Review of Journalism & Mass Communication

Networks within the Competitive Media Environment
Paul Ziek, Kate Fink

Abstract
The goal of the current study is to understand the relationships between media practitioners, especially those in the integrated process of creating, disseminating and receiving visual and written content artefacts. There is a pervasive public notion that media professionals are at constant odds. Yet this simply is not the case, media professionals, such as public relations practitioners, journalists and television producers, have a complex, interdependent relationship that is both cooperative and competitive. To investigate how the cooperative-competitive environment play-outs over time, a mixed method of experiential learning and Social Network Analysis was employed. The experiential learning took the form of a simulation called “The Trifecta”, where teams of undergraduate students in the disciplines of journalism, public relations and television video production worked together to represent functioning media organizations over an eight-week period. After each week of the simulation, data was gathered on the quality and nature of the links that emerged between the practitioners. Results show that a dense emergent network evolved throughout the simulation with three noteworthy implications: cooperation is based on context; cooperation fluctuates among individuals; cooperation occurs through myriad technologies.

Full Text: PDF     DOI: 10.15640/rjmc.v6n1&2a1