Storsul, Tanja and Arne Krumsvik (Eds.). Media Innovations: A Multidisciplinary Study of Change.

Khan, Abdullah M.

Storsul, Tanja and Arne Krumsvik (Eds.). Media Innovations: A Multidisciplinary Study of Change. Boras, Sweden: NORDICOM, 2013. Pp. 282. ISBN 978-91-86523-65-7 (paper) 250SEK.

This book is a very timely addition to the growing field of media innovation studies. Thanks to the recent advancements in the information and communication technologies (ICTs) and subsequent growth in various web-based commercial and social media outlets, innovations in production and delivery of media contents has spurred. In the process, the definition of media is being constantly evolved. This is undoubtedly the high time for undertaking of multidisciplinary research on this topic.

In the foreword, the editors assure the reader of the timeliness and importance of the contents of this book that is composed of a selected group of scholarly papers presented at the 1st International Symposium on Media Innovations. As an introductory note, author Lucy King emphasized that media innovation includes changes in content creation and delivery as well as organizational changes. Quoting J. M. Keynes, the author reminds the reader that innovation successes depend not only on creation and adoption of newer ideas, but also on our abilities to embrace them which often test our willingness and ability to step out of our comfort zones of traditional cultures, thoughts, and ways of doing things.

Editors Storsul and Krumsvik coauthored the first paper contained in Chapter 1 "What is media innovation?" They mention of four types of innovations according to the classification of Francis and Bessant (product innovation, process innovation, position innovation, and, paradigmatic innovation) and add social innovation as a fifth one to the list. Social innovation implies innovative usage of media and communication services to achieve social purposes. The authors also emphasized the inextricability of media innovation and rapid changes in information and communication technologies.

This book is composed of three sections titled "concepts," "structure and management," and "services and users." Each of these sections contains several thematically cohesive papers, each presented as a separate chapter. The first paper in Section 1 (Chapter 2) by Leyla Dogruel, "Opening Blackbox: The Conceptualizing of Media Innovation," sheds light on the issue of media innovation mainly from economic, sociological, and managerial perspectives. The author summarizes media innovation studies into three categories: technical innovation of media related products and processes; new media consumer products focusing on media technologies such as interactive TV, Internet, smart phones, and new standards such as DVD; and new media content innovations that are often related to marketing initiatives. Dogruel points out that such categories of research represent an over simplification in our understanding of the crucial aspects of media innovation and underscores the necessity of more interdisciplinary research projects to shed light on media innovation more holistically. She supports the view that multidisciplinary of studies on definitional aspects of media innovation will help the topic to emerge as a distinct field of study.

In the next chapter, "Balancing the Bias. The Need for Counter-discursive Perspectives in Media Innovation Research," Steen Steensen makes a point regarding complementing the discourse of media innovation and change with partially counter-discursive analysis in order to have a better grasp of how and why new media practices develop through interaction between structures and agencies. The development of online journalism is presented as an example of such multi-perspective approach of new media development. As new media practice development examples, the author cites social media interactions; digital music creation, distribution, and consumption; eBook publishing, distribution and reading; digital gaming etc. The development of these new media practices were influenced by precedence and by the agency of individuals. In the last paper Section 1, "Topics of Innovation: Towards a Method of Invention and Innovation in Digital Media Design," Gunnar Liestol discusses the inter-linkages of media economics, media management, and innovation theory and identifies four characteristics of media innovation: novelty, economic or social exploitation, communicative implication, and complex social processes. According to Liestol, media innovation is better viewed as a process than as ready-for-use product. Like other colleagues, the author urges more research efforts, both empirical and conceptual, be devoted to better understand the nature and forms of media innovations.

The five papers in Section 2 examine various aspects of structure and management of media innovations. In "Adapting to the Brave New World: Innovative Organizational Strategies for Media Companies," Sabine Baumann summarizes multi-tier market structures for media products and services and discusses some relevant organizational design options. The four types of organization graphically analyzed in the paper are hierarchical, network, virtual, and modular organizations. Baumann recalls the relatively higher initial cost and fast decreasing marginal cost of reproduction of media products and stresses how economies of scale and associated network effect calls for addressing a larger audience for the business bottom line. In "Size Ownership and Innovation in Newspapers," Arne H. Krumsvik, Eli Skogerbo, and Tanja Storsul empirically tested hypotheses regarding the attributes of newspapers that might positively relate to technology savviness such as offering iPad apps for online patrons. The authors particularly considered two attributes or innovation indicators: size of a newspaper measured by its circulation, and ownership status measured by whether the newspaper belongs to a corporate group of industries or not. The results indicate that corporate ownership is a stronger innovation indicator than circulation size. Corporate media house-based newspapers may have significantly more financial resources to look beyond everyday sustenance and are able to focus past the mainstream market to innovate new produces and market development opportunities.

Gillian Doyle's "Innovation in the Use of Digital Infrastructures: TV Scheduling Strategies and Reflections on Public Policy" is particularly geared towards analyzing how TV broadcasters adapt to technological innovations; it examines instances where public policy promotes innovation and when that may play a stifling role. Realized and anticipated innovation potentials exist in areas ranging from content creation to content delivery to management of audience flow. Citing Google chief executive Eric Schmidt, Doyle underscores a paradigm shift in public policymakers' mindset from one of control orientation to innovation-friendliness. "Innovation in Small Regions' Media Sectors--Assessing the Impact of Policy in Flanders" by Sven Lindmark, Heritiana Ranaivoson, Karen Donders, and Pieter Ballon provides a technical framework for impact assessment of publicly funded R&D and innovation support. There are six elements in this framework: problems, objectives, inputs, outputs, outcomes, and impacts. Some other generic assessment issues are relevance, effectiveness, efficiency, utility and sustainability. Specific to a small regional market such as the Flemish media market, the authors identified a number of issues which may also have some resonance with other small media markets. These circumstances are ambiguity in defining what is media innovation, lack of policy problem statements, the detachment of innovation policy, the media industries themselves, and underlying tension between companies' short-term profit maximizing with longer-term policy interests.

Stine Lomborg and Rasmus Helles's "Privacy Practice: The Regulation of Personal Data in Denmark and Its Implications for New Media Innovation" examines how regulations regarding privacy facilitate or hinder digital media innovation in Danish society, and how regulatory practices responded to emergent technological advancements. In Scandinavian societies, involvement of public agencies is widespread in all walks of life and the Danish Data Protection Agency (DDPA) has independent supervisory authority under the Danish Ministry of Justice. The authors note that the close interrelation of business innovation and public regulation is a hallmark of the Danish economy. At present, mining of personal data by businesses is largely legal as long as its stated objective of such archiving of personal data is a product or customer service improvement. However, considering the commercial incentives for other uses (and, possibly misuse) of such archived data, the authors point out that it was about time that the DDPA started to increase regulatory oversight on such mining of personal data by commercial entities.

Section 3, the largest section of the book with seven papers, addresses the theme of services and users of media innovations. "Measuring Innovation. Successes and Failures in a Newspaper Market" by Piet Bakker informs the reader of the Dutch experience regarding which media innovations worked and which ones did not work to save the newspaper industry's falling revenue trends. Bakker reports that the major media innovations adopted to aid the Dutch newspaper industry includes online editions, flexible subscriptions, format changes, and new paid and free newspaper titles. The paper indicates that media innovation strategies also included business consolidation via acquisitions for some Dutch media groups (e.g., Telegraaf Media Group).

Charles Davis' paper "Audience Value and Transmedia Products" evaluates transmedia product design challenges across platforms and associated value propositions for audiences as well as creators. Davis briefly reviews Jenkin's (2009) seven principles of transmedia storytelling (i.e., spreadability vs. drillability, continuity vs. multiplicity, immersion vs. extractability, worldbuilding, seriality, subjectivity, and performance) and mentions that a central transmedia product design challenge is to effectively reconcile business logic, audience logic, and aesthetic logic. He points out that contemporary audiences are organized as complex layers, networks, and segments; and media product creators today have to be ever innovative to attract the attention of the audience. According to Davis, some future research (mostly empirical) topics in this broader area include measurement of effectiveness of transmedia products, and understanding of various modes, degrees, kinds, and dynamics of audience engagement.

"Innovation in TV Advertising in Flanders" by Iris Jennes and Jo Pierson is an interview-based piece primarily dealing with the Flemish TV sector and the prospects and challenges digital television offer to advertisers. The authors summarize the Strength-Weakness-Opportunity-Threat matrix for Flemish TV advertisers as follows: strengths--reach power struggles, impact lack of knowledge, and branding; Weakness--resistance to innovation; Opportunities-data gathering and targeting, new advertising formats; Threats--audience measurement. Jennes and Pierson lend their support for an open innovation model for TV advertisement industry that would encourage knowledge management from both inside and outside the corporation. Jeremie Nicey ("Between Reactivity and Reactivation--User Generated News Photo Agencies, New Practices and Traditional Processes") provides a case study of a French participative news photo agency, Citizenside, that sells user-generated content (UGC) to both traditional and new media outlets. Nicey contends that the UGC approach is not amateur, but rather innovative. Citizenside's collaboration with well established Agence France Presse (AFP) resulted in professional-amateur contents which provides an empowering opportunity for "amateur" photo journalists to enjoy the level of visibility and mainstream media recognition that traditionally was enjoyed solely by professional photo journalists. According to the author the success of Citizenside's innovative business model, on the one hand, relies on online platforms' interactivity, and on the other hand, warrants reactivation of classical business practices.

"Small Pieces in a Social Innovation Puzzle? Exploring the Motivations of Minority Language Users in Social Media" (Niamh Ni Bhroin) examines the case of motivational factors of 20 individual minority language users in social media. The languages considered minority language in this study include the Northern Sami and Irish languages. The motivational factors are intrinsic and extrinsic. Extrinsic factors, in turn, are of two categories: self-determined extrinsic motivations and externally determined extrinsic motivations. The main findings of the paper are as follows: intrinsic motivations promoted creative, bottom-up innovation practices relative to the user's understanding of social media environment as an effective platform for language learning, communication potentials, and prospect of connection with other language users for support. Self-determined extrinsic motivation was based on individual beliefs that minority languages should be preserved and promoted. Self-determined extrinsic motivations ensued from desire of protecting or promoting minority languages. In concluding notes, the author underscores the analysis of social innovation processes in the context of complex cultural interrelations between individual needs for competence, relatedness, and autonomy, and a range of intrinsic and external motivational factors.

Jeremy Shtern, Daniel J. Pare, Philippe Ross, and Michael Dick ("Historiographic Innovation--How the Past Explains the Future of Social Media Services") evaluate the impact of Federated Social Web (FSW) initiative in obscuring the distinction between incremental and radical innovation and in posing challenges to media innovation in general. The authors compare and contrast FSW with Web 2.0 and semantic web on four areas: project vision, knowledge representation framework, interconnectivity features, and treatment of data. They present a historiographical account on emergence of social media services including FSW and do not hesitate in expressing some concerns regarding sustainable future growth of alternative social web services. The term historiography refers to a dialogue in which "history forms a narrative in itself, with the narrative's connection to the specific area being examined, forming a metanarrative" (p. 251). This paper deals with some complex issues surrounding technology and innovation, namely the commercial viability of innovation, and the political economy of technology and innovation.

Kjartan Muller ("Innovation and the Genre-Platform Model") explains a model for dealing with the complex activities of genre-innovation and design of digital platforms and artifacts. Muller uses the model in analyzing Wikipedia and EPUB 3.0 platforms for expository purposes. Cornerstones of the model are the concepts of horizontal and vertical genre convergence. Drawing from innovation theory, these concepts are, in turn, compared with the concepts of architectural, modular, incremental, and radical innovation. In this paper the author graphically presents Henderson and Clark's model of types of innovation, a generic platform model, a model showing horizontal and vertical convergence involving EPUB 3.0, and the platform model. The author is confident that this proposed model is particularly path-breaking due to its incorporation of technological considerations, and as time passes by, the model should get more refined and serve as a productive analytical tool to study digital media and innovation.

As the editors' forewords suggest, the book is all about the contemporary topic of media innovation. As a reader, I found the chapters of this book to be very contemporary and intriguing as they analyze some very important and fast emerging aspects of media innovation. The papers are all relevant, and cohesive to the central theme. This 280-page book is a nice, compact document of multidisciplinary studies on this important topic. With thanks to the editors for their great, timely undertaking, I would like to share couple of suggestions for future editions/sequel of the book. First, a slight increase in the font size may provide greater ease of reading. Second, the incorporation of a paper or two regarding the impact of recent innovations in Wi-Fi technology on overall media innovation frontiers may further enrich multidisciplinary research prospects of this important and ever expanding subject.

Abdullah M. Khan

Claflin University