Medienstrukturen

The mass media is phenomenally important in society. However, the media services that are offered do not materialise by coincidence: a country’s media structure fundamentally influences both how media organisations act internally and externally and media performance. As Lazarsfeld and Merton noted as early as in the 1940s, we can neither explain nor understand media services without bearing in mind social and organisational structures. The characteristics of the media system, the social framework within which the media operates, the media’s own institutional set-up and the way it is organised are vitally important. The series entitled ‘Medienstrukturen’ (‘Media Structures’), which relates to the network of media structures, is intended to provide researchers studying media structures from a political, historical, economic, legal or sociological perspective with a platform on which they can publish their findings. It welcomes theoretical and conceptual works as well as empirically analytical contributions, which regard it their duty to analyse the media on both the macro and meso levels. Moreover, the series attaches great importance to comparative research, be it comparisons of countries or different eras.