I have read very little in the way of scholarship on media economics, but in reading through this chapter of the Küng et al. book, I was struck by how many of the concepts I recognized from popular writing about media and technology. From creative destruction to the information age to disruptive innovation to free-rider problems, I hadn't realized how much of the popular writing about new media is loosely based on a framework drawn from economic theory.
It makes sense, I suppose - so much of the mass-marketed wisdom in most fields has to be filtered through business lenses, because the easiest way to get someone to buy a book (or read an article) is to convince them they'll make some money from that investment. And when you look at the most popular thinkers in media and tech - Chris Anderson, Clay Shirky, Jeff Jarvis, Clay Christensen - they all approach things from a business/economics angle. Even the most popular of the more academically inclined writers in media, like Yochai Benkler and Lawrence Lessig, write from an economics-based perspective.
Yet it seems as though there's not a correspondingly significant amount of rigorous, scholarly work explicitly applying economic principles to media. Benkler and Lessig's focus is much broader than media in particular, and though there are a few major journals in this area, they don't seem to be widely cited in other areas of media studies. Several other areas of media studies - media effects, obviously, and also sociology and the study of media and democracy - have achieved a critical mass of well received, prominent scholarship, but I haven't seen that with media economics.
So what gives? I don't think media economics is destined to be fundamentally an area of popular interest rather than scholarly interest, but it hasn't taken off yet in the latter despite an enormous amount of attention for the former. It seems like there is a gap waiting to be filled by applying some of these concepts more explicitly and rigorously to actual media settings, connecting the conventional wisdom of the Shirkys and Jarvises of the world with the methods of scholarly study.
One more link: I found this Businessweek article on ESPN's business model really interesting, particularly the way it's built a media empire on something other than advertising, a market that keeps growing more uncertain. Less than a quarter of its revenue comes from advertising, and the rest is being paid by cable subscribers directly for its content. That's a business model other media organizations (especially news organizations) would kill for, but for ESPN it also comes with its own problems, namely, the conflicts between its business interests and the demands of covering news.
You're right that much of the popular comment on the news industry is based on more on economic theories than anything else. I think that's mostly because the problem is fundamentally one of economics, but also partly because these economic theories can be explained in a sentence, I noticed. Many of the communications-specific theories I've encountered were much more complex and much less generalizable.
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