Financialization and the “Crisis of the Media”: The Rise and Fall of (Some) Media Conglomerates in Canada

New media have expanded the size of the media economy without cannibalizing the economic base of traditional media. The current woes facing some media primarily reflect a short-term, cyclical decline in advertising revenue caused by the economic downturn, the accumulated results of media consolidation, and the financialization of the media. The latter process saw vast sums of capital investment in the creation of massive media conglomerates based on wildly optimistic projections where future profits would grow faster than the expanding network media economy and exceed the high profits that characterized the media in the past. When that rosy scenario failed to materialize, some media companies were indeed in trouble and saddled with unsustainable debts, but there has been no crisis of the media per se.