ABSTRACT
Reporting on media mergers resounds with the voices of financial analysts, scholars, industry experts, journalists and regulators. Yet the relative silence of industry leaders obscures the fact that media consolidation has created many strange new partnerships: horizontally integrated cable and telephone companies, vertically merged entertainment content providers and distributors, phone companies in information processing and entertainment ventures, and print publishers moving into electronic publishing. Telecommunications executives are more skeptical, but have nonetheless been active participants in the race to merge. A cross-industry perspective was used to determine if any measurable differences existed beyond the effects of company size. Telecommunications executives’ experiences with large organizations and sizable bureaucracies could explain their skepticism towards integration, particularly with regard to creativity. Telecommunications executives signaled that in their organizations size had stifled creativity, whereas entertainment executives and new media executives did not feel that their company’s size was influential.
