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Philip M. Napoli offers a timely and persuasive case for seeing social media as news media, with a fundamental obligation to serve the public interest. Social Media and the Public Interest offers valuable insights for the democratic governance of today's most influential shapers of news.

"Media scholarship has responded to a rapidly evolving media environment that has challenged existing theories and methods while also giving rise to new theoretical and methodological approaches. This volume explores the state of contemporary media research. Focusing on intellectual foundations, theoretical perspectives, methodological approaches, context, and contemporary issues, this volume is a valuable resource for media scholars and students

No longer beholden to the programming or publication schedules of media producers, today's consumers access media content through a number of unprecedented and increasingly prevalent platforms, and the development and overlap of television, the internet, and other outlets have fragmented media audiences more than ever, making the effort to reach them more complex. 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 also considers the changes that n

Questions concerning the quality of media performance and the effectiveness of media policymaking often revolve around the extent to which the media system fulfills the values inherent in diversity and localism principles. Media Diversity and Localism

This article offers a definition of media policy and, through a discussion of specific areas of public policy, describes the scope of media policy as an area of potential government intervention. I argue for a more expansive conceptualization of media policy than has typically guided the work of 21st-century media policymakers. I also argue that there has been a troubling tendency to apply a technology policy framework to contexts that would be better served by a media policy analytical framework. The result has been a neglect of core media policy principles that are focused on cultivating an informed citizenry and ensuring that communities' information needs are being met.

As digital platforms have come to play a central role in the news and information ecosystem, a new realm of watchdog journalism has emerged – the platform beat. Journalists on the platform beat report on the operation, use and misuse of social media platforms and search engines. The platform beat can serve as an important mechanism for increasing the accountability of digital platforms, in ways that can affect public trust in the platforms, but that can also, hopefully, lead to the development of stronger, more reliable, and ultimately more trustworthy, platforms. However, there are a number of tensions, vulnerabilities and potential conflicts of interest that characterize the platform beat. This article explores these complex dynamics of the platform beat in an effort assess the capacity of those on the platform beat to enhance the accountability and trustworthiness of digital platforms.

AbstractIn the United States, debates about political bias in the content curation and moderation practices of social media platforms have spilled over into the policy realm, rekindling conversations about the Fairness Doctrine and its potential utility in possible regulatory approaches to social media. This article revisits the history of the Fairness Doctrine and uses this history as a lens for critically examining current proposals for integrating Fairness Doctrine‐like principles into a regulatory framework for social media. In addressing this topic, the first section of this article provides a brief overview of the history of the Fairness Doctrine and how the Doctrine has informed (and misinformed) subsequent media policy debates in the years since its elimination. The second section describes how the Fairness Doctrine is being brought to bear in the contemporary debates around social media regulation. The third section offers a critical analysis of the applicability of the Fairness Doctrine to the social media context.

Revelations about the misuse and insecurity of user data gathered by social media platforms have renewed discussions about how best to characterize property rights in user data. At the same time, revelations about the use of social media platforms to disseminate disinformation and hate speech have prompted debates over the need for government regulation to assure that these platforms serve the public interest. These debates often hinge on whether any of the established rationales for media regulation apply to social media. This article argues that the public resource rationale that has been utilized in traditional media regulation in the United States applies to social media. The public resource rationale contends that, when a media outlet utilizes a public resource—such as the broadcast spectrum, or public rights of way—the outlet must abide by certain public interest obligations that may infringe upon its First Amendment rights. This article argues that aggregate user data can be conceptualized as a public resource that triggers the application of a public interest regulatory framework to social media sites and other digital platforms that derive their revenue from the gathering, sharing, and monetization of massive aggregations of user data.

Abstract
This article revisits the long tail phenomenon, a dozen years after it was first articulated as a model for the digital media economy. As this article illustrates, both the research evidence and the evolution of industry practice have demonstrated that the long tail phenomenon has failed to take hold to the extent expected. This article outlines the interconnected technological, institutional and economic factors that explain the decline of the long tail, and considers the implications of this decline for media policy and media research.