Introduction

Especially since the early 2000s, being a professional media maker has meant being conscious of the fact that you have and are a personal brand. Branding yourself has become a ubiquitous task. The reason for this shift may seem obvious: new communicative technologies. Without technologies such as Twitter, Facebook, or earlier predecessors like MySpace, media workers did not have the tools to brand themselves. Yet, suggesting that journalists, advertising creatives, game developers, and all the other professionals across the media industries brand themselves because it is now technologically possible to do so overlooks the history of self-branding as a perceived prerequisite for success in the media industries, and especially bypasses a deeper question: why would anyone think that this was a good idea or a necessary practice in the first place?

Media workers – such as professionals in film and television, advertising, and music – to some extent have always adopted branding tactics for themselves: creating and managing a certain persona, doing the emotional labour necessary in largely informal and reputation-driven working environments to suggest a persona, performing this identity dutifully in order to make it work. The twin developments of precarization of work in the media industries and the rise of digital media have amplified and accelerated the branding trend, often raising the level of self-promotion to stressful levels.

However, branding is not an inevitable practice – it is not even all that measurably effective. In this chapter, we argue that the notion of branding accompanied a shift in how people understand the nature of work and, more specifically, a shift in how people understood what it meant to work for others. People are now expected to view themselves as a business of one (Lane, 2011), seeking to enter into business alliances with others.

Introduction

What does it mean to make media professionally? To be a journalist, a marketing communicator, advertising creative, or public relations practitioner? What is it like to work in film or television, to develop games, to be a musician, or manage a record label for a living? It is safe to say that the answers to these questions vary greatly. Whereas the various fields of cultural work used to be considered in terms of their specifics, contemporary scholarship acknowledges the great diversity and hybridization of practices and careers that make up formerly distinct professions in the media industries. Profound transformations are afoot in the areas of technology and digitalization, management and economics, culture and audience preferences, as well as in the role politics and policymaking plays in both enabling and constraining the ways in which media industries and professionals can do their work and earn a living.

This book aims to investigate, illustrate, and critically analyse how the various technological, political, economic, and social transformations are affecting the media industries as well as the people professionally making media. The goal is to provide those interested in studying media industries and production, and those considering a career in the media a clear grasp of the relevant topics and themes, as well as an understanding of what shapes media work. The authors gathered in this volume provide a comprehensive review of the scholarly research on making media, delving specifically into emerging themes such as the emotional quality of media work, the radical changes affecting the business operations of media firms, and ways in which precarity determines the lived experience of media professionals across a variety of media industries. In doing so, we endeavour to bring into conversation different domains of theory and practice in media industries: political economy and cultural studies; the sociology of work and psychology of professional decision-making; production and management studies.

In order to grasp the many developments shaping the creative work media professionals do, we have structured this book in three sections: production, practices, and professions. Media production considers issues at play within, across, and around the institutions and forces that create our media, our information, and our culture: management and economics, media policy, markets, consumers (Hesmondhalgh, 2006; Paterson, Lee, Saha, & Zoellner, 2015).