Book about Media Sustainability in the Digital Era Addresses Weaknesses of the Chilean Television Industry

The text by researcher Chiara Sáez is part of an Ibero-American perspective on the issue of media sustainability in the digital scenario and seeks to broaden the debate to advance toward a critical theory and a political economy of media.

The book “Media Sustainability in the Digital Era: Political Economy of Public, Private and Community Media”, edited by Ángel Carrasco Campos and José Candón Mena, analyzes through multiple perspectives the role played by media and their public service function, vital for democracy.

In this sense, the text maintains: “The challenge of sustainability entails carrying out the communicative action while maintaining political and economic independence so as to not undermine the social work of media. This governance model must be accompanied by a reduction of the environmental impact of the generated products and technologies“.

The lead researcher of the Fondecyt Project on Convergent Regulation, Chiara Sáez, stated:

“My contribution is a chapter in which I problematize the financial sustainability of local, regional and community television, providing evidence about the oligopolistic nature of relevant markets for the television industry, audiences and advertising investment, as well as the impact of these market failures on the sector’s weakness compared to nationwide television. Although it is a study that addresses Chile as a case study, the situation is quite similar in the rest of Latin America.”

The academic at the the Faculty of Communication and Image (FCEI) of Universidad de Chile analyzes the economic viability of small television media in Chile in an essay entitled “Financial Sustainability and Industrial Data: The Case of Regional, Local and Community TV in Chile”..

About the Book

The analysis of media sustainability in the digital era -threatened by the development of liberal economies and the crisis of the welfare state- requires a critical perspective and a radical approach in economic, cultural, eco-social and legal aspects of production, distribution and consumption systems in at least three dimensions: major media corporations, public media, and the third sector of community media.

The book identifies the difficulties of media in terms of sustainability under current material conditions, exploring the challenges and opportunities of the digital environment to propose more just and participatory models and communicative practices.