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This chapter focuses on conceptual tools used for considering large contemporary media organizations like MSNBC. It examines a nonmonolithic framework for elucidating how MSNBC's digital distribution is influenced by organizational factors and shows how keeping pace with rapidly transforming production and distribution environments has altered the way that legacy media institutions are organized. It also discusses the emergence of heterarchy as a novel form of organizational structure that allows media conglomerates to cope with perpetual uncertainty. Finally, it analyzes the provincialism of Internet technologies in newsrooms by drawing on a number of theoretical frameworks from the sociology of technology. The chapter argues that large media organizations are not single actors with singular objectives, but complex and dynamic assemblages of individuals, groups, and technologies whose interrelations all influence the flow of content.

This concluding chapter discusses how international election monitoring has become the most prominent tool in the liberal effort to promote democracy and create a more stable and just world. After elections, media organizations everywhere hurry to the press conferences of the international monitoring organizations and headline their assessments. International leaders likewise rely on the monitors' information to justify their rejection or acceptance of newly elected governments around the world. Election monitors can be a force for good. Although they generally cannot bring about change singlehandedly, they can reinforce existing pressures on a country. They can help improve elections and increase turnover, and politicians sometimes do follow their advice and make real changes to the electoral process.

This chapter offers both a more detailed examination of the principles behind the recommendation systems and examines the comparative impact of these technologies across media organizations. Recommender systems research has changed dramatically over the past decade, but little of this new knowledge has filtered into research on web traffic, online news, or the future of journalism. Scholarship to date has focused on the impact of these technologies for an individual web user or an adopting media firm. But there has been little exploration of the wholesale effects of these changes not only within news and media organizations, but also with regard to competition between them. In addition, this chapter takes a detailed look at the Netflix Prize—a contest with surprising lessons even for those who do not care about movies. As it turns out, the task of recommending the right movie is similar to recommending almost anything—predicting which songs users like, which ads they prefer, which news stories they engage with.

This chapter addresses the distinction between old and new media by exploring how new media technologies enter into the settings of supposedly ‘old’ media organisations. In focusing on how Toronto Star editors negotiated new forms of visual display and online technology, it highlights the tenuous practices and material settings that make up sites of public action, and in turn questions sweeping claims about the political potential of, or otherwise the threats posed by, new media.

The modern media industry is in a state of crisis. Digitalization has changed the nature of competition in media markets and the range of products provided. There is growing concern over news quality and the effectiveness of the media as a check on power. Furthermore, the number of journalists is plummeting in all developed countries, a major social change that may reflect media outlets’ declining incentives to invest in quality. An open question—with consequences for journalists and more generally for the quality of the democratic debate—is whether news still has a commercial value, and what kind of new business models and legal status need to be developed for media organizations. This chapter explains why quality news should be considered a public good, and why this public good is essential in well-working democratic societies. It then investigates why this public good is under-provided—and under-consumed—in contemporary democracies, and discusses solutions to provide adequate long-term financing and capitalization of news media while preserving media independence. The chapter stands-up a new “non-profit media organization” (NMO) model that leverages digital technologies to remove direct links between the philanthropists and the media they fund.

Arab media used to be almost unheard of until the war on Afghanistan in 2001. Since the independence of most Arab countries, the role of the media, both print and audio-visual, has been to safeguard Arabic culture and unity. Today, the Arab world is undergoing a radical media change, featuring the launch of satellite and cable television channels. This book provides a comprehensive analysis of the broadcasting differences between the different Arab channels and focuses on both the discursive practices of these channels and the sociological aspects that contribute to their formation. Aside from a historical analysis of the development of the Arab media, this book also argues that the analysis of discourse can be used as a starting point to examine the ideological stance of media organizations.

This chapter presents some preemptive measures that can be taken to meet the following challenges to the global flow of information: a new generation of autocrats who are better at concealing repression, terror and criminal groups that target the media directly, and governments asserting greater control over the Internet. In order to develop strategies that will preserve and strengthen the global flow of information, the chapter attempts to predict how global news will be delivered in the future. These assumptions include global media organizations competing with activists, bloggers, citizen journalists, and political organizations in providing public information; state secrets and confidential documents being exposed; and destabilizing ideas being put forward. Ultimately, it is only when information is democratized, and when the voices of the marginalized are heard that the full potential of the information revolution through technological innovation can be realized.

This chapter presents the findings of the research to draw wider conclusions about the continuities and discontinuities between historical case study and contemporary conditions concerning the communication of international conflicts. It is noted that the Republic may have won the propaganda war in the British media but, as it was fighting for much higher stakes than its enemies, the scale of its victory was insufficient. British coverage was dominated by three broad structures of interpretation. As the war progressed, the ‘defence of democracy’ interpretation gained credence over the ‘legitimate reaction’ interpretation within the British media but it was the ‘British interests/British values’ interpretation that dominated most British coverage. Media organisations were emerging from several years of tight government control and were well trained in sublimating their independence to the demands of the national interest. The Propaganda State was a creature of a mediated, rather than mediatised, political system.

This chapter details how the terror threat has transformed the way large media organizations function around the world. Cautious of kidnappings and bombings, journalists sometimes have to report from secured bunkers and are generally more reluctant to meet with sensitive sources for fear of abduction. As a result, critical stories have gone largely unreported. The lack of information has created difficulties for policy makers and undermined global understanding. The terror/anti-terror dynamic has played out differently and in various circumstances, and every single time has had a harmful effect on the work of media, transforming the coverage of war over the last decade. The chapter illustrates how similar dynamics took place wherever al-Qaeda is involved, from Afghanistan and Yemen, to Mali and Syria.

This chapter examines how TheNotebook and LaPlace websites entered the chase for traffic. It recounts how the two websites realized that they needed to attract more online readers to survive. It also talks about how TheNotebook and LaPlace developed the same editorial and organizational strategies to increase their traffic over time despite distinct political and editorial identities. The chapter shows how media organizations located thousands of miles apart ended up making similar editorial decisions when they entered the chase for clicks. It also provides an analysis of TheNotebook and LaPlace when they started experiencing an acute tension between editorial and click-based modes of evaluation, which affected the kind of content they published.

This chapter presents an empirical case study that applies discursive news values analysis (DNVA) to a corpus of images used across Facebook news feeds by established news media organizations in Australia, Canada, Ireland, United Kingdom, and the United States. It shows that DNVA of news photography can be used to examine journalism as social and semiotic practice, and how this approach can be combined with the analysis of other aspects of news practice (e.g. around the use of captions, image attribution, aspects of layout/templating) to provide insights into emerging news practices involving the use of images in social media and online. The chapter makes a valuable and unique contribution to the analysis of social media as used by news media organizations.