Aleksander Sašo Slaček Brlek, PhD in Communication Studies
Sašo Slaček Brlek holds a PhD in communication and is a researcher at the Center for Social Communication Research at the Faculty of Social Sciences, University of Ljubljana. His research focuses primarily on the political-economic analysis of changes in media markets and business models of news media under the influence of digitalization and the rise of digital platforms, the analysis of related changes in news work and the historical analysis of the role of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia in the efforts to change the global communication system. e has published in Slovenian (Teorija in praksa, Časopis za kritički znanosti) and international (Javnost-the Public, Triple C, Critical Sociology, Digital Journalism) journals.
HHe is co-editor of the monographic publication In the shadow of digital giants: contemporary trends of Slovenian digital journalism (FDV Press) and guest editor of the academic journals Javnost-the Public, Triple C, The Political Economy of Communication and Journal of Criticism of Science. He is co-director of the international summer school for PhD students Political economies of the media. He is a long-time activist (informal educational project Workers and Punks University, 15o and Mi smo univerza, member of the Coordinating Committee of Antifa Seminars at the Faculty of Social Sciences), politician (member of the Executive Committee of the Left Party in the years 2017-2023) and trade unionist.
Recent Publications
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Slaček Brlek, Sašo and Boris Mance (2023). “The Strictest Taboo: The Marginalization of Marxism in Mainstream Communication Studies.” Critical Sociology, 0(0). https://doi.org/10.1177/08969205231213281
The study uses big data analysis to examine the influence of Marxism on communication studies throughout its history. We track citations of Marxist authors and the use of Marxist concepts in the titles, keywords, or abstracts of publications in the Web of Science scholarly database in the category of communication. We find that Marxian authors and ideas were almost completely absent from the mainstream of media studies until the end of the Cold War. The end of the Cold War and the Great Recession of 2008 significantly increased citations of Marxist authors. We use network analysis to identify different currents of thought or paradigmatic appropriations of Marxism within communication studies and identify five clusters of appropriation of Marx’s ideas within communication studies: Theories of Democracy, Political Economy of Communication, Critique of Power Relations, Feminism and Antiracism, and Critical Discourse Analysis.
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Slaček Brlek, Sašo and Kaluža, J. (2022). “Survival Strategies of Digital News Media in the Changing Market Environment”. In Futures of Journalism: Technology-Stimulated Evolution in the Audience-News Media Relationship, edited by Ville J. E. Manninen, Mari K. Niemi, and Anthony Ridge-Newman, pp. 35-48. Cham: Springer Nature. DOI: 10.1007/978-3-030-95073-6_3.
The chapter deals with the question of how the changing business strategies of Slovenian commercial news media affect the relationship between journalism and the –audience. The authors conducted 38 interviews with journalists and editors, marketing managers, social media and analytics specialists and analyzed annual reports and other relevant investor-oriented forms of communication. Based on the analysis of this data, they identify several trends that will shape the relationship between journalists and their audiences. The influence of market demands on content will continue to increase, leading to more content that is either cost-effective to produce or has high potential for monetization, either due to audience interest or advertisers' demands to combine editorial content with advertising. In addition, the search for revenue streams outside of advertising will lead to a pluralization of business models and additional ways in which news media will seek to engage audiences and involve them in non-media ventures such as event management.
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Mance, Boris and Sašo Slaček Brlek (2021) “Inequality: The Blind Spot of Western Communication Studies.” History of Media Studies 2 (July). https://doi.org/10.32376/d895a0ea.dd047f5b.
The study focuses on the proliferation of conceptualizations of communicative inequality in the field of communication studies after the end of the Second World War. While communication studies has adopted and been influenced by conceptualizations of inequality from related disciplines and fields, conceptualizations of communicative inequality seem to have played only a marginal role. Using a network analysis conducted on a corpus of more than fifteen thousand articles published between 1945 and 2018 in eight prominent international journals in the field, this study aims to map the prominence and adoption of different conceptualizations of communication inequality. Using network analysis, the study identifies conceptualizations by tracking the most frequently cited authors associated with a particular conceptualization over time. We identify four different groups of conceptualizations: Modernization Theory, Cultural Imperialism, Knowledge Gap, and Digital Divide. Historically, approaches to communication inequality have been divided either along ideological lines - essentially defined in terms of support (modernization theory) or opposition (cultural imperialism) to US foreign policy — or in terms of different levels of communication inequality. While both modernization theory and cultural imperialism focus on inequality in international communication, the knowledge gap tradition focuses on interpersonal differences. We argue that the prevailing approaches and paradigm shifts in the conceptualization of communication inequality have largely been driven by forces outside of communication studies. Modernization theory, which dominated the period up to the late 1970s arose from the US interest in securing its hegemony in the Third World. The critique of cultural imperialism emerged in the 1970s as a direct challenge to modernization theory and was closely linked to Third World resistance to US hegemony. The term digital divide, which has become the dominant conceptualization of communication inequality since 2000, largely stems from the US Department of Commerce's National Telecommunications and Information Administration's concern with providing “universal service” to US citizens, while the tradition of the knowledge gap relates to the effectiveness of top-down communication campaigns.
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Slaček Brlek, Sašo (2022) “The Creation of the Non-Aligned News Agencies Pool.” Contributions to Contemporary History 62(1). http://dx.doi.org/https://doi.org/10.51663/pnz.62.1.2
The article looks at the process that led to the creation of the Non-Aligned News Agencies Pool (NANAP) and the factors that influenced its formation. The author explains the emergence of NANAP on the basis of three groups of factors. The first is the interests and strategies of the Yugoslav political elites and the Yugoslav news agency Tanjug. While Tanjug was interested in expanding its global reach and position in the global news agency market, the federal political elites saw Tanjug as an important foreign policy tool. Already in the run-up to the 4th NAM summit in Algiers, Yugoslavia actively pushed for the institutionalization of information cooperation within the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM), even though the objective conditions were considered minimal. The second factor is the changes in international relations, as NANAP developed in the context of the institutionalization of NAM in the 1970s and its efforts towards “self-reliance” in order to strengthen its position within the global economy and its bargaining power vis-à-vis the developed countries. NANAP therefore recontextualized Tanjug’s bilateral news exchange agreements into a multilateral project of economic cooperation within NAM aimed at strengthening mutual understanding and gaining independence from global (mainly Western) news sources. Finally, the development of NANAP was shaped by the institutional history of the movement, as NANAP was conceived and institutionalized along the lines of already existing forms of economic cooperation. In order to do justice to the decentralized ethos of the movement, Yugoslavia had to downplay and disguise its significant involvement in the establishment of NANAP and other forms of information cooperation, presenting them as multilateral projects with broad support within NAM.