Merja MyllylahtiAuckland University of Technology | AUT · School of Communications Studies
Merja Myllylahti
Doctor of Philosophy
About
45
Publications
18,353
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413
Citations
Citations since 2017
Introduction
Senior Lecturer and researcher at the Auckland University of Technology (AUT). Co-director at the AUT's research center for Journalism, Media and Democracy (JMAD). Current research interests in platforms, attention economy, digital subscriptions, digital revenue models and media ownership.
Additional affiliations
February 2019 - present
January 2011 - present
AUT's Centre for Journalism, Media and Democracy
Position
- Project Manager
Description
- An author and project manager of the JMAD New Zealand media ownership report, published annually.
January 2011 - March 2016
Publications
Publications (45)
This paper addresses the contemporary issue of newspaper paywalls. The paper aims to analyse different paywall models and how they impact on media corporations’ revenues in the United States, the United Kingdom, Slovakia, Slovenia and Poland (Piano Media), Australia, New Zealand and Finland. The paper finds that newspaper paywalls provide roughly 1...
In March 2019, a terrorist killed 51 people in Christchurch mosque attacks, livestreaming his actions on Facebook. The attacks lead the country into a critical juncture: the New Zealand government was expected to abandon its relaxed attitude to platform regulation, and to implement strict rules to govern them. While the government has taken some me...
This exploratory article maps the development of the reader revenue market, and its aim is twofold: first, to examine how the digital reader revenue market was structured in 2010–2020; second, to investigate how the market was configured during 2020–2021. The article argues that in the past decade, large news publishers were rewarded for the attent...
In the age of misinformation, trust and trustworthiness – core values of journalism – have become more important as news companies reeling from the pandemic seek emergency funding for their operations from the public and funders look for trusted brands to support. Earlier studies indicated people are more willing to pay for trusted news brands, and...
The10th JMAD New Zealand media ownership report finds that in 2020, the country’s media landscape changed dramatically. Stuff became an independently owned media outlet, Bauer Media was sold to a private equity firm, and MediaWorks’s television arm was acquired by Discovery. As a consequence, New Zealand had more independently and privately held me...
This paper offers a preliminary inquiry into platform companies’ digital subscription services as they are rolled out and evolve. During 2019, hundreds of newspapers and magazines in the United States, Canada, Australia, and the United Kingdom signed for the Apple News+ service alone (Tobbit, 2019). The paper explores digital subscription services...
Trust in news in New Zealand.
Key findings:
• Compared internationally, trust in news in Aotearoa New Zealand generally is high, with 53% of people agreeing they can trust ‘most of the news most of the time’.
• Even more New Zealanders (63%) trust the news they personally consume.
• Trust in news consumed via social media and search engines in A...
The New Zealand media is facing the biggest changes since the first publication of the JMAD New Zealand media ownership report in 2011. In 2019, major New Zealand media organisations were put up for sale, and hundreds of jobs were at risk. In 2019, MediaWorks was seeking a buyer for its television arm including Three. Furthermore, the government wa...
Digital journalism has become entwined with the platform ecosystem as news companies distribute their news through platforms to gain audience attention and reader revenue. To understand where, how, and by whom individual user interaction is collected, measured and monetised, the concept of attention is critical. However, attention is a scarce and f...
Examining regulation of digital platforms has become increasingly important for the fields of the political economy of communication and digital journalism (Myllylahti, 2018a; Pickard, 2018a & 2018b). This paper is based on the analysis of the documents and data related to digital media inquiries in Australia and the United Kingdom, and merger deci...
Is reader-revenue revolution really here? A comparative analysis of newspapers reader payments in an attention economy
The dominance of Google and Facebook in the major Western digital advertising markets has forced news companies to increase their investments on audience monetisation (ACCC, 2019; Hindman, 2018; Author, 2018a; Winseck, 2018). In...
Digital subscriptions, or paywalls as they are coined, began emerging in 2010 as a new tool for funding journalism and hence the term became more prominent in the journalism and digital journalism studies. After the global financial crisis in 2007–2008, publishers in the matured newspaper markets started to introduce charges for their digital news...
Digital subscriptions, or paywalls as they are coined, began emerging in 2010 as a new tool for funding journalism and hence the term became more prominent in the journalism and digital journalism studies. After the global financial crisis in 2007–2008, publishers in the matured newspaper markets started to introduce charges for their digital news...
This exploratory study examines digital subscription services offered to news publishers by prominent platform companies. The paper explores to what extent platform subscriptions may empower news companies and aid their revenue building. Additionally, in the context of platform capitalism and platform power, the paper debates whether the reliance o...
This JMAD New Zealand media ownership report observes a considerable shift in New Zealand media ownership. In 2018, Australian Nine Entertainment took over Stuff’s parent company Fairfax Media. The report notes that the impact of this merger on the future ownership of Stuff and its New Zealand media holdings remain unknown. In 2018, New Zealand’s p...
Earlier studies and reports suggest that news companies have handed power over their traffic and news distribution to Facebook, and this is harming their business. This article, based on data analysis of four media companies, evaluates to what extent this is true. The article finds that 24% of news companies total traffic came from social media wit...
This chapter examines some of the symptoms and causes of the crisis facing newspapers via analyses of their finances and of audience measures. The consequences of the crisis, and whether there are any realistic remedies, are also considered, both in relation to journalism as a product and to the institutions, such as newspapers, that have tradition...
Routledge Handbook of Developments in Digital Journalism Studies
This is a report about power imbalances in digital media markets. It confirms that Google dominates New Zealand digital advertising. It also reveals that on average search engines and social media drive 53 percent of news websites’ traffic. Additionally, Facebook is the third largest news consumption platform in New Zealand (NERA Economic Consultin...
Funding of journalism has become a critical part of journalism and digital journalism studies because no single business model has emerged to solve revenue problems for print and digital news outlets. Despite newspapers’ efforts to expand their income sources, they have remained print reliant in terms of revenue. In 2017, approximately 80% of globa...
The paper analyses monetary and power relations between Facebook and news companies by investigating their web traffic sources, social sharing practices and content distribution on Facebook. The paper also seeks to determine the extent to which news companies’ revenue is derived from the platform. This is an ambitious task because news corporations...
This JMAD New Zealand media ownership report 2017 reveals a considerable shift in the pattern of New Zealand media ownership. For the first time in seven years, the number of privately/independently owned media outlets exceeded the number of publicly (shareholder) and Crown owned companies.
In 2017, there were seven privately owned media companies...
This qualitative research article explores New Zealand media convergence in an increasingly digital media environment. It considers media ownership convergence in the context of the Commerce Commission’s merger rulings in 2017. However, the focus of the research is on other kind of convergences. There is a lack in New Zealand academia of research i...
This study offers an analysis of print news media coverage of the 2016 New Zealand Local Body
elections, focusing on reportage around issues of diversity. This study builds upon a prior project
by the Media Observatory group at Auckland University of Technology of the 2014 New Zealand
General election that also examined issues of diversity. The...
There are certain topics that journalists and editors have preferred not to talk about. One of these has been audience monitoring and measuring, and how the use of metrics may affect journalistic work and editorial decisions. Increasingly, news organizations have integrated audience-monitoring tools into their newsrooms, and the intensified focus o...
Newspapers in developed countries are increasingly implementing ‘digital first’ strategies as part of a process of lessening their reliance on print as a delivery platform. Publishers frequently report ‘strong’ and ‘aggressive’ increases in their digital revenues, but a lack of detail in their digital disclosure has made analyses of these claims ra...
This paper suggests that the New Zealand media market is facing a period of doom and gloom even when some new digital media ventures – such as newsroom.co.nz, are emerging. In 2016, in its preliminary rulings, the Commerce Commission denied merger approvals for NZME-Fairfax and Sky TV-Vodafone mergers (Commerce Commission 2016a, 2016b). The Commerc...
The JMAD New Zealand media ownership report observes that New Zealand media institutions are facing major changes in ownership, management and structures, but it is not clear what combinations will eventually emerge.
For the first time in six years, New Zealand media companies are exclusively owned by financial institutions. Media moguls and News...
Digitalisation has fundamentally changed how news is produced, consumed, and delivered. It has also affected newspaper publishers’ revenue models, and building new digital income streams has become critical for the future of newsrooms. Some newspaper publishers have reported substantial growth in their digital-only subscription numbers as well as i...
Should newspapers move digital-only? A critical evaluation of digital and print revenue and expenses The contemporary Western news organisations have implemented 'digital-first' strategies, and many of large news publishers regard themselves now as 'digital-first' news organisations. This paper aims to critically evaluate this 'digital-first' rheto...
This paper explores and identifies the content which news publishers consider worthy of placing behind a paywall. It compares online news commodification in the leading Australasian financial newspapers—the Australian Financial Review (AFR) and the National Business Review (NBR). Based on a quantitative content analysis of 614 articles published on...
The paper explores how the business models of APN and Fairfax have been transformed from a print to digital environment, and how these models have affected their paywall implementation. It considers whether paywalls are a viable revenue option for legacy news publishers in the future. The paper is based on case study and document analysis methods,...
Conference presentation at JEAA conference on December 4 2012
The thesis critically examines how the business models of trans-Tasman media corporations Fairfax and APN evolved towards online news commodification – paywalls – from 2004 to 2013. The research analysis, grounded in the critical political economy of communication tradition, examines how the digitalisation of media, and financialisation of media ow...
This New Zealand Ownership Report 2014 is the fourth published by AUT’s Centre for Journalism, Media and Democracy (JMAD). The report finds that the New Zealand media market has failed to produce new, innovative media outlets, and that all the efforts to establish non-profit outlets have proved unsustainable.
The report confirms the general findin...
From the early 2000s, the financialisation of global capitalism reshaped the strategies of transnational media conglomerates. As financial institutions expanded their operations, non-financial corporations became seen as an assemblage of business units that ought to be continuously restructured to maximise share price performance and profit rates....
This article identifies recent developments in the ownership and management of New Zealand media institutions since Bill Rosenberg’s 2009 article in Pacific Journalism Review. New Zealand is enmeshed within global capitalism; a reality which shapes contemporary ownership patterns. Often the media ownership discussion in New Zealand is centred on me...
Using in-depth interviews, newsroom observation, and internal documents, this case study presents and analyses changes that have taken place at Finnish financial daily Taloussanomat since it stopped printing on 28 December 2007 to focus exclusively on digital delivery via the Web, email, and mobile. It reveals the savings that can be achieved when...
Projects
Projects (9)
Due to the current crisis facing news institutions, discussions about media policy have, increasingly, focused on economic sustainability, motivated by concerns about the ability of legacy news providers to fulfill their established roles. A key question is whether incumbents should be subsidized or whether a different approach should be taken to supporting the development of sustainable public-interest journalism.
