Today's consumers have unprecedented choice in terms of the technologies and platforms that access, produce, and distribute media content. The development and overlap of television, the internet, and other media technologies is fragmenting and empowering media audiences more than ever. Building on his award-winning book, Audience Economics, Philip M. Napoli maps the landscape of our current media environment and describes its challenge to traditional conceptions of the audience. He examines the redefinition of the industry-audience relationship by technologies that have moved the audience marketplace beyond traditional metrics. Media providers, advertisers, and audience measurement firms now deploy more sophisticated tools to gather and analyze audience information, focusing on factors rarely considered before, such as appreciation, recall, engagement, and behavior. Napoli explores the interplay between political and economic interests in the audience marketplace and their effect on audience evolution. He recounts the battles waged between stakeholders over the assessment of media audiences and their efforts to restrict the functionality of new technologies. As Napoli makes clear, the very meaning of the media audience continues to evolve in response to changing technological, economic, and political conditions.
Philip M. Napoli is a Professor of Communication and Media Management in the Graduate School of Business, and Director of the Donald McGannon Communication Research Center, at Fordham University in New York City. He is also a Knight Media Policy Fellow with the New America Foundation and in 2011 was a Visiting Scholar at Princeton University's Center for Information Technology Policy. He received his Ph.D. from Northwestern University. He is the author of Audience Evolution: New Technologies and the Transformation of Media Audiences (Columbia University Press, 2011); and the co-editor (with Minna Aslama) of Communications Research in Action: Scholar-Activist Collaborations for a Democratic Public Sphere (Fordham University Press, 2011). His previous books include Audience Economics: Media Institutions and the Audience Marketplace (Columbia University Press, 2003), Media Diversity and Localism: Meaning and Metrics (Erlbaum, 2007), and Foundations of Communications Policy: Principles and Process in the Regulation of Electronic Media (Hampton Press, 2001).
Professor Napoli has been interviewed on media industry and media policy issues in media outlets such as the Los Angeles Times, Consumer Reports, Rolling Stone, the NBC Nightly News, the Boston Globe, and the Baltimore Sun. His research has been supported by organizations such as the Ford Foundation, the Benton Foundation, the National Association of Broadcasters, the American Television Alliance, and the Social Science Research Council. He has been invited to speak before organizations such as the U.S. Senate, the Federal Communications Commission, the American Association of Advertising Agencies, the Council on Research Excellence, and Harvard's Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics, and Public Policy.
