World Media Economics and Management Conference 2016

In the last couple of years, in Germany as well as in other parts of Europe, startup companies have become more and more attractive for young professionals of Generation Y. Especially in the realm of digital media, new ventures that aim at innovation, scalability and growth are launched at a rapid pace. For this study we asked German students from the field of media and communication where they prefer to work after graduation: Do students decide in favor of entrepreneurial media startups or well-established corporates? The study addresses this question by investigating the critical impact factors that explain the decision to work for a future employer. Based on a literature review, a theoretical framework is developed bringing together the following dimensions: (a) psychological, (b) economical and (c) functional benefits as well as (d) personal characteristics. Results show that startup companies have to be recognized as strong competitors for established corporates. The big media players do not appear to be as attractive now as they were several years ago. An innovative working environment is a critical factor in decision finding in our sample. However, salary as well as status symbols and prestige of the company still play a vital role, too. Therefore, it depends on personal views, preferences and previous work experiences, whether students find a company attractive or not. Nevertheless, we advise media companies – startups as well as corporates – to focus more on employer branding, since loyalty for an employer is rapidly decreasing under todays’ conditions of “War for talent”.

The current study utilizes an exploratory case study approach to examine entrepreneurial ecosystems located in the North Carolina’s Triangle and Triad regions, which boast emerging innovation, growth, research, community, and startup incubation. Innovation districts such as the Triangle and the Triad are geographic areas where cutting edge cooperative working spaces, accelerators and incubator clusters connect start-ups, economic development, and community growth with a strong focus on innovation and entrepreneurship. The study specifically selected four organizations that self-identify as either a cooperative working space, an accelerators, an incubator or a combination of those services; American Underground, HQ Raleigh, HQ Greensboro, and the Citrix-Red Hat Accelerator. This study explored these cooperative working spaces, accelerators and incubators within an established entrepreneurial ecosystem from a Resource Based-View of strategic management. The findings suggest that organizations that operate within entrepreneurial ecosystems not only offer unique resources and strategic advantages to the startup ventures in their organizations but also contribute to and receive additional unique set of resources and strategic advantages as members of their respective burgeoning entrepreneurial ecosystems.

In order to secure its future in the new digital landscape, the media industry is increasingly convinced that innovation is required. However, in recent years the need to innovate has become even more pressing and complex, due to the fast pace in which digital technology is evolving. Several media organizations, particularly in the Western world, have begun to realize that they need to do more than just simply making cuts in their workforce and hoping that advertising market will improve sometime. These media companies now understand that they are faced with a greater challenge and need to go further in order to find innovative formulas for their work processes and business activities. The so-called ‘labs,’ special units for R&D&I into these companies, are one the most promising ways to harness the impact of digitalization on the media industry. This type of innovation, known as “intrapreneurship,” provides a counterpoint to classical entrepreneurship as a way of generating innovative ideas. This paper analyzes the emerging phenomenon of labs from the theoretical, typological and empirical viewpoints. The first part contextualizes the phenomenon and offers and overview of the main examples all over the world to end up identifying four different types of labs that currently exist worldwide. The main contribution made by this study is that it is the first indepth analysis of labs in Spain and includes corresponding models and trends.

This paper discusses entrepreneurship in Brazilian university extension based on testimonials from students who joined the Junior Journalism Enterprise of São Paulo State University (UNESP), in the city of Bauru in São Paulo, Brazil. It reflects the view of such group on the pedagogical and practical aspects of the junior enterprise initiative, assessing its pedagogical contributions to their journalistic training. The paper reviews the project's objectives, its structure, teams, and processes, and presents original data from a survey conducted in January 2015 with 22 former students, along with its qualitative and quantitative analysis. This group evaluated and commented on the importance of entrepreneurship in their professional education, also ranking 18 different activities held around the junior enterprise. The results reinforce the benefits of the inclusion of entrepreneurial practices and subjects in university extension activities, in order to strengthen experiences around entrepreneurial journalism education and narrowing the gap between the academic community and the professional field.

The importance of media convergence, data journalism and visualization have been widely discussed in journalism studies, whereas few researches have noted the economics value or content value they might create. This paper thus starts with a theoretical examination on media convergence, data journalism and data visualization, and reviews theories with regards to value creation. Based on the theoretical analysis, this paper proposes research questions to address in what way the combination of data, text and visualization creates value and what value that are provided to the audience. The authors construct quantitative method to answer these questions, and a design for experiment will be proposed to identify factors contribute to value creation. Finally, the authors discuss the implications and further possibilities studying value creation system in data-driven journalism.

There is an unsatisfied need to understand the underlying mechanisms through which industrial sectors shape entrepreneurship phenomena. In this paper, we elaborate on the legitimacy-building mechanisms used by entrepreneurs in media industries. We suggest that in highly institutionalized contexts, start-up entrepreneurs may build trust in their ventures by borrowing sociopolitical legitimacy from neighboring fields. We also analyze the implications that these mechanisms may have on the cognitive and competitive configuration of the disrupted industry set-up. Our results propose that bricolage-entrepreneurs may succeed not only in developing a competitive advantage but also in creating a truly native, new legitimacy base in the media industry. We illustrate our theoretical analysis with the growing phenomenon of journalism entrepreneurship.

This paper aims to characterize the scenario of entrepreneurship in Brazilian journalism startups and identify issues, challenges and results on value creation opportunities for small and microenterprises, with the creation and operation of information services on digital platforms. After doing a literature review regarding the economic context of news industry, we have conducted an empirical research to characterize three recent cases of journalism startups in Brazil, considering their management strategies and the business models they adopt, aiming to identify the challenges to make these operations sustainable. Based on interviews with the three startups' managers, this study examines some critical factors for the success or failure of such projects and identifies weaknesses that limit their growth and may even lead to the end of their operations.

This article proposes a business model for the operation of a value-added service based on cultural and educational products for sale by University television stations in Brazil. Our hypothesis is that such service enables the generation of additional revenues to public funding for the sector, with a view to commercial exploitation of digital resources of interactivity through first and second screen t-commerce applications, considering the educational and cultural vocation of the University TVs. The model is described and shown visually as the elements of the BMG-Canvas. In order to test the technical feasibility of its implementation, the model was also used in the development of a first screen application, implemented in partnership with the station's staff and programmed in Ginga NCLua, the standard of the Brazilian Digital Television System. For its validation, the proposal has been subjected to a critical examination by TV UNESP’s staff, via a qualitative research with the team. The results suggest the existence of alternatives for University TV managers to plan a price proposal for their services, aiming for the sustainability of these stations through a possible combination of their current funding sources with new business.

Within industry cluster studies, especially media clusters have recently gained interest from the scientific and political world. However, there is no common agreement on a comparative framework that integrates the various facets of the phenomenon. After a thorough revision of existing literature, this article proposes a framework into which empirical observations and theoretical considerations can be placed. Within the literature on (media) clusters, this paper finds several parameters: place, proximity, pertinence, profile, path-dependency, policy, and performance. We argue that these seven parameters - 7Ps - provide a solid foundation to grasp the dynamics of media clusters, which are composed of three essential entities: media institutions, media workers and media communities. We argue that the integrative and multidisciplinary framework brings together the existing heterogeneous approaches towards media clusters into one suitable analysis model.

Grounded in theories of social capital and imagined communities, this study uses a case study approach to analyzing the most successful crowdfunded project in the world to date - online developmental video game “Star Citizen.” It yields insights into the strategies and tactics of this successful crowdfunding venture and adds to the scholarly literature on crowdfunding, social capital, imagined communities and brand trust.

The audio-visual market has dramatically changed over the last thirty years, and even more since the implementation of digital terrestrial television throughout Europe. New suppliers of audio-visual content have appeared and audiences have fragmented. Broadcasting television has losing its capacity of gathering big audiences. Thanks to the digital revolution, the consuming of video is becoming more and more popular. The main broadcasters have started to offer online contents on a free and payment basis. The purpose of this paper is to review how broadcasters monetize their online video offer paying attention in the audience data they need to make effective sales of their online businesses. We will use a case study, which is Atresmedia in Spain. The question we want to respond using a case study is: a) how broadcasters offer online video content; b) how it is monetizing it and, c) what data it requires to make business from the online products. The case study is based on a combination of a direct observation of the digital strategy of the group, analysis of internal reports, commercial booklet and personal interviews to the CEO and the commercial staff of Atresmedia Digital.The final goal is to obtain recommendations for audience measurement. Media companies need to find a unique source for the metrics of cross-media audience, audited by an external bureau in order to offer reliable data for advertisers.

Online Video is a promising product option for newspapers, whose traditional business models are under pressure. However, the introduction of new media forms in newsrooms frequently meets resistance. Therefore, a coherent execution of innovation and change management is needed to successfully integrate online video production and distribution into the existing production routines. Bases on a qualitative, multi-method research design carried out in five of Germany’s leading newspapers, the study examines the approaches companies take regarding strategy development and implementation (organisation, staffing/building competencies as well as communication/leadership and organisational learning). We find that editorial needs and approaches to problem solving clearly dominate. Further optimisation potentials include a better documentation of strategy, assumptions and goals (also enabling learning and refining in later stages). Competencies are largely built inhouse, limiting the speed of adopting online video. Additionally, existing organisational features tend to be reproduced at first, leading to coordination and communication issues. The study finally highlights the crucial roles of individual ‘change agents’ that drive adoption and diffusion of online video capabilities throughout the organisation.

The artistic and commercial success of TV series is increasingly of interest to media and scholars. TV series attract large audiences, and constitute a substantial share of TV broadcasters’ program, and of audiences’ media consumption. Content is established as an important success factor of media products and TV series, and the scholarly interest in audience effects of messages in TV series is increasing. This qualitative explorative study focuses on decision making in the production of TV series’ content, and investigates influences on content of TV series as perceived by the creators of TV series themselves. The perceived influences emerging from the data are organized, ordered, and interpreted on the basis of conceptual models of influences on media content. On each level of influences, the assumptions put forward by conceptual models are contrasted with empirical findings. The deployed method is content analysis of interviews. The sample consists of TV series’ creators and experts from five countries. Analysis reveals that the influences on content of TV series as perceived by creators can be assigned to five levels, whereby the assumption of a hierarchical structure of influences put forward in conceptual models is confirmed. The conceptual models suggest specific influences on content per levels. For a substantial share of these specific influences evidence is found in the data. The strength of influences in decision making on content of TV series is established.

Sharing Economy is a keyword much talked about in recent years. Most commonly, it is associated with sharing platforms, such as Uber or Airbnb. This paper applies the concept of the Sharing Economy to the media industry and in particular to the TV industry. It argues that behind the recent interest in the Sharing Economy is an increase in sharing culture in today’s society, which also influences the media industry. This increase in sharing culture has been made possible by the emergence of social media platforms and it is reflected in increasing sharing activities among audiences as well as between audience members and TV providers. This paper addresses the following question: How can changing business models of traditional TV producers and stations be traced back to an increasing sharing culture? The paper addresses this question through in-depth interviews with company representatives as well as through the review of previous literature. As a result, this paper identifies various characteristics of the Sharing Economy relevant to traditional TV providers (importance of social media, interaction with audiences, circulation among audiences, increased audience activities and resulting changing audience expectations) and discusses how these characteristics influence various business model components (value proposition, value creation & provision, financial endurance). In a last step, the results of this study and the need for future research are discussed.

Entrepreneurship, the set of behaviors that leads to the creation of new enterprises, has invigorated the media sector in recent years just as information and communication technologies (ICTs) have disrupted established media businesses. Nowhere have the twin cycles of disruption and entrepreneurship been more evident than in Israel’s media sector. The disruptive effects of ICTs have been studied at length but media entrepreneurship, less so. This paper reports on a qualitative study of 12 media entrepreneurs in Israel. Findings include evidence that media entrepreneurship is often social entrepreneurship, that media entrepreneurs’ decision-making is marked by moral identity and moral imagination and that bricolage, Levi-Strauss’s notion of “making do with what is at hand” are central to the strategies of the entrepreneurs in the study.

In 2008, China surpassed the U.S. as the largest Internet market in the world. This study examines how major Asian news organizations pursue business opportunities in this massive media market. This study, through a series of in-depth interviews with top managers, examines how five prominent Asian news organizations serve Internet users in China through their Chinese-language Web editions. Taken together, these cases demonstrate the viability of different operating models and the challenges and opportunities facing these media organizations as they serve the largest online population in the world.

For many years, newspapers have dominated the mediated news space for most Americans. However, as people move to digital news, the business model that has worked for decades has become less effective. Many media researchers have called for new models that could be the salvation of the news business. This project is a case study of two local media entrepreneurs, one in a very rural location and one in the most urban area of the United States, and how they looked beyond the barriers that were presented to them to create successful media organizations. These cases build on existing media management and innovation theory and provide an example for other budding entrepreneurs to follow.

Incumbent local news media like local newspapers, weeklies, and local broadcasters see their traditional platforms losing ground and find it hard to make the transition to a sustainable digital model. At the same time new local news initiatives emerge that don’t bear the burden of a traditional business model. These new hyperlocal models try to survive within a local ecosystem that also consists of other media, advertisers, sources, government, businesses and active audiences. For this research we gathered empirical comparable data from more than 30 different hyperlocal entrepreneurial media in three different countries: the UK, France and the Netherlands. We focus mainly on their business model; how they organize content production, what their main revenue streams are and what their costs structure is. We find a high diversity in content production and content strategies but a lower diversity in their revenue model. Those that are most robust don’t use banner ads as their main source of income but rather rely on more creative and diverse income streams like partnerships, native advertising or sponsorship. In the business life cycle the hyperlocals in our study seem to move towards the maturity phase.