To be or not to be the media industry – Delineation to a fuzzy concept

Even though media industry studies are on the rise, there is a major issue: the concept itself is “fuzzy”. The goal of this paper is to shed light on the concept. To do so, the paper analyses existing approaches, combining academic references as well as sources commonly used by practitioners (e.g. the OECD, the EU, DCMS). It allows to give three delineations to the media industry: (1) A novel theoretical delineation, (2) a sectoral delineation, and (3) a delineation through the NACE statistical classification system. The main research findings are: (i) the development of a so-called circling model that shows how “mediated content” is at the core of the definition of the media industry; (ii) through the convergence tendencies, many different media activities can play a supporting or facilitating role; (iii) a list of NACE codes to guide statistical analysies.