Importance of the media for industrial conglomerates and governments is not only a Balkan phenomenon.

Robert G. Picard  is Director of Research at the Reuters Institute in the Department of Politics and International Relations at University of Oxford, a research fellow at Green Templeton College (Oxford), and a fellow of the Royal Society of Arts. A specialist in media economics and policy, he is the author and editor of 28 books, including  The Economics and Financing of Media Companies, Media Clusters: Spatial Agglomeration and Content Capabilities ,  The Internet and the Mass Media , and  Media Firms: Structure, Operations, and Performance.  He has been editor of the  Journal of Media Business Studies  and  The Journal of Media Economics .  Picard  received his Ph.D. from the University of Missouri, Columbia, and has been a fellow at the Shorenstein Center at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. He has consulted and carried out assignments for governments in North America, Europe, Africa, and Asia and for international organisations, including the European Commission, UNESCO, and the World Intellectual Property Organisation.