27 May 2026
LMU professor Neil Thurman’s new book on transformations in the contemporary media landscape combines historical context, a novel conceptual framework, and extensive empirical findings.
Professor Neil Thurman | © Thurman
The impact of digital on the media landscape has been huge, but the transformations wrought by its advent are not total. “We live in a digital age, but not everything in it is digital, just as in the Iron Age not everything was made of iron,” says Neil Thurman, Professor in the Department of Media and Communication at LMU. “Media change never ceases, but the change, while sometimes happening very quickly, can also happen slowly, and fitfully, and on occasions can go into reverse. And where new media forms and practices do exist, they invariably owe much to the old.”
This is the complex reality addressed in Media Change: Contemporary Cases, Consequences, and Conceptualizations by Neil Thurman. The book investigates change and its absence through nine case studies that range from the use of AI in media content creation to media brands such as newspapers and television channels going online-only to the part that automation is playing in how journalists gather the news.
The book locates present media change within a context of past media change and shows how change is shaped not only by technological advances but by forces that include the economic environment and resistance on the part of organizations and audiences. This resistance is one of the themes that make up the book’s ‘six Rs’ framework, with media change considered in the light of six fundamental ideas – revolution, remediation, resistance, rapidity, regulation, and reversals.
The book is informed by Thurman’s decades of research findings on what digital has done to the media landscape. A recent development has seen media brands – like taz (Die Tageszeitung) – abandoning analogue and relying on a purely online presence, prompted by financial tribulation. The chapter on this reports Thurman’s investigations into what happened when a newspaper, magazine, and television channel decided to leave analogue behind.
His findings show that although the moves to online-only allowed the brands to save money, they also resulted in significant loss of audience attention. Partly as a result of this dramatic loss, both the magazine and television channel in question subsequently resurrected their analogue platforms – an example of the reversals that make media change a far from straightforward proposition.
Though reversals happen, change does, nevertheless, take place. A striking contemporary development has been the increasing use of automation in the production of media content, including in the writing of journalistic texts. Thurman’s chapter on this subject demonstrates that some prior research into what readers think about automated journalism has been questionable in its methodology, making use, for example, of small, non-representative respondent samples and asking respondents to compare non-comparable texts.
With LMU colleagues, the author sought to address such deficiencies in a study of his own, in which he discovered that respondents thought machine-written articles significantly less comprehensible than human-written articles, with comprehensibility impacted by word choice and the handling of numbers. That media change can sometimes happen for the better and sometimes for the worse is part of the complicated picture painted by Thurman, and his book makes clear the role that research can play in identifying harm and pushing change in better directions.
The book is published by Wiley, and its cover image features a sculpture by the South Korean artist and LMU alumnus, Nam June Paik.
Neil Thurman: Media Change: Contemporary Cases, Consequences, and Conceptualizations. Wiley 2026.