In November 2014, news broke of what became known in the press as the Sony Pictures Entertainment hack, an infamous release to the public of confidential email data belonging to the media company and its staff. The hack led to a wide range of private information concerning Sony’s employees, executive salaries, and previously unreleased Sony films becoming public knowledge. Allegedly, Angelina Jolie was branded ‘a minimally talented spoiled brat’, and insensitive jokes concerning President Obama’s favourite African American film became public news stories. Moreover, the leak suddenly provided statistical evidence regarding long-suspected salary discrepancies between Hollywood’s male and female stars. Assumptions about work practices and the burden of promotional campaigns on actors and publicists—all important components and considerations in today’s film industry—were suddenly revealed for public consideration in a way rarely seen in the traditionally secretive media industries. Sony’s co-chairman quickly departed the company, such was the level of controversy surrounding the openness of the hack and the release of private email correspondence.
Perhaps above all else, the widespread public fascination with the Sony hack highlights just how interested we all are in the people in charge of making the so-called dream factory of Hollywood film. And it is hard to argue against the contention that at least some of the information released during the hack adds new depths of understanding about the workings of a giant media conglomerate like Sony to those of us on the outside looking in. As Emily Carman (2015) notes, ‘while the hack is clearly an invasion of privacy, it is also a vital resource for scholars because contemporary Hollywood reveals so little about its internal operations and business practices.’ The inner workings of the media industries are indeed often associated with veils of mystery, rather like fiction’s the Great Wizard of Oz, whose face and work were so famously hidden from the world behind a curtain. Much like the Wizard from the L. Frank Baum fairy tale and MGM iconic musical, the media industries may connote magic and mysticism; the creative, escapist lure of the films and television programmes media industries produce can evoke within audiences a sense of awe and wonder. People are drawn to stories, to characters, to worlds. Without emotions of awe, wonder, intrigue, and relish, many of these same film and television programmes would surely cease to capture the public’s imagination in ways necessary for these forms of entertainment to succeed. And so it is little wonder then that the media industries at large attempt to operate on a behind-the-scenes basis, upholding a strictly wizard-behind-the-curtain approach.
Yet the understandable secrecy of many media industry operations also causes a major problem for those wishing to research and study them. In a sense, the Sony hack crystallises not only how many people are now interested in learning about the workings of media industries, but even more so the importance of learning how to learn about the workings of media industries: how does one go about researching the media industries strategically and ethically?
John Mateer (2015) directly links the closed-door facade of the media industries and their tendency to often withhold information for commercial advantage to an increased difficulty of gaining access and forging mutually beneficial relationships between academia and industry. For Mateer (2015), ‘this has made meaningful research into certain aspects of media industries much more difficult and required academics to be more creative in ways to procuring relevant data.’ And yet understanding the inner workings behind the proverbial curtain of the media industries is crucial to anyone interested in studying, working in, or perhaps even shaping the future of the media industries. As Huw Jones (2014) rightly notes, ‘knowledge of the media industries is essential to understanding the media’s wider social, cultural, political and economic significance. Yet few graduate or postgraduate degrees offer the necessary skills and training to research this area.’
It may actually be true, as Michele Hilmes (2014) argues, that ‘all of us who have been doing media studies have, from the very beginning, been doing media industry studies—since the first films were instituted and the first television programmes were studied.’ Nevertheless, the specified turn to focusing critically on the industrial structures, processes, and practices of the media’s workings—or media industry studies—has emerged explicitly only recently within the last ten years or so, which for Hilmes (2014) has ‘to do with a lot of changes in the industry itself.’ In the UK, as of 2014, the creative industries are now worth £71.4 billion per year to its economy, a growth of almost 10 % since 2012 (Gov.uk 2014). As such, the wider creative industries have emerged as one of the most celebrated sectors of the UK economy, framed and endorsed as part of a new knowledge economy for a global digital society. As such, as Daniel Ashton and Caitriona Noonan (2013: 1) assert, ‘the media industries, or more accurately their partial political successor, the creative industries, are associated with ideals of flexibility, enterprise, competition and modernity […] [I]n the UK the sector is often framed as a panacea to numerous financial and social ills, including economic development, urban regeneration and social inequalities.’
There has been sizable academic interest in the media industries, too—something that Ashton and Noonan tie, at least in part, to ‘the various government-led programmes which have attempted to provide a strategic plan for the industry in the UK’ (2013: 2). 1 In the academy, moreover, it is surely no coincidence that media industry studies has been quite similarly framed as a panacea to any perceived limits to studying media—with ‘industry’ here becoming a shorthand for collaboration and utopic partnerships across borders. As Catherine Johnson (2013) discusses, in ‘the current research funding environment in the UK, a key factor in contemporary higher education policy … is the emphasis placed on the impact of research conducted within universities and funded through public money.’ Linked to this, Johnson continues, ‘government policy on higher education research has also placed increased emphasis on knowledge exchange and knowledge transfer.’
With media industry studies certainly emerging as a priority at several major UK and US universities, finding ways to enhance the relationships between universities and businesses are becoming increasingly important to emerging researchers, and this, of course, is impacting the type of research that best affords such priorities. Producing work that is not only about the business of the media but also seeks, as part of its in-built research agenda, to actually shape or perhaps reshape the future business strategies of the media industries themselves is thus now becoming increasingly crucial to supporting this broader shift in the focus of UK policy towards the development of a thriving media-based knowledge economy.
And yet it is fair to suggest that the relative lack of clear and fully developed methodologies for conducting research about the media industries often impedes the formation of lasting collaborations between academia and the media industries that may well benefit both parties. Many emerging scholars often lack the resources necessary to approach and engage with media companies, studios, and organisations. Perhaps this is because the best media industry research draws from such a diverse range of disciplines. But in practice, this multi-disciplinarity means that novice researchers can sometimes find the methodological landscape of media industry studies difficult to navigate. While some scholars have attempted to outline approaches to studying media industries in the past, much of this work is quite conceptually broad and lacks clear direction. Jane Stokes (2003: 107–108), for instance, asserts that in researching the media industries, ‘there are two kinds of evidence: documentary evidence (such as written sources) and people (such as interviews and participant observation.’ Stokes is right in her assessment, but what exactly is the value of documentary evidence for our understanding of media industries? For what types of studies is documentary evidence most appropriate? Similarly, how does the evidence gained from people differ from that gained from written sources? And how does one go about finding relevant people?
The Aims of the Book
So, despite the prominence of industry engagement, theoretical understandings of the actual methodological processes for studying media industries remain vague. This lack is not particularly surprising given the relative infancy of media industry studies as a focus of scholarly research. In 2009, Jennifer Holt and Alisa Perren published Media Industries, a hugely important publication that aimed to define the critical study of media industries as a coherent discipline. Holt and Perren acknowledged that ‘the media industries themselves have been experiencing a period of unprecedented influence, prosperity, cultural debate, and transformation’ (2009: 1). The growth in the importance of the media industries has been matched in academic circles with the founding of new research groups and academic journals based on the study of the media industries, such as the Media Industries Scholarly Interest Group of the Society for Cinema and Media Studies and the Media Industries journal, which both exemplify the surge of interest in these industries. But if the focus of our scholarly research is as vast and often as intangible as an entire media industry or set of media industries, then how exactly do we research this vastness? How precisely do we get close to this intangibility? What is the industry as a ‘text’ or what are these industries as an object of study? What are the appropriate methods for examining specific aspects of the media industries—and how does one navigate those methods in light of complex industrial deterrents such as copyright law or policy regulations, not to mention the aforementioned difficulty of gaining access to the innards of media industries outside of unethical public hacks?
Indeed, while the above scholars, groups, and journals have all been pivotal in developing media industry studies into a coherent discipline, there remains a notable lack of understanding about how to actually do research in this particular discipline. For as Paul McDonald (2013) observes, ‘labelling a field of inquiry […] suggests there is a distinct and coherent body of purposes, principles or perspectives at work, although any survey of scholarship on media industries is immediately confronted by the enormous diversity of approaches and critical preoccupations.’ In fact, as Holt and Perren (2009: 1) also note, ‘to explore the media industries in the twenty-first century is to engage with an extraordinary range of texts, markets, economics, artistic traditions, business models, cultural policies, technologies, regulations, and creative expression.’ And yet, while such a vast array of critical emphases have been crucial to the definition and topicality of media industry studies as a field of enquiry, thus far there has been little sustained effort to unify the broad approaches of this work under a more coherent methodological framework.
Responding to this need, Industrial Approaches to Media aims to offer a guidebook for those interested in undertaking study of the media industries. Its goal is twofold: one, to conceptualise the objectives and critical orientations of media industry research, as well as to conceptualise media industries as an object of study; and two, to provide guidance, most pointedly to postgraduate students and early career researchers, in developing a methodology for researching the media industries. In particular, this book looks to provide such guidance in ways that might be best suited to more effective, collaborative, and valuable dialogue between media industry scholars and the media industry professionals that those scholars may interact with in the course of their research.
The book therefore extends the work done by Jennifer Holt and Alisa Perren, amongst many others, by attempting to offer a set of practical, theoretical, and ethical principles for researchers new to the area of media industry studies. I build on the likes of Holt and Perren (2009), Havens et al. (2009), and Wasko and Meehan (2013), who have all called for a more unified methodological approach in media industry studies. Given that scholars based in the US have done a large proportion of the groundwork of media industry studies, moreover, this book will primarily offer a UK perspective on what it means to conceptualise the media industries as an object of study—an approach that seems especially important given that at least some of the forces bringing industry and academics into collaboration may be unique to the UK, as noted previously. Many of the book’s contributors have a strong knowledge of the UK media landscape, offering insight into particular production and academic cultures that lend greater nuance to media industry studies approaches. That being said, I do not intend this book to be entirely specific to the UK setting; on the contrary, media industry studies requires an increasingly globalised approach to research given the global ecology of today’s media industries. While not attempting to generalise what are certainly different worlds of research and industry between the UK, the US, and other national contexts, the book will make use of insights and case studies from scholars based outside the UK so to realise the aim of establishing a more unified methodological understanding of media industry studies.
It is certainly not my intention, in other words, to profess some kind of complete radicalisation of media industry studies methodology, but rather to pull together the numerous, if occasionally contradictory, insights about ways of researching the subfield of media industry studies into a single, coherent resource that provides more depth and with more elaboration than has been outlined previously. Specifically, this book aims to demonstrate, in a rather nuts-and-bolts sense, and via contemporary examples and points of guidance, how the differing yet highly complementary methodologies of trade paper and social media analysis, interviewing and ethnography, political economy, cultural studies, and social theory can all be used in media industry studies as what Havens et al. (2009) have called an overarching Critical Media Industries Studies approach. A critical media industries approach is a multi-method, multiperspectival approach to studying media industries, bringing together a variety of different methods as part of a holistic analysis, paying equal consideration to economic, corporate, and discursive contexts.
The first objective of this book, therefore, is to theorise, methodologically, how emerging researchers can go about conceptualising the media industries as a coherent object of study, an...
