Working with Secondary Data: Official and Industry Statistics

Abstract

This chapter demonstrates which official statistics are available for media policy analysis including statistics provided by national and local statistics organizations, international organizations and private organizations. In addition, the advantages and limitations of working with official and industry statistics are discussed including reliability of data and the issues in delineating the media industry. Concluding, a step-by-step approach to work with media industry statistics is given based on two exemplary cases, one for Europe and one for the USA. The goal of this chapter is to show how official and industry statistics can be used for media policy analysis to create data-driven insights that can support policy making.