Thesis project

By diggesting some thoughts and reading some more on the subject, I believe I might be on track of finding my so long sought after thesis subject!

This is my main thought that I would like to examine:

What has happened internally to media companies since the introduction of the Internet and thereby thousands of new distribution channels?

In the old days, media companies were all about traditional supply chains where news were produced in one end of the chain, printed and then delivered to the end customer in the other end. Quite straight forward, and the media company could control the entire process.

As the density of offerings have increased with the microprocessor (very cool way of saying that things have changed from “Designing Interactive Strategy: From Value Chains to Value Constellations“) the end customer’s value creation has started to take new forms. Media is consumed in new ways, via new channels (Google News, Digg.com, personal blogs and so on).

The major driver for this change has been the everyday lower external transaction costs of communication which is also the largest driver of organizing in value constellations with several smaller actors instead of in one large firm (Coase, Theory of the Firm).

What I would like to examine is this: Have the media companies (specifically the newspapers) adjusted internally to this transformation (by working more in networks with other actors) or are they still run like they used to be (by doing most of the work in-house and trying to maximize revenue from each additional channel)?

What’s great about this subject is that there is a large amount of data to be collected qualitatively and the end product might actually result in something useful for media companies!