How media really works

Warming up the Tardis

Subscribers to Wessenden’s audiencebriefing news review were recently treated to a special Tardis Issue, which picked out three key “pivot years”:

• 1990 was a year of tumultuous change as the UK economy plunged into recession. In comparison to 1990, we are currently just stagnating and fragmenting in economic terms, rather than facing an apocalypse. Yet the speed of current change is still desperately fast and relentless.
• 2000 was the year when the publishing business almost lost control of its retail supply chain. The mix of dirty politics and smart strategic thinking in evidence then are very relevant to today. Managing all our pipelines to the end consumer, whether print or digital, has never been more critical.
• 2008 was the year when the PPA mounted its wide-ranging Magazine Week promotion. The current 2026 industry PR activity, piggybacking on what book publishers are doing, is positive and worthy, but it lacks scale, investment and ambition. Is it time to make a bigger statement about our industry? And to position ourselves away from Books, which was one of the strategic objectives of Magazine Week.

The solutions that the industry has come up with in the past may seem a bit archaic and obvious now. Yet what lay behind them was the irrepressible creativity, confidence and hyper-activity, which have always characterised the media business.

Yet in many ways, our 2026 industry has become more risk-averse, as it has become smarter, more complex and tighter margin. On balance, the similarities between now and past “pivot years” probably outweigh the differences. Yet understanding the reasons why things are similar or different is central to learning from the past, so that we do not reinvent wheels or make the same mistakes all over again.

Yet as part of the ongoing mediafutures programme, the Wessenden Tardis is now working overtime. It is diving back even further in time: more than 5,000 years to be precise. It is also extending its scope to cover the whole media business. The output of all this is a book, ‘How Media Works’.

What is ‘media’?

The definition used in the book project is essentially based on scale, reach, and ambition. Before media, communication was oral and one-to-one or one-to-few. In our terms, media really began when communication became one-to-many, usually driven by technological leaps such as the printing press (by the way, Guttenberg was not the first to create one). Today, media is entering a volatile many-to-many phase, as traditional media companies are in danger of losing control of the whole process for a variety of reasons.

So, there is a strong chronological story to be told. This is built around seven “eras” or “ages” of media:

1. Before Media

2. Emergence

3. Explosion

4. Industrialisation

5. Digitalisation

6. Going synthetic

7. The end of Media?

The drivers of media

Running behind this chronological approach is the “hidden formula” of TBDAR. There are five forces that shape every media system in every era in a coherent structural model: Technology (T); Business Models (B); Distribution Power (D); Audience Behaviours (A); Regulation & Society (R).

These five factors revolve around media shapers: the humans at the core, who bend the systems and make things happen at key moments in media history.

Then, there is a cyclical overlay to all this. The concept of recurrence is that media does not simply evolve in a straight line. It also oscillates through repeated and predictable four-phase cycles: explosion, consolidation, saturation, decay.

The human factor

Alongside this rather cold model of forces and patterns running through time, the project dives into recurring themes: media dynasties, the psychology of moguls, the rise of secular content over religious “committed” content, the globalisation of media, women in media and much more…

My own personal fascination with media began not with a book, a newspaper or a magazine, but with a film: Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane. Released in 1941, it has become a cinematic classic and the defining portrait of the archetypical ‘media mogul’. Kane is driven to master his world through control of communication platforms: a personality powered by dark demons; a bully obsessed by power; a weakling undermined by his own flaws and passions. It is a powerful and disturbing story. Equally disturbing is how Randolph Hearst (the real-life model for Kane) tried to kill distribution of the movie and trash Orson Welles personally.

The film weaves together four themes that still define the media industry:

• Power: the ability to shape our world at many different levels. It is a power which individuals over the centuries have often sought to harness for their own personal ends: and they still do;
• Money: the varied business models that sit behind different media channels and which continue to morph and flex;
• Passion: the hidden obsessions which often lie at the core of many of the personalities who control the media;
• People: Behind the tech, there are the individual humans who make the big decisions, seal the deals and shape the outcomes.

These threads form the modern image of the ‘media mogul’: a man (and more rarely a woman) who is part visionary, part tyrant, part performer, part living human tragedy. This project explores some of those characters, both the remarkable and the despicable.

Does media have a future?

The whole purpose of the project is to attempt to answer that question. Without revealing all, the answer is yes-ish. At the centre is a feeling: a hope rather than a firm belief: that even in an automated, AI-driven, robot-managed world, humans will continue to play a central role in media. Their roles may well change; they will definitely have different skill sets; their numbers will certainly shrink and perhaps quite drastically. Yet there will always be people at the helm of this strange, influential, and endlessly fascinating industry: a business that is both adaptable and fragile simultaneously.

This article was first published in InPublishing magazine. If you would like to be added to the free mailing list to receive the magazine, please register here.