Research on media in small markets

Analysis through the prism of the disciplinary ideal type

Abstract

Using a mixed-method approach, the paper analyzes research on media in a small market context. Audiovisual and media policies are the most regularly studied objects. For a long time marginal on the scientific agenda, publications on the print media have been growing significantly since the mid-2010's under the impetus of the digital revolution. After classifying the literature into four disciplinary ideal-types (political economy, economics, journalism studies and cultural studies), we show that, within the corpus analysed, research mainly belongs to the first scientific tradition. The contribution concludes with an explanation of the main results achieved by researchers working within each of the identified currents.