This sounds familiar

The economics theories presented in the Kung chapter read as if they were developed by observing the last 20 years of media history. Of course many of the examples used are media-oriented, but at least to me, having worked in the news media for six years now, the applications of these theories were immediately apparent. Property rights? Only one of the most defining struggles of the digital age. Scale, network and bundling economies combined to make newspapers not only viable but intensely profitable -- both no longer true once those same economies can be achieved in other ways. In short, it's easy to see where these concepts apply.

Which made me wonder, why have I not encountered them before in scholarly research? Obviously that's part of the reason I'm taking this course -- to be exposed to applications of economics in media research. But it's something that has surprised me in the last year that I've been studying communications theory (and academics in general): Much academic work exists in silos, separated -- sometimes by circumstance, but often quite on purpose -- from everything surrounding it.

To me, this is where insights like those in the New York Times article are valuable. Of course we must be more open-minded in our research, both in conceiving our own and in evaluating our peers'. In fact, we might be well served to be even more open minded than the authors -- I agree that a strict devotion to the scientific method limits our field, but discarding it entirely throws the baby out with the bathwater. The scientific method brings important discipline to our work, particularly when trying to build on previous research. Rather than following a particular method or system that journals seem to like, we ought to focus on finding understanding and solving problems, then let our thoughts speak for themselves.

Haha, that sounds really hoity toity. But I think my opinion there grows out of a resistance to the "must do it this way" approach many people take to quantitative research. Isn't research supposed to be about figuring it out, even if that means figuring out not only which questions to ask but how to answer them? And I believe our work in both directions becomes better informed the more we include ideas and methods from other disciplines.

A popular-scholarly divide in media economics?

I have read very little in the way of scholarship on media economics, but in reading through this chapter of the Küng et al. book, I was struck by how many of the concepts I recognized from popular writing about media and technology. From creative destruction to the information age to disruptive innovation to free-rider problems, I hadn't realized how much of the popular writing about new media is loosely based on a framework drawn from economic theory.

It makes sense, I suppose - so much of the mass-marketed wisdom in most fields has to be filtered through business lenses, because the easiest way to get someone to buy a book (or read an article) is to convince them they'll make some money from that investment. And when you look at the most popular thinkers in media and tech - Chris Anderson, Clay Shirky, Jeff Jarvis, Clay Christensen - they all approach things from a business/economics angle. Even the most popular of the more academically inclined writers in media, like Yochai Benkler and Lawrence Lessig, write from an economics-based perspective.

Yet it seems as though there's not a correspondingly significant amount of rigorous, scholarly work explicitly applying economic principles to media. Benkler and Lessig's focus is much broader than media in particular, and though there are a few major journals in this area, they don't seem to be widely cited in other areas of media studies. Several other areas of media studies - media effects, obviously, and also sociology and the study of media and democracy - have achieved a critical mass of well received, prominent scholarship, but I haven't seen that with media economics.

So what gives? I don't think media economics is destined to be fundamentally an area of popular interest rather than scholarly interest, but it hasn't taken off yet in the latter despite an enormous amount of attention for the former. It seems like there is a gap waiting to be filled by applying some of these concepts more explicitly and rigorously to actual media settings, connecting the conventional wisdom of the Shirkys and Jarvises of the world with the methods of scholarly study.

One more link: I found this Businessweek article on ESPN's business model really interesting, particularly the way it's built a media empire on something other than advertising, a market that keeps growing more uncertain. Less than a quarter of its revenue comes from advertising, and the rest is being paid by cable subscribers directly for its content. That's a business model other media organizations (especially news organizations) would kill for, but for ESPN it also comes with its own problems, namely, the conflicts between its business interests and the demands of covering news.