Alejandro Ocampo (aocampo@itesm.mx) is a scholar from the Monterrey Institute of Technology and Higher Education (State of Mexico Campus). Currently he is the Chair of the Department of Creative Industries. His lines of research are education, ethics, and their relationship with technology. Furthermore, he was the editor of Razón y Palabra, the most important online journal specializing in communication in Latin America. He studied communication, education, and philosophy.

Saba Bebawi (Saba.Bebawi@uts.edu.au) is Associate Professor in Journalism at the University of Technology Sydney (UTS). She has published on the role of media in democracy‐building in conflict and post‐conflict regions. She is author of Media Power and Global Television News: The role of Al Jazeera English and Investigative Journalism in the Arab World: Issues and Challenges.

O. Hugo Benavides (benavides@fordham.edu) is Chair and Professor of Anthropology at Fordham University. He has published three books: Making Ecuadorian Histories: Four Centuries of Defining the Past, (2004); The Politics of Sentiment: Remembering and Imagining Guayaquil (2006); and Drugs, Thugs and Divas: Latin American Telenovelas and Narco‐Dramas (2008), as well as over 50 articles.

Isaac Abeku Blankson (abekublankson1@yahoo.com) is the Vice President of Ghana Technology University College (GTUC). His research focuses on social media and electronic communication applications, crisis communication, media studies, and public relations in developing countries. He has authored several publications and is co‐editor of Negotiating Democracy: Media Transformations in Emerging Democracies published by SUNY press.

Glenda Daniels (Glenda.Daniels@wits.ac.za) is Associate Professor in Media Studies at Wits University, Johannesburg, South Africa. She is also a writer and media freedom activist. She is the author of the book Fight for Democracy: The ANC and the media in South Africa (Wits Press, 2012) and has spent around 20 years as a print journalist. She serves on the council of the South African National Editors' Forum (Sanef) as chair of the diversity and ethics committee. Daniels is also on the board of the Institute for the Advancement of Journalism based in Johannesburg, South Africa.

Karen Donders (karen.donders@vub.be) is a lecturer in Policy Analysis, Political Economy of Journalism, and European Media Markets at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel. She heads the MEDIA unit of research center imec‐SMIT, hosting 30 PhD and senior researchers. She specializes in public service media policies across Europe, the interplay between media economics and policies, and competition law and media.

Scott Fitzgerald (s.fitzgerald@curtin.edu.au) is a Senior Lecturer at Curtin University, Australia. His research interests cover cultural industry corporations, creative work, public services (especially education), and new public management. He has published several chapters in international collections on the media industries and the book Corporations and Cultural Industries (Rowman & Littlefield).

Martin Fredriksson (martin.fredriksson@liu.se) is Associate Professor at the Department for Culture and Society, Linköping University. He has, among other things, published extensively on issues concerning the theory and history of piracy, commons, property rights, and the history of copyright. He is currently finalizing a project on the commodification of commons.

Thom Gencarelli (thom.gencarelli@manhattan.edu) (PhD, NYU) is Professor and Founding Chair of the Communication Department at Manhattan College. His research spans media ecology, media education/media literacy, popular media and culture, and popular music, and he is co‐Editor of the recent Baby Boomers and Popular Culture: An Inquiry into America's Most Powerful Generation.

Fernando Gutiérrez (fgutierr@itesm.mx) is the Head of the Division of Humanities and Education at the Monterrey Institute of Technology and Higher Education (State of Mexico Campus). He earned a PhD in Design and Data Visualization from The Metropolitan Autonomous University (UAM). He is the author of several titles about media.

Grant Hannis (g.d.hannis@massey.ac.nz) is Associate Professor of Journalism at Massey University in Wellington, New Zealand. His research interests include media history and economics. He lives near to where Peter Jackson grew up and has closely followed the film‐maker's career, after attending the New Zealand premiere of Bad Taste in 1988.

Rebecca Kern‐Stone (rebecca.kern@manhattan.edu) is Associate Professor of Communication, Media, and Advertising at Manhattan College. Her research focuses on community and identity discourse and practice, critical/cultural studies, and digital culture. She has published in a number of journals including: Sexualities, Information, Communication, and Society, Telematics and Informatics, and First Monday.

Shin Dong Kim (kimsd@hallym.ac.kr) is Professor of Media and Communication at Hallym University, South Korea. His research and teaching cover global communication, media and cultural industries, and Asian cinema. He has traveled and taught widely in Asia, Europe, and North America, and currently work on a multi‐year research project on the development of the Korean ICTs on a national funding.

Michael Lewis (lewism@msu.edu) is Professor of History, Emeritus, at Michigan State University. He has written widely on modern Japanese social, political, and cultural history and Japan's influence on its East Asian neighbors. His most recent study is “History Wars” and Reconciliation in Japan and Korea (Palgrave, 2017).

Suman Mishra (smishra@siue.edu) is Associate Professor and Graduate Program Director at the Department of Mass Communication, Southern Illinois University Edwardsville. Her research focuses on globalization, transnational media, consumer culture, and identities.

Onookome Okome (ookome@ualberta.ca) studied at the University of Ibadan, Nigeria, and is currently Professor of Anglophone African Literature and Cinema at the University of Alberta, Canada. His recent publications include Global Nollywood: An African Video Film Industry (with Matthias Krings, Indiana University Press, 2013), and Popular Culture in Africa: The Episteme of Everyday Life (with Stephanie Newell, Routledge, New York, 2014). “Islam et Cinema en Afrique de l'ouest” (Tresor de Islam en Afrique. Paris: Silvania Editoriale, 2017) is his most recent essay. He is a Humboldt Scholar and was a Fellow of the Salzburg Seminar.

Humphrey A. Regis (hummuh@att.net) is Professor in the School of Communication at Texas Southern University in Houston, Texas, USA. He studies mass communication and culture, reference group orientation, and location in global social space; and won the Saint Lucia Medal of Merit (Gold) for “long and meritorious service in Education and Journalism.”

Liudmila Voronova (lusyandrik@gmail.com) is Senior Lecturer at the Department of Journalism, School of Social Sciences, Södertörn University (Sweden). Her research interests are comparative studies of journalism cultures, political communication research, and gender media studies. In her studies, she focuses particularly on the media in Russia, Ukraine, and the Baltic Sea region.

D. Ndirangu Wachanga (wachangd@uww.edu) is Professor of Media Studies and Information Science at the University of Wisconsin. His research interests include memory, communication technologies, global media, and information ethics. He is the authorized documentary biographer of Professor Ngugi wa Thiong'o, and Professor Micere Mugo. His documentary, Ali Mazrui: A Walking Triple Heritage, won the 2015 New York African Studies Book Award. He is widely published and has presented his work internationally and is also a commentator for British Broadcasting Corporation Television.

Lisa Waller (lisa.waller@deakin.edu.au) is Associate Professor of Communication in the School of Communication and Creative Arts, Deakin University, Australia. She is the co‐author of two recent books: The Dynamics of News and Indigenous Policy in Australia (Intellect, 2017) and Local Journalism in a Digital World (Palgrave, 2017).

Xinyuan Wang (xinyuan.wang.11@ucl.ac.uk) is a post‐doc researcher from the UCL Department of Anthropology and received her PhD and MSc degrees from the same department. Her current publications are How the World Changed Social Media (co‐author, 2016, UCL Press) and Social Media in Industrial China (2016, UCL Press).

Andreas Widholm (andreas.widholm@ims.su.se) is Associate Professor of Journalism in the Department of Media Studies (IMS) at Stockholm University, Sweden. His research addresses the relationship between media, politics, and culture with a particular focus on journalism, digital political communication, and social media.

This edited book is designed to meet the introductory needs of undergraduate and graduate courses in international media, international mass communication, global media transnational media, comparative media analysis, and the like. More broadly, it aims to fulfill the needs of colleges and universities who are internationalizing their curriculum to meet the needs of an increasingly globalized world through introduction of international‐oriented courses. Books that exist on the subject tend to be highly theoretical and often focus on journalism or entertainment media or specific regions of the world. In this book we have provided a broader perspective on national and transnational media in an easy to read accessible form and covered different media forms from Africa, Asia (including the Middle East), the Americas, Europe, and Oceania.

In media studies, concepts such as global communication, transnational communication, international communication, trans‐border communication, world communication, inter‐cultural communication, and so on have been used to highlight the communication and flow of information across boundaries. Each of these terms has its own dimension and complexity (Kamalipour 2007). We use the term “transnational” to recognize media's role in communication and relevance both within a nation and also across the transnational arena.

Thus, this book provides a country‐based perspective along with a transnational perspective. It is important to note that it is impossible to cover every region of the world and every country within a region; nevertheless, the book covers media from a wide array of countries from around the globe and highlights its national and transnational dimensions.

Chapters are arranged so that important foundation material is presented at the beginning of the book with regional and country discussions in the remaining chapters. The following two chapters introduce and discuss key transnational media concepts and theories and media systems. The first introduces concepts like globalization and the historical development of transnational media and communication theories in the area, also referred to in general as theories of international communication. It highlights the major strengths and weaknesses of these theories and changes over time. Last, it addresses the many complexities of today's world to provoke thought and discussion for future theories in this area. The chapter on media systems introduces how media is directly integrated with political, economic, and cultural conditions. These discussions are meant to be introductory and are presented not as highly theoretical models, but as background information to understand how media function around the world.

The book is then divided by regions of the world, namely: Africa, the Americas, Asia (including the Middle East), Europe, and Oceania. These regions have been defined based on the UN's Standard Country and Area Codes Classifications, revised October 2013 (UN Stats). In each regional section of the book, we have first provided some basic information about selected countries from the region, including a brief description of their media, and then provided more in‐depth country‐specific media cases as well as transnational influences of media from that country.

We have invited international scholars to write essays or case studies on specific countries as we wanted to include more international voices in this book. The essays and case studies offer country‐specific examples of media trends in television, radio, films, journalism, social media, and music, among others. As a whole, this book explores and answer the following questions:

1. How can media be understood on a global scale within and between nations?
2. How do changing global conditions – including economic, political, and cultural – impact media and how are they impacted by media in transnational information flow?
3. What are some of the primary centers of transnational media activities, both new and old?

1.1 Understanding Transnationalism and Related Trends

Transnationalism engages in political, cultural, social, and economic initiatives that extend beyond the borders of nation‐states. A nation‐state is a geographic locale that has defined borders where people share similar identities. These identities may be cultural in that they involve religion, food, traditions, clothing, history, or other factors that bring groups of people together. The identities may also be nationalistic or have nationalism, in that the people of the nation see themselves as part of a geographic place where they live, work, raise families, and engage with government affairs. As a result, there evolves a sense of allegiance with place. While not necessarily politically motivated, people of a nation‐state feel a belonging to the place they call home. Nation‐states, however, usually have fluid borders. Citizens, in most cases, are able to come and go from their home country and travel. Their view of the world expands beyond their local geography and culture, resulting in new curiosities about global understandings. Under transnationalism, global movement and interactions are what create a more integrated global society.

For transnationalism to occur a few additional factors need to exist. First, there needs to be “regular and sustained social contacts over time across national borders” (Portes et al. 1999, p. 219). In other words, regular trips across borders – whether business or pleasure – that involve activity and transaction, facilitate the concept of transnationalism. The trend of transnationalism is not new. While the term might be, transnationalism has existed since people have crossed borders to engage in political, cultural, social, or economic transactions. It can be tied to the history of globalization, which will be discussed in Chapter 2. Essentially, it could be argued that transnationalism is a long‐established trend that only recently was given a name. Second, as Portes et al. (1999) note, transnationalism began with the individual. It is at the local level that individuals sought opportunities across borders, whether for political motivations – as a need to escape government policies or regimes, or economic motivations – as a way to obtain goods or connections for business, for example. Displays of nationalism in sport, music, art, and traditional dress are all presented by the individual. Transnationalism does not only exist at the level of the individual: it begins with the individual but works to embolden larger institutions. These institutions may be government, corporation, education, religion, or of course mass media. Mass media can function on both the local and public level, which would be considered more nationalistic, or on the transnational level. Both are important to how people gain information about the world around them.

Examples of transnationalism can be seen at a macro level through global statistics; for example, in population changes, economic changes, immigration flows, global travel, and technology. All these changes are intrinsically linked with growth, production and consumption of media, global flow of information, patterns of media adoptions, cultural influences and changes, and so on. For example, many leading media companies from America and Europe today, for example Bertelsmann, are investing in the media markets of developing countries like India, China, Brazil, and Nigeria because of their size, and this provides a growth opportunity for these companies as well as growth of international media reach in these countries. Further understanding of the international reach and investment of a large European conglomerate in growing markets is discussed in Chapter 19. Similarly, economic changes in China have helped Chinese businesses immensely; these businesses are now investing in the established media markets of America and Europe and are helping to boost them. Chinese investment in the American movie‐theater chain AMC Entertainment Holdings Inc., Hollywood studio Legendary Entertainment, and India‐based Reliance Entertainment's investment in Hollywood director Spielberg's DreamWorks studio, are just a few examples of global changes and the impact they have had on media business. US‐based Hollywood's, Australia‐based Wellywood's, India‐based Bollywood's, and Nigeria‐based Nollywood's contributions and connections to global media and markets are further discussed in Chapters 7, 10, 14, and 22, respectively. Other examples include the enormous transnational growth of several Latin American media companies, which has expanded the reach of telenovelas around the globe. For more on Latin American media conglomerates as well as the global impact of telenovelas, see Chapters 8 and 9. Transnational media has impacted news and journalism as much as entertainment. A number of news channels, such as BBC, CNN, Al Jazeera, and Russia Today (RT), are broadcast via satellite around the world, are available online, and have offices and reporters based in major cities around the world. This adds to differing perspectives on global events. The news systems and global reach of Al Jazeera and RT are discussed in Chapters 16 and 20 respectively.

1.2 Population Trends

Population changes can tell us a lot about clusters of growth, media opportunities, employment and capital, infrastructure needs, and other necessities. The population of the world currently is over 7.6 billion (UN DESA 2017). The United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs (2017), expects the population to reach 8.6 billion in 2030, 9.8 billion by 2050 and 11.2 billion by 2100. That is an increase of 14% by 2030, 12% by 2050, and 13% by 2100. The largest countries in terms of population size are China and India, representing 19% (1.4 billion inhabitants) and 18% (1.3 billion inhabitants) of the world's population (UN DESA 2017). However, India is set to overtake China's population within five years. Of the 10 largest countries in the world by population, see Figure 1.1, Nigeria and India are growing most rapidly.

1.3 Economic Trends

Overall, the world economy is projected to double by 2050 (PWC 2017). By 2050, China, India, the United States, Indonesia, and Brazil are projected to be the world's top five economies (PWC 2017). Vietnam, the Philippines, and Nigeria are expected to make the biggest leap upward in the ranking (PWC 2017). On average, the emerging markets (E7: China, India, Indonesia, Brazil, Russia, Mexico, and Turkey) are expected to grow twice as fast as the advanced economies (G7: US, UK, France, Germany, Japan, Canada, and Italy) (PWC 2017).

The GDP (Gross Domestic Product) – a measure of economic output, growth, and development – for many countries is changing under overall transnational growth (World Bank 2018). That means a larger labor market, global connectivity, growing opportunities, and greater purchasing power for many. Higher GDP allows for an increase in infrastructure spending which then can be used to bring in media opportunities, such as local radio, internet, and newspaper, as well as education opportunities. It can also boost current media in developing as well as established economies. Overall, the GDP of most countries has been growing. Developing countries have been growing faster than developed regions (World Bank 2018) (see Figure 1.2).

While the economies of countries have been growing, poverty levels on a global basis have been dropping (UN DESA 2015; World Bank 2018). The global poverty line is set at US$1.90 PPP (purchasing power parity) a day, and since 1990 poverty has dropped by over 20%. However, as the United Nations notes, those in low‐income countries – a GNI (gross national income) per capita below US$1025 or less, such as many in sub‐Saharan Africa and southern areas of Asia – are more likely to be caught in the poverty coverage gaps. Poverty in high income countries – a GNI per capita of $12 476 or more – is often overlooked in poverty measurements as wealthier countries are not considered to have any extreme poverty (World Bank 2017). Yet, wealthier nations with extreme poverty gaps have similar problems to poorer nations when it comes to media access. Poverty level and inequity affect people's access to goods and services including access to technology and the communication infrastructure. This also means citizens have less opportunity to create their own stories, whether socio‐political or cultural, or engage with transnational voices.