Strategic Management in the Media

'Its scope and learning are brilliant and dazzling.' - Eli Noam, Columbia Business School

'New quotation to come'

- How did The New York Times transform its organisation for the digital age?
- How does Netflix drive performance through culture?
- Why did Disney struggle to find a CEO to replace Bob Iger?
- How did the BBC drive equal gender representation in its news programmes?

The media industry is developing furiously and fast, and its organisations face unprecedented levels of transformation and challenge. This fully revised third edition of the classic textbook on strategy in the media:

Explores key shifts in the strategic environment including the digital platforms, streamed media, the creator economy, the metaverse and generative AI.
Explains key concepts in strategic management with insight and clarity.
Applies all theories to the sector, illuminating all dimensions of the strategic task, from understanding competition and building core competencies to driving innovation, shaping culture and finding the right leadership approach.
Takes readers deep into innovation, disruption and strategic adaptation in action with an expanded set of new cases on a diverse range of global companies from Scandinavia to South Africa.
* Provides new 'Resources' and 'Questions' sections to guide readers' further study and support classroom learning.

Lucy Kung has again written the essential guide to strategy and management in the media industry. This is the ideal text for students of media studies, media economics and media management.

Professor Lucy Kung is an expert on strategy, innovation and leadership and focuses on successful responses to the challenges of digitalization. She is Senior Visiting Research Associate at the Reuters Institute, Oxford University, and Non-Executive Board Member of the NZZ Media Group and formerly of Swiss PSM broadcaster SRG and VIZRT, the media tech provider. She has held professorships at the University of Oslo, the Institute for Media and Entertainment New York (IESE) and the University of Joenkoeping.

Küng’s book stands out for its focus on concepts, drivers, and dynamics. Its scope and learning are brilliant and dazzling. This updated edition will be a source of insight for students and a tool for industry veterans who seek the perspective of academia.
-- Eli Noam
Covering an industry full of hope and hype, Küng’s book stands out for its focus on concepts, drivers, and dynamics. Its scope and learning are brilliant and dazzling – the ascendancy of the media tech sector, the culture of digital organizations, their creative workforce, and their strategic leadership. This greatly updated and upgraded 3rd edition, with new cases and issues, will be a source of insight for aspiring students and a tool for industry veterans who seek the perspective of academia. -- Eli Noam

The strategic environment of the media industry is changing fast" is perhaps the greatest understatement in this updated edition of Strategic Media Management.  Around the globe, media organizations are coping with unparalleled and accelerating technological disruption of a breadth and velocity never witnessed before. With an unjaundiced approach framed by strategic theory, including more invaluable case studies than ever before, Küng provides scholars, students, and practitioners with invaluable tools to map the impact on media industries by global platforms including the rise of creator culture, the breathtaking speed in which streaming services now dominate media production and distribution, and the threat already posed by the rise of next-gen technologies, whether coined the metaverse or generative AI.  

-- David Craig
Lucy Küng’s groundbreaking book enters its 3rd edition with a bang! Updated to cover a complex strategic context including the digital platforms, generative AI, streaming, the metaverse and more, and with new illustrative case studies on media trends and organizational practice, this book is a must read for any scholar or student of media management -- John Oliver
Hail to the Küng! A must-read for industry as well as academy, this is one of the best books about strategy and management in the media industries. It is written at a time where most of what is solid melts into air, but as the line between media and technology sectors increasingly blurs, no one writes about these issues with more clarity than Lucy Küng -- Aske Kammer
Embark on a journey to comprehend the profound impact of the digital revolution on the media industry with this essential contribution. In this fully revised third edition of Strategic Management in the Media, Lcy Küng revisits the key elements of strategy and provides invaluable insights for navigating the accelerating process of transformation. -- Charo Sádaba
Once again, Lucy Küng has produced the standard text in media management. Fully updated, she offers a comprehensive and accessible guide to strategic management in the media for students, lecturers and researchers. It is compulsory reading in my classes! -- Ulrike Rohn
In the age of relentless technological disruption, unlimited media distribution, artificial scarcity, content abundance, and non-professionalized creators and practices, successful media firms are more dependent than ever on strategic media management. In her first book, Lucy Küng identified the core concepts, strategic themes, and best practices in the field. In her second edition, Küng articulates the iterative dimensions of the media industries to account for an ever-increasing array of challenges and strategies. -- David Craig
A landmark contribution to scholarship in the area of media management, Lucy Küng’s excellent and most welcome revised Strategic Management in the Media provides an empirically rich and analytically sharp-sighted guide to the forces, concepts and issues governing contemporary organizational strategies in a complex and dynamic digital media environment -- Gillian Doyle
In this second edition of a book many found invaluable for research and teaching, including myself, Küng accomplishes a challenging task: to preserve all the best qualities of the first edition while both extending the scope and deepening understandings about strategic management theory in application to media industries. She has thoroughly updated an already rich assortment of case studies to ensure a much needed contemporary view of how theory informs practice, and the reverse -- Gregory Ferrell
... provides vital insights into the elements of strategy and their application to media firms. Küng relates strategic concepts to the unique settings and operating conditions of various media using contemporary examples that direct attention to core issues and challenges. Solidly grounded in theory but not pedantic, the book explores the nature of change in media markets and how strategy must be altered in response. It is essential reading for those who make or wish to comprehend choices of media companies. -- Robert Picard
Insightful, contextually analytical, yet easy to comprehend, Strategic Management in the Media successfully applies the adaptive and interpretative areas of strategic theory in the media sectors. This book’s integrative approach provides a unique perspective in which common themes linking media strategy and industry environment were thoughtfully discussed. The focus on media organizations’ adaptive strategic behavior, especially in technology management, creativity and innovation offers a pragmatic approach to understanding today’s changing, complex world of media. -- Sylvia M. Chan-Olmsted

The third edition of Strategic Management in the Media consolidates Lucy Küng′s work as one of the main references for managers and scholars in the information and entertainment industry. With the same seriousness and lucidity that characterized the previous editions, the author weaves a rich theoretical substrate about the media ecosystem in addition to showing, through real and extremely current cases, the opportunities and limits behind the business models that predominate in the sector. With the publication of this third volume that updates her body of work, Lucy Küng makes Strategic Management in the Media -perhaps without directly intending to do so- a brilliant trilogy that brings together the recent history of communication companies. Read consecutively, the books make it possible to see, chronologically, the profound transformations that occurred in the industry and its various stages: from the initial shock through a period of unrestrained reproduction of monetization models to a greater degree of maturity, especially in terms of business strategies, to team profiles and the relative weight of technology in this whole process. An indispensable book.

-- Glaucia C. Noguera
I have learned so much from Lucy Küng′s work and always look forward to her next book as a chance to learn more. -- Rasmus Nielsen

Lucy Küng, Reuters Institute, University of Oxford, and University of OsloShe is the author of Innovators in Digital News (2015, IB Taurus), The Internet and the Mass Media (Sage, 2014), When Innovation Fails to Disrupt: The Launch of BBC News Online (2007), and  Inside the BBC and CNN: Managing Media Organisations (2000, Routledge) 

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