The Routledge Companion to Media Industries

Paul McDonald is Professor of Media Industries at King’s College London. He recently co-edited Digital Media Distribution: Portals, Platforms, Pipelines (2021 with Courtney Brannon Donoghue and Timothy Havens). Alongside authoring or editing major works in the field, he’s contributed to advancing critical studies of media industries by launching the Media Industries conferences, being a founding member of the Editorial Collective for the journal Media Industries, co-editing (with Michael Curtin) the International Screen Industries book series from the British Film Institute, and establishing specialized media industries networks within the Society for Cinema and Media Studies (SCMS) and the European Network of Cinema and Media Studies (NECS). Before entering academia, he worked in various areas of the media industries, with periods spent as an actor, media analyst, and in aspects of animated film production, art book publishing, film exhibition, and studio photography.

Media, industries, research: problematizing the field PART I Perspectives: conceptual and critical directions 1. Assembling production studies: formative interventions in Britain and Europe 2. Origins of research into media industries conducted in the United States 3. Meeting the challenges of media and marketing convergence: revising critical political economy approaches 4. Why should we care about media policy? Critical directions in media policy research 5. Economic perspectives on the characteristics and operation of media industries 6. The state of media management research 7. Critical and cultural? Production studies as situated storytelling 8. Locating and localizing media industry studies: the case of Greece PART II Interventions: rethinking the field 9. Industrial media studies: considering infrastructures for audience manufacture 10. The infrastructural turn in media and internet research 11. Informality and indeterminacy in media industries research 12. An industry of its own? Approaching the American comic book industry 13. Approaching race in media industries research 14. Methodological approaches to women’s work in Hollywood 15. Global configurations: re-spatializing labor in contemporary film and television production 16. Producing for small audiences: smallness and peripherality in the global media industries 17. Currents of change: the unstoppable momentum of the Chinese media industrial complex 18. Bricks, mortar and media: understanding the media industries through their buildings 19. Authorship and agency in the media industries PART III Transformations: digitalization and industry change 20. The online television industry: fragmentation, consolidation, and power 21. Children and the media industries: an overlooked but very special "television" audience 22. Game-changer or a new shape to familiar dynamics? Netflix and the American indie film sector 23. User as asset, music as liability: the moral economy of the "value gap" in a platform musical economy 24. The digital news industry: the intertwining digital commodities of audiences and news 25. The dynamics of the book publishing industry 26. Social media industries and the rise of the platform 27. When East Asian media industries are faced with digitalization: transformation and survival strategies PART IV Intersections: transnational exchanges and industry traversings 28. Creating that "local connect": the dubbing of Hollywood into Hindi 29. The Hollywood-Chinawood relationship: continuities and changes 30. TV formats: transnationalizing television production and distribution 31. From idents to influencers: the promotional screen industries 32. Branded entertainment: a critical review 33. Gatekeepers of culture in the music video supply chain 34. The immersive cinema experience economy: the UK film industry’s third sector 35. Transmediality as an industrial form 36. Sports rights: global content, national markets, and regulatory issues PART V Practices: doing media industries research and pedagogy 37. Writing film industry history 38. Writing the airwaves: recent trends in histories of US broadcasting 39. Policy studies and the case for plurality 40. Media economics and management as optimization research: toward a shared methodology 41. Backstage observations: studying media producers 42. Breaking into Hollywood: strategies for interviewing media producers 43. Harnessing the life history method to study the media industries 44. Interfacing with industry 45. Media industries and audiences: an analytic dialogue 46. Ethics in media industries research 47. Appreciating the costs and benefits of media market research in the digital era 48. Numbers and qualitative media industries research 49. Teaching media industries through experiential learning: pathways to engagement and understanding