created. Throughout a research career in media management and media economics that started in the 1960s and stretched over more than five decades, Karl Erik Gustafsson kept exploring these topics, and their implications for both business strategy, regulation, and policy. His work formed early building blocks, both for media management as an academic field, and for the design, operationalisation, and governance of media policy, especially concerning newspaper development, in the Nordic countries. This article provides an introduction to his work.

This article argues that the origins of U.S. radio policy, and the reasons for the differences with European nations, were driven by general industrial development policies, by previous decisions involving communications industries, by national financial and economic conditions, and by business and geographic challenges. These factors combined to create a policy environment in which the interests of private enterprises became predominant in developing radio and radio policy. It asserts that much of the existing literature on broadcasting policy is disconnected from preexisting policies, market conditions, economic and social history, and business strategy and that it ignores the important roles those played in setting the conditions under which policy was made and creating constraints for those constructing the policies.

This article gives an overview of the current VAT treatment in the EU of digital donloads of films, audio, text, and other media provided by established as well as non-established companies to taxable and non-taxable persons. Four specific issues are discussed; the classification of electronically supplied services, an overview of who may be regarded as a taxable person, the definition of fixed establishment and where electronically supplied services are deemed to be supplied. Proposed changes of the VAT treatment for established companies and their possible effects are also evaluated in relation to the last issue.

In the wake of recent trends forcing local news organisations to adjust business models, local news publishers are often challenged with recognising new technologies as business opportunities. This contribution investigates the role of localisation technologies by using an abductive qualitative approach. We analyse how local media managers' everyday activities shape the capability of creating, identifying, and experimenting with new business opportunities in a local news media market - discussed here for location-based services (LBS) - in a case study of a local news market with local journalists with managerial responsibilities and newsroom managers. Doing so, this contribution comments on activities undertaken concerning evolving technologies. The findings indicate that the selected local media managers do not experiment with LBS, and most organisations use LBS only for advertising. We reveal the factors explaining this finding to be the media managers' limited information about technological developments, their lack of experimentation within core areas, and media organisations' constraints to the acceptance of mistakes.