Media Entrepreneurship—Taking Stock and Moving Forward

ABSTRACT

This editorial reviews current research about media entrepreneurship and introduces the four papers published in this special issue. These papers move the emerging academic field of media entrepreneurship forward by outlining the relevance of context for enhancing our understanding of entrepreneurial phenomena, by introducing the theoretical concept of ‘entrepreneuring as emancipation’, by analyzing the institutionalization of media entrepreneurship education, and by categorizing different investment types in corporate entrepreneurship. The editorial concludes by calling for continuing efforts to theory-building to further develop the field.

Within the media management field, the topic of media entrepreneurship is witnessing an increasing level of academic attention, as evidenced, among other things, by topic-oriented special issues of journals, international conferences, and focused summer schools.¹ This growing interest among academics and practitioners alike can be interpreted as the result of mutually reinforcing push and pull factors: On the one hand, the crises of many legacy media companies—aggravated by their low levels of entrepreneurial orientation—have led to diminished traditional career opportunities. For example, graduates of journalism programs are pushed into entrepreneurial careers (though this for some is largely a euphemism for precarious work situations of free-lancers, e.g., Cohen, 2015). These new careers are increasingly catered for by new higher education curricula of entrepreneurial journalism and media entrepreneurship offered within or in addition to existing media programs (e.g., Ferrier, 2013; Sindik & Graybeal in this issue)—even though recent empirical evidence from Spain points at the low level of entrepreneurial intentions among media and journalism students (Goyanes, 2015). On the other hand, contemporary technological developments—typically within the digital realm—have paved the way for a new kind of entrepreneurial start-ups that are disrupting the media industry (see Compaine & Hoag, 2012). Over the past years, these start-ups have radically altered the ways of producing, marketing, distributing, and consuming media products, as well as their revenue models—challenging much of the previously established knowledge of how media management works (e.g., McKelvie & Picard, 2008).

While the media industry was characterized by a high level of entrepreneurial activity even before the digital era (for data on the United States, see Hoag, 2008; for data on Europe, see Achtenhagen & Naldi, 2011), this activity has, for quite some time, not received much explicit research attention. This lack of research on entrepreneurial firms has been attributed, among other things, to a lack of data availability on small firms (Van Weezel, 2010). One main argument for the need of media entrepreneurship studies is based on the potential of new media ventures to provide additional voices in the marketplace to counteract an increase in media ownership concentration which could threaten democracy (Hoag, 2008, p. 74). In their systematic literature review, Hang and van Weezel (2007) found little overlap between the fields of media and entrepreneurship, but also an increasing body of literature, which has continued to grow in the decade following their publication—even though recent publications in the field typically continue to proclaim a lack of media entrepreneurship scholarship.

Early research explicitly discussing media entrepreneurship attempted to define its phenomenon (e.g., Achtenhagen, 2008; 2012; Hoag & Seo, 2005), with some recent integrative efforts continuing along this vein (Khajeheian, 2017). This is relevant, as one prerequisite for achieving legitimacy as an academic field—rather than only representing studies drawing on a particular industry context—is that this field is sufficiently different from already established fields. For us, this means that we need to clearly point out how media entrepreneurship substantially differs from or pinpoints mainstream entrepreneurship; media entrepreneurship research needs to be able to tell us something about entrepreneurship based on the intimate understanding of the media industry’s functioning. Only then does it deserve focused research attention to better understand the functioning of media entrepreneurship. Thus, the underlying question addressed by such attempts of defining and developing the field is in what way media entrepreneurship differs from other entrepreneurial activity, justifying its separate study.

While for Compaine and Hoag (2012), this difference of media entrepreneurs lies in their founding of an independent content business with a clear revenue model (with the production and distribution of content following a different logic than non-media products), for Witt et al. (2016, p. 191) the media industry differs in that the product itself is becoming digital and dematerialized to a higher degree than witnessed in other industries, arguing that even media products that had been nonmaterial at consumption before (such as TV signals), mostly had depended on a physical basis, such as films, tapes, newspapers or books. Generally, however, until now scholars tend to pay too little attention to explaining in what way the own research is relevant and matters for developing the field of media entrepreneurship.

So far, researchers have taken different approaches to studying the phenomenon of media entrepreneurship—ranging from macro- to micro-levels of analyses, and employing data reaching from secondary sector-level data to interview-based, qualitative studies. For example, Hoag (2008) conducted a quantitative, macro-level analysis of start-up rates in media industries in the United States in comparison to other industries. As example of a qualitative study, Compaine and Hoag (2012) interviewed 30 media entrepreneurs in the United States to establish their motives for becoming entrepreneurially active as well as the barriers to entry they perceived. But not all research on the topic is based on U.S. start-ups. Indeed, it is encouraging to see that research efforts often focus on country contexts beyond the United States, which continue to dominate mainstream management research. For example, Khajeheian (2013) studied the commercialization of digital innovations by Iranian media entrepreneurs. The need for adjusted policies to better promote entrepreneurial activity in the Estonian audio-visual sector has been pointed out by Ibrus (2015). Studying the digital music industry in Italy, Raviola and Dubini (2008) assessed the relationship between incumbents and newcomers in their competitive as well as cooperative dynamics, arguing for the relevance of acknowledging the impact of geographic context on research results. Davis, Vladica, and Berkowitz (2008) used an organizational capability approach to investigate why some entrepreneurial start-ups producing children’s television in Canada are successful despite the industry’s unfavorable conditions.

Recently, a substantial body of research has developed around the topic of entrepreneurial journalism, that often takes the form of digital news start-ups, and their challenges, such as their uncertain economic sustainability. A special issue published in Journalism Practice in 2016 has greatly contributed to this development. Sparre and Färgemann (2016) examined the impact of entrepreneurialism on postgraduate journalism students in Denmark, following students that took an entrepreneurship and innovation course module while doing a full-time internship in the media industry. They found that while students did not necessarily develop their entrepreneurial identities, the module content made them look at their places of internship more critically. Taking their starting point in the 454 news media ventures founded in Spain between 2008 and 2014, Casero-Ripollés, Izquierdo-Castillo, and Doménech-Fabregat (2016) investigated perceptions regarding entrepreneurship held by journalism students. While they found an increase in the willingness of students to engage in entrepreneurship as they progress in their studies, their view of journalism became more negative and disenchanted. Entrepreneurship education was also in focus in Barnes and de Villiers Scheepers (2017) article, outlining the trial of a Multi-Disciplinary Experiential Entrepreneurship Model (MEEM). These authors found evidence that participants in that model developed an entrepreneurial mindset through assimilation of effectuation principles (see Sarasvathy, 2001), presented as an entrepreneurial problem-solving method. In result, career aspirations to do something “entrepreneurial” were enhanced.

De Cock and de Smaele (2016) interviewed journalistic freelancers about their work and perceived preconditions of making entrepreneurial journalism a success in the Dutch-speaking part of Belgium. They did not find a “fixed list” of perceptions, instead these varied mainly in relation to whether freelancers were forced to be self-employed or had chosen this form of employment. Holton (2016) also studied journalistic freelancers, finding that frequently they experimented with social media, and that this experimentation was monitored by editors and incorporated into organizational strategies informing newsroom practices and engaging the audience. She interpreted this as a shift of freelance journalists developing from newsroom outsiders into “intrapreneurial informants.” Even Mathisen (2016) was concerned with the professional role of freelance journalists, conceptualizing their work situation into the two different types of entrepreneurs versus idealists. She discussed the tension between autonomy and freedom of freelancers versus the constraint of insecure income.

One article investigated crowdfunding as a way in which entrepreneurial journalists received (micro-)payments by supporters to finance their reporting, assessing ethical concerns deriving from the overlap of the roles of journalist, publisher, and fundraiser (Porlezza & Splendore, 2016). These authors found it crucial that news start-ups lived up to ethical standards to build and maintain authority and credibility (2016, p. 212). Hunter (2016) investigated entrepreneurial journalism financed by crowdfunding from three perspectives: the work involved in the crowdfunding campaign itself, the work of the donors, and the type of work which crowdfunding enables. She found not only that journalists embraced an enormous amount of work, equaling “having a second full-time job,” but that they often felt uncomfortable with employing entrepreneurial techniques and marketing their work. In another study of crowdfunded journalism, Aitamurto (2011) concluded that journalists needed to renegotiate their role and professional identity to succeed with the new type of task. The renegotiation of the professional identity due to the work-role transition of journalism entrepreneurs was also studied by Chadha (2016), who argued that a lack of entrepreneurial role models made the founders of hyperlocal news sites to reiterate to old norms and practices, which for example they had acquired during their previous employments as journalists.

In an interview-based study, Harte, Turner, and Williams (2016) asked what kind of entrepreneurs such founders of hyperlocal news sites might be. They found, among other things, a strong wish in journalism entrepreneurs to play a greater role for their community—but that this relationship with the community also made them hesitant to ask for money for the journalistic products offered, as they were afraid to lose independence and negatively impact the relationship, fearing to no longer be the community’s “voice.”

Siapera and Papadopoulou (2016) studied journalistic cooperatives in Greece, which they found to be close to their audiences through social relationships, measuring their success in terms of the benefits produced rather than profits made, and experimenting with cooperative decision-making as a governance mode. Based on a single-case study of the French start-up Mediapart, Wagemans, Witschge, and Deuze (2016) found that although that venture used as its unique selling proposition that it challenged and provided an alternative to mainstream press in France, it still followed a very traditional journalism ideology. Vos and Singer (2016) studied how entrepreneurship was depicted in journalism to understand how such discourse might contribute to the articulation and legitimation of entrepreneurial journalism as a form of cultural capital as the field’s business imperatives change. They found that the concept of entrepreneurship in media was generally depicted in a positive way, and concluded that much of the examined discourse appeared to reflect a belief that entrepreneurialism is not only acceptable, but even vital for survival in a digital age. It is interesting to note how through the concept of entrepreneurial journalism—and the usually deriving double role of journalists as content-producers and business people—journalistic work has moved much closer to the type of research questions addressed within media management.

But also beyond entrepreneurial journalism, the changes taking place in the media sectors have spurred some research activity. As has been called for by several scholars over the past years (e.g., Achtenhagen & Mierzejewska, 2016; McKelvie & Picard, 2008; Picard & Lowe, 2016), publications in media management—as well as media entrepreneurship—should pay more careful attention to building theory. Some signs of such theory-oriented scholarship are becoming evident. Cestino and Matthews (2016), for example, applied a framework combining path dependency and the knowledge-based view of the firm to better understand the lack of business model innovation of regional legacy newspapers. Drawing on a conceptual framework combining entrepreneurship and strategy literature, the approaches of three online news startups in the United States were compared by Naldi and Picard (2012), who especially pointed at the importance of “formational myopia”—the pre-existing expectations and organizational objectives that were based on the entrepreneurs’ based experiences. In another study of online news ventures, Nee (2013) found that the digitally native news entrepreneurs saw digital technology as an opportunity rather than a threat. Drawing on innovation management theory, her findings pointed at the importance of identifying a niche and staying within that, based on the respective venture’s competences.

Media entrepreneurship appears to become interesting even for sociologists. For example, Scott (2012) studied independent music producers in New Zealand as cultural entrepreneurs applying a Bourdieuian framework. He showed how for creating a “buzz” without much economic capital, these music entrepreneurs drew on different combinations of social, cultural, symbolic capital. Cockayne (2016) explored the relationship between entrepreneurship and the affective and passionate attachments that entrepreneurs formed to their work. Examining early-stage digital media ventures in San Francisco, he argued that entrepreneurial affect functions through the embodiment of work as a site of personal “satisfaction,” the development of passionate attachments to that work, and the production of working subjectivities characterized by their “compulsory sociality.” His findings suggested that affect functions through entrepreneurial forms of digital media work to produce and reproduce attachments to precarious working conditions.

Within mainstream entrepreneurship research, we also see an emerging interest to better understand digital entrepreneurship, which naturally has much overlap with media entrepreneurship. In a recent article conceptualizing digital entrepreneurship, published in the highly ranked entrepreneurship journal Entrepreneurship Theory & Practice, Nambisan (2016, p. 2) argues that mainstream entrepreneurship research:

has by and large focused on entrepreneurship as practiced in technology-intensive environments (including digital technology), wherein technology is treated merely as a context for empirical work [e.g., Bingham & Haleblian, 2012; Vissa & Bhagavatula, 2012]. Limited effort has been made on theorizing the role of specific aspects of digital technologies in shaping entrepreneurial opportunities, decisions, actions, and outcomes.

For the field of media entrepreneurship, this confirms the need to move the research-based theorizing beyond the specific industry context. Indeed, Nambisan’s (2016) arguments invite to the interpretation that we witness an unprecedented opportunity to put media entrepreneurship on the academic map beyond media and communication scholarship, as the digitally driven entrepreneurial opportunities characterizing much media entrepreneurship can be better understood with a profound industry understanding—and indeed such contextualization in, for example, industry-specificities is one important way of theory development (e.g., Welter, 2011).

The aim with the four articles published in this special issue is to move the field of media entrepreneurship forward in different dimensions.

In general entrepreneurship research, there is an increasingly shared understanding of the importance of context for understanding entrepreneurial activities in their different features (e.g., Welter, 2011). So far, this trend had not found entry into media entrepreneurship research. The previous discussion has outlined the relevance of context, beyond for studying entrepreneurship. Price Schultz and Jones with their article entitled “You Can’t Do That! A Case Study of Rural and Urban Media Entrepreneur Experience” are changing this, by comparing local, entrepreneurial news ventures from highly different contexts—one rural and one highly urban. Drawing on Richard Florida’s Theory of the Creative Class, which predicts the creative class to migrate to urban centers, they illustrate the relevance of context for understanding the different preconditions, developments, and challenges encountered by the two case companies.

The second article, “No More Status Quo! Canadian Web Series Creators’ Entrepreneurial Motives through a Contextualized ‘Entrepreneuring as Emancipation’ Perspective” by Emilia Zboralska, continues on the relevance of context. This article is especially interesting as it tries to break new theoretical ground by introducing the theoretical framework of entrepreneuring to media entrepreneurship and outlining its potentially emancipatory approach.

The article by Sindik and Graybeal entitled “Media Entrepreneurship Programs: Emerging Isomorphic Patterns” draws attention to the emergence of media entrepreneurship curricula and examines whether similarities between different programs are developing as a way of building legitimacy. The reasoning behind this articles draws on institutional theory, and especially the concept of isomorphism. Empirically, telephone interviews with program heads of media entrepreneurship programs across the United States were conducted. The article finds programs to display similar coercive, normative and mimetic processes in the attempt to legitimize the emerging area of media entrepreneurship.

Despite the growing body of literature on media entrepreneurship, corporate entrepreneurship in the media industry has not yet received much research attention (Hass, 2011). In the last article in this special issue, entitled “Strategic Media Venturing: Corporate Venture Capital Approaches of TIME Incumbents,” Hasenpusch and Baumann shed light into this phenomenon by analyzing different patterns of corporate venture capital investments by corporate investors from the telecommunications, internet technology, media & entertainment, and consumer electronics (TIME) sectors. Based on their empirical findings, they suggest a taxonomy of three types of investment behavior, which they label “aggressive,” “attentive,” and “dispersive.” While “aggressive” investors invest primarily in early-stage ventures, “attentive” investors attempt to strengthen their core business areas—the latter being found to be the main approach used by corporate investors from the media industries. “Dispersive” investors appear to follow a portfolio approach, spreading their risks across diverse industries. The authors also investigate how these approaches differ between the sectors under study.

This is the second special issue on media entrepreneurship in this journal. For the first special issue, editors Dowling and Mellewigt in their editorial (2002, p. 201) were surprised about that they had not received any submissions focusing on entrepreneurship in traditional media markets, such as TV, newspapers, books, or radio. Though media entrepreneurship research is still a young field, we have clearly come a long way since those days, as the articles in this special issue reflect concern about the implications of current changes on traditional media.

Overall, the articles published in this special issues make clear that media entrepreneurship scholarship can play an important role to improve the theoretical and practical understanding of the field, by carefully considering the specificities of entrepreneurial media firms, but also by investigating how the unique characteristics of media ventures shape entrepreneurial pursuits. However, we will jointly need to focus on explicit theorizing about media sectors and the characteristics of media entrepreneurship, and integrating these insights with existing theoretical perspectives and concepts in entrepreneurship, to really move the field forward. I look forward to that journey!

Notes

1. Previous special issues on media entrepreneurship were published in this journal in 2002, in Journal of Media Business Studies in 2008, as well as in Journalism Practice in 2016. The World Media Economics Conference had media entrepreneurship as its theme in 2016, and the 2016 doctoral summer school of the European Media Management Association (EMMA) had the same focus.