What gets measured gets done? : a study within the newspaper industry

Abstract: According to Atkinson, Banker, Kaplan and Young (1995) management accounting and control practices have an important role within today’s organizations. In order for the organization to be successful, information on the finances and performance are crucial. But in the media industry there are indications that management accounting and control practices are not as accepted as in many other industries (Tjernström, 2002). Since there have not been much research about management accounting in the media industry, compared to what have been done in other industries, like manufacturing and new economy firms, there are less knowledge from this industry. The purpose of our thesis is to investigate, explain and analyze the management accounting practices, with focus on performance measurement and what the attitude to performance measurement is within four newspapers in Sweden. This will be done from a management perspective. Previous research about agency theory, stewardship theory, budget, responsibility centres, operating- income and margin, reward and incentive plans, balanced scorecard and intellectual capital statement and theories about the newspaper industry are described and used. A qualitative research with four interviews was conducted. Three were newspaper managers and one editor in chief. From our four researched newspapers we have found that managers described management accounting and performance measurements to be important but still not communicated. Therefore, it is interesting that none of the newspapers measure performances in the editorial department. Journalists have been and are sceptical to management accounting practices and performance measurements but this attitude has changed and is not so strong and not a problem nowadays. Focus on profit has increased but is not considered as a threat to newspaper quality as long as it is not too extreme. Operating margin is the key ra-tio that all four newspapers use.