How Media Ownership Matters will be published by Oxford University Press in early 2025 (scheduled for February 4, 2025)!
Daniel C. Hallin, Distinguished Professor, University of California-San Diego, provides this advance praise for the book:
“Ownership has always been assumed, in both scholarship and public discussion, to be a key factor affecting the production of news. But it’s also something extremely hard to study systematically. How Media Ownership Matters is the finest work to date on this subject, rigorous and complex at the same time engaging and accessible. It’s a wonderful contribution to the political economy of news.”
Through a comparative analysis of more than 50 news outlets in the US, Sweden, and France, the book shows how four ownership forms—market, private, civil society, and public—each shape the news in civically consequential ways. Interacting with funding models and target audiences, these forms affect the degree to which coverage is oriented toward public service, partisanship, or the promotion of owners’ economic interests.
For a preview of some of the key findings of the book, see Rodney Benson, “How Media Ownership and Funding Matter for Democracy,” in Novel Directions in Media Innovation and Funding, eds. M.L. Young and A. Hermida, with C. Castaneda, Vancouver: The Global Journalism Innovation Lab, March 2024.
See also these related publications on media ownership and funding:
Rodney Benson and Victor Pickard, “Saving the news means moving beyond the benevolence of billionaires,” The Conversation, February 13, 2024.
“News you can use to promote your interests: Media ownership forms and economic instrumentalism.” (Timothy Neff and Rodney Benson), Journalism Studies, published online first on October 22, 2021.
Rodney Benson, “Can Philanthropy Save Public Interest Journalism?” Byline Times, article commissioned by UK Media Influence Matrix, June 22, 2021.
“How Media Ownership Matters in the U.S.: Beyond the Concentration Debate.” Sociétés Contemporaines (in English), Rodney Benson interview with Eric Darras, no. 113 (2019): 71-83.
Rodney Benson, “Rethinking the Sociology of Media Ownership” (in L. Grindstaff, Ming-Cheng M. Lo, and John R. Hall, eds., Routledge Handbook of Cultural Sociology, 2019).
“Media Ownership and Public Service News: How Strong are Institutional Logics?” (Rodney Benson, Timothy Neff, and Mattias Hessérus in International Journal of Press/Politics, 2018)
Rodney Benson, “Can Foundations Solve the Journalism Crisis?” (in Journalism, 2018).
Rodney Benson, Matthew Powers, and Timothy Neff, “Public media autonomy and accountability: best and worst policy practices in 12 leading democracies,” International Journal of Communication 11 (2017), 1-22.