Sound Business
February 03, 2013
http://www.upenn.edu/pennpress/book/14882.html Sound Business: Newspapers, Radio, and the Politics of New Media by Michael Stamm "A fascinating,…
Michael Stamm
Michael Stamm is a political and cultural historian, and his research focuses on two primary topics: the political economy of news and journalism, and the consideration of “new media” in historical perspective. His explorations of these subjects have resulted in published scholarship on the relationship between radio sound and printed text in the 1930s, media reform campaigns in the 1960's and 1970's, the intellectual history of communication theory, and religious broadcasting. His book, Sound Business: Newspapers, Radio, and the Politics of New Media (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011), traces how American newspapers have responded to competition from “new media,” which in the few decades after 1920 meant radio broadcasting. Confronted by a new aural medium that could be used to distribute both information and paid advertising, many newspaper publishers began broadcasting as a way to meet this new competition directly. Papers around the country, from large metropolitan dailies to smaller local papers, established radio stations, in the process creating a new type of media corporation with a public presence in multiple media. Concern about the influence of these new multimedia corporations was widespread, as they seemed to critics to be not manifestations of strategic decisions by firms in the media business but instead institutions that could attain too much power to shape public discourse and stifle the circulation of diverse perspectives through the mass media. The outcome of the struggles between corporations, policymakers, and critics over how to regulate these new kinds of media businesses ultimately decided who would have the power to shape the emerging public sphere that included radio alongside newspapers, and who would control the institutions undergirding American society and politics.
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