The concept and phenomenon of media innovation is gaining some attention in the academic community, policy circles and among practitioners. However, the phenomenon is still poorly defined and not well understood. This paper therefore first analyses how media innovation is framed in the literature on media economics and media management. Then it considers to what extent the standard analysis of innovation could be applied to the media field, considering, on the one hand, the traditional view on innovation policy and, on the other hand, some of the most common indicators of innovation. Based on this information, the paper suggests a novel conceptualisation of media innovation. Furthermore, an analysis of statistical indicators on R&D expenditure leads to three assumptions related to media innovation, namely (1) that the Media and Content Industries (MCIs) are much less innovative than the ICT industries, or/and (2) that R&D statistics do not properly capture the innovativeness of the MCIs, or/and (3) that the innovative activities in media and content are largely taking place elsewhere (for instance in the ICT sector). Whereas the statistical indicators point towards the second explanation, a small round of expert interviews in Flanders revealed that there is a case for assumptions (1) and (3) as well. First of all, it was shown that all forms of innovation defined in our typology exist in the media field, but not with the same importance. The most important ones from the media industries’ point of view seems to be the innovation related to the product, notably concerning the core (e.g. creation of new types of TV shows) and business model innovation. There is also technological innovation taking place in the media industries, for instance concerning new ways to access and interact with the content but this innovation comes from out the media sector (e.g. HD-TV, search engines) and at best the media industries try to adapt to this rapidly changing technological context.

This article critically assesses the effects of media mergers on news diversity at Mediahuis, one of the leading players in the media market of the Belgian region of Flanders. The founding of Mediahuis (in 2013) has led to an extremely concentrated Flemish newspaper market, as it owns and publishes four of the seven daily newspapers. We conducted ethnographic research inside the newsroom of Het Nieuwsblad, Mediahuis’ biggest newspaper, and assess the editorial independence, the changes journalists face on a daily basis due to ongoing digitalization, changing roles and values both within and beyond journalism, and the effect of the merger on the media management of what is now Mediahuis. We also performed an in-depth news diversity study in which we analysed over 3000 newspaper articles appearing in 2013 and 2018 in the four papers. Using this mixed method approach of combining ethnographic research and content analyses, the global results of this study reveal that while the editorial independence has been fairly well maintained, there has been a drastic increase in the number of articles being recycled across newspapers. Overall, over half of all articles produced for four of the seven Flemish newspapers are recycled in at least two of the four Mediahuis newspapers on a daily basis, with an increase from 36 to 51 per cent between 2013 and 2018. This practice has been facilitated by lowering the total number of working journalists, and sharing a content management system which facilitates copy-pasting articles across newspapers and websites.

In this article, we assess the interactions between user metrics and journalists, as newsrooms shift towards “data-informed” models in which the main online news performance indicator becomes the “time spent” metric, instead of the number of clicks. The paper at hand applies a mixed methods approach combining components of ethnographic participant observation inside the newsroom of a leading Belgian newspaper, and a quantitative analysis of the media company’s overarching internal data platform. This approach allows us to shed light on user data of not one, but four very differentiated newspapers. Our results confirm that (a) journalists tend to remain hesitant at best and fearful at worst in accepting user data as an integral part of their daily work, (b) attempts of increasing the “time spent” in articles only rarely seem to pay off, and (c) the relationship between journalism and metrics cannot be assessed without properly addressing and tackling other existing gaps and differences between (groups of) journalists and titles under the same company.

Platforms and Exposure Diversity: Towards a Framework to Assess Policies to Promote Exposure Diversity | Article | Media and Communication

In the past decade, public service broadcasters have been confronted with major shifts affecting their remit, portfolio and financing. Heavily fuelled by cutbacks and increasing competition, discussions on 'distinctiveness' have resurfaced again and stand central in many policy discussions on the legitimacy of public service broadcasting. This article critically contextualizes discussions on distinctiveness within broader scholarly work on genre and genre diversity in public service broadcasting. It presents the findings of a comparative, quantitative study of the programming schedule of seven public broadcasters (Flanders, Finland, Germany, Hungary, Iceland, Portugal and the United Kingdom). The article addresses how discussions on distinctiveness tap into broader discussions on genre diversity and the amount of entertainment in public service broadcasting programming, how we can assess and compare the diversity of genre programming across different broadcasters, and to what extent high levels of specific genres such as entertainment can be linked to other performance indicators of the selected public broadcasters. The article provides a consistent comparison of genre outputs, based on an original database made of a large set of countries and a high, representative number of programmes and applies a consistent set of indexes to assess not only the share of entertainment but also the diversity of the programming. The underlying question to this article is to what extent genre is still valuable to measure performance and legitimacy of public service broadcasting, considering difficulties of measuring 'genre' as proxy for public service media's (PSM) effectiveness.