Introduction

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Digitization, new entrants and the disruption of business models prompt concern about the media’s societal mission. The article investigates how media managers conceptualize societal responsibility in an era of turmoil. Based on 20 semi-structured interviews with executive managers of private media companies in Norway and Flanders, the study reveals important differences in the definition of the public interest. While Flemish media managers emphasize brand value, Norwegian managers emphasize societal values, such as educating the public. When comparing managers of traditional and newer companies, a third, more straightforward market logic is also elicited, illuminating the vulnerability of traditional values.
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Media disruption and the public interest

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This article follows on from previous research by questioning the <italic>disruptive</italic> character of four French online media: <italic>Les Jours</italic> (2016), <italic>Le Quatre Heures</italic> (2013), <italic>Médiacités</italic> (2017) and <italic>Brief.me</italic> (2015). In an attempt to identify what has changed and what may have settled to become standards of contemporary pure players today, this research investigates the way in which work is organized and revenue is made and, consequently, what this may mean for the journalistic profession in general. The findings suggest that building these pure players from scratch offers the opportunity for journalists to renew their skills in a framework in which they have control over the values and the means developed to maintain them. In a precarious professional context, it appears that journalists adapt by developing an increasingly entrepreneurial profile.
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Disrupting journalism from scratch

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News automation is an emerging field within journalism, with the potential to transform newswork. Increasing access to data, combined with developing technology, will allow further inquiries into automated journalism. Producing news text using NLG (natural language generation) is currently largely undertaken in specific, predictable news domains, such as sports or finance. This interdisciplinary study investigates how elite media representatives from Finland, Europe and the US imagine the affordances of this emerging technology for their organization. Our analysis shows how the affordances of news automation are imagined as providing efficiency, increasing output and aiding in reallocating resources to pursue quality journalism. The affordances are, however, constrained by such factors as access to structured data, the quality of automation and a lack of relevant skills. In its current form, automated text generation is seen as providing only limited benefits to news organizations that are already imagining further possibilities of automation.
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Unboxing news automation

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The technocultural disruption triggered by digitization has radically changed the way in which we consume films outside cinemas and transformed content providers’ business models. In Norway, between 2010 and 2016, DVD/Bluray and subscription-based streaming services switched places as major and minor platforms for home video consumption. Hence, home video consumption has migrated from a high-yielding platform at the head of the home video release cycle to a low-yielding platform at the tail end, where films also face tougher competition from drama series and international content tends to surpass local content. A case study of the earnings generated by local films released by a major distributor in this period suggests that home video revenues have diminished, making local films much more dependent on theatrical revenues and vulnerable to changes in cinema-going behaviour.
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How streaming services make cinema more important

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This article compares the “continuity” produced by private- and public service television companies and discusses whether it can survive in the digital era. In broadcast television, “continuity” carries the industry’s dominating business model: the commercial break. The present disruption to this model, caused by digital technology, over-the-top companies like Netflix and social media like Youtube, has made the television industry eager to adapt to new television viewing habits. However, based on a comparative analysis of the communicative strategies of four television companies in Denmark, the article argues that a traditional <italic>delay economy</italic> still governs the temporal structures and constructions of continuity. This delay economy draws heavily on the patience of its implied viewers. The article discusses this conceptualization of the audience in the context of an emerging <italic>impatience culture</italic> in which instant access to personalized audio-visual content and gaming on different devices are part of the viewers’ media experience.
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The delay economy of “continuity” and the emerging impatience culture of the digital era

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This article analyses the disruptive potential of Valve’s game distribution platform, Steam, focusing specifically on how Steam has evolved into a de facto online social network and how Valve uses constant feature changes as part of its corporate rhetoric. Despite its profound influence on the video game industry, scholarly inquiry into Steam has focused on analyses of user or value creation. However, Steam arguably derives its long-term disruptive potential from combining the gamification of digital distribution with the formation of ephemeral public spheres around the games that it distributes, thereby becoming a de facto online social network. To investigate this strategy, the article employs a historically comparative affordance analysis, drawing on a small data set of Steam blog posts and tech blog coverage from 2007 to 2018 to map patterns of affordance change.
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Disrupting video game distribution

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Digitalization is both a major cause of the challenges now faced by several media industries and a source of their potential solutions. Within the book and newspaper industries, the value of the physical product is about to be surpassed by that of digitally delivered content, disrupting the distribution system that these industries have relied on for many decades. In particular, digital distribution has radically changed the way in which consumers engage in unpaid and paid media consumption.
Anchored in the notion of disruptive innovation, and more specifically related to the idea of distribution as disruptive technology, our study investigates Generation Z’s unpaid and paid consumption of digital books and online local newspapers. Drawing on two Norwegian audience surveys, we find that both industries involve at least one disruptive actor. Generation Z relies heavily on Facebook as a distribution channel for news. Pay-walls have a negative effect on the usage of paid online local news, despite the belief that paywalled news is better than free news. In the Norwegian book industry, paper books still have a very strong position among Generation Z. Audiobooks have greater usage than e-books, and we conclude that the real disruptive actor in the Norwegian book industry is the streaming of audiobooks by actors such as Storytel.
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Digital payments for a digital generation

Contributors

AHEAD OF PRINT

Volume 5 (2023): Issue 1 (June 2023) The Return of Propaganda

Volume 4 (2022): Issue 1 (June 2022) Media Events in the Age of Global, Digital Media

Volume 3 (2021): Issue 1 (June 2021) Media and the Climate Crisis

Volume 2 (2020): Issue 1 (June 2020) What is Nordic in the Nordic Media Studies?

Volume 1 (2019): Issue 1 (June 2019) Disrupting Media Infrastructures

Nordic Journal of Media Studies

About the journal  Nordic Journal of Media Studies is published by Nordicom, a centre for Nordic media and communication research at the University of Gothenburg, supported by the Nordic Council of Ministers. Established in 2019, the digital-only journal is published once a year, and each volume focuses on a particular theme of media research.  An open call invites proposals (extended abstracts) for contributions and, on the basis of this, invitations to write full-length articles are issued. All submissions are subject to a double-blind peer review by two external reviewers.  Nordic Journal of Media Studies is Open Access and published under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International Public licence (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0).  The journal is supported by the Nordic Board for Periodicals in the Humanities and Social Sciences (NOP-HS).  Aims &amp; scope  Nordic Journal of Media Studies is a peer-reviewed international publication dedicated to media research. The journal is a meeting place for Nordic, European, and global perspectives on media studies.  The editors stress the importance of innovative and interdisciplinary research, and welcome contributions on both contemporary developments and historical topics. The journal is open for theoretical contributions and empirical research, and combinations thereof. The editors also welcome critical approaches to media studies addressing questions of power, inequality, participation, and voice.　　  Nordic Journal of Media Studies focuses on the interplay between the media and their cultural and social contexts. We are interested in the media as industries and institutions of modern society, but also in how they are woven into the fabric of everyday life as mobile and interactive technologies.  The emergence of new social networks, changes in political communication, intensified datafication and surveillance of human interaction, and new dynamics between media, popular culture, as well as commercial markets, are important aspects of the changing relationship between the media, culture, and society.   Archiving  Sciendo archives the contents of this journal in Portico - digital long-term preservation service of scholarly books, journals and collections.  Plagiarism Policy  The editorial board is participating in a growing community of Similarity Check System's users in order to ensure that the content published is original and trustworthy. Similarity Check is a medium that allows for comprehensive manuscripts screening, aimed to eliminate plagiarism and provide a high standard and quality peer-review process. 

Volume 1 (2019): Issue 1 (June 2019) - Disrupting Media Infrastructures