The Twenty-First-Century Media Industry

The 21st Century Media Industry is well worth reading not only for its broad scope, but for the timeliness of the chapters. Readers of this book will come away with a clear conceptual map of the changing media landscape as well as a detailed understanding of the challenges of the years ahead in forging a new business model, or set of business models, for media operating in the digital age. -- John V. Pavlik, Rutgers University
Predicting the future of the media industry at this juncture may sound audacious, yet this volume does so, and the future it presents is auspicious. The 13 chapters—all by US academicians and media scholars with impressive credentials—address possible approaches to media management, new technologies and innovations, and the implications of various media: recorded music, print, journalism, cable and broadcasting (including radio), cinema, the Internet, mobile telephones. Media have saturated modern society for the past 50 years. The opening essay, coauthored by Hendricks (Stephen F. Austin State Univ.) and Susan Smith, notes that "the latter half of the twentieth century saw an explosion in the communication industry [with] personal computers, satellites, cable television, cell phones, digital and high definition television, DVDs and the World Wide Web." But, the essay goes on to observe, the change is not in the media per se but rather in the "delivery systems." That the book does not offer an exact definition of the term "new media" is only right, given that in the 1450s the printing press was a "new medium." Summing Up: Highly recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty. * CHOICE *