Course provides a theoretical and practical introduction to the political economy approach in researching journalism and media more generally. Political economy is considered one of the key critical research traditions in media and communication studies and the central approach for a structural and systemic analysis of media and cultural industries as parts of (global) capitalism.

Course follows these presuppositions by thematically moving from general topics to more specific issues. It is divided in four parts: in the first part, a contextual analysis of how global capitalism, in which inequalities and perturbations have intensified in the past decades, works. In the second part, students get to know the conceptual and theoretical foundations of political economy approach in media and communication studies. In the third part, journalism and media industries are related to the practices and processes distinctive of capitalist societies through an analysis of specific cases. In the fourth part, some of the key shifts in journalism are identified and analysed in relation to the political and economic changes, with a particular focus on the crisis of the existing economic model of the media industries, which materially supported journalism throughout the twentieth century.