A media system does not exist in a vacuum. It develops and grows within social, political and economic systems. They interact with and influence one another, as well as stimulate each other's development. The main subject of this work is the dynamically evolving Polish media system, which is under the influence of institutions and external stakeholders. Thanks to this, it is easier to understand that the "crossroads" is not only a problem of the Polish media system, but a global one. For this reason, a comparative perspective is employed. Three chapters help to provide an answer to research questions dedicated to political parallelism and journalistic professionalization. The analysis would be limited and unrepresentative if the book enclosed it with one country's border, omitting the broad global, European and Centro-European context.

This book is a collective effort of scholars who elaborate on democracy, civil society and media-political relations in Central and Eastern Europe. The authors look at both theories and practices of media systems and democracy. They indicate problems, risks, challenges related to political transformations, the public sphere, journalism culture and media freedom. All of this while bearing in mind the growing role of new media, civic engagement in the online space as well as societal changes that Central and Eastern European democracies are going through in the second decade of the 21st Century. This book is a helpful companion to media and communication scholars as well as students of journalism and political science, media practitioners and policy makers in Central and Eastern Europe and beyond. "A well-documented book on the mass media in a little explored area: Central Eastern Europe. Four models of media and politics are presented opening the floor for a wider scholarly debate." (Paolo Mancini, Universita di Perugia, Italy) "This volume meets the continuing need to make sense of the changing worlds of journalism, journalists, and media. Each of the ten contributions is a well conceptualized, researched and thought out assessment of the pertinent issues and a springboard for further evaluations and model building. A great addition to the classroom and scholarship." (Peter Gross, The University of Tennessee, USA)

Media developments change journalism all over the world. But are the changes the same in different media systems? How is professionalization influenced by the constant growth of a network society and social media? How are commercialization and political influences in the media relating to each other? These are some of the issues discussed in this study. It is based on the research project Journalism in Change - professional journalistic cultures in Poland, Russia and Sweden. From 2011 to 2014 researchers from Sweden, Poland and Russia at Soedertoern University in Stockholm have been cooperating closely in order to survey a sample of 1500 journalists and 60 in depth interviews with journalists. The results are presented in a comparative design covering different areas. It is an unusually tightly focused volume that sheds much light on the values, roles and working conditions of these journalists in a revealing comparative perspective. It is a model of well-conceptualized and carefully conducted comparative cross-national journalism research. David H. Weaver, Bloomington, Indiana University, USA

New technologies and new media have significantly influenced the process of political communication. They have created new opportunities such as the great interactivity of communication, the personalization of a message or an uncountable number of possibilities for campaigning. This publication is a collection of socio-political studies which analyze the phenomenon of political communication in the 21st century. The main focus is on new media, especially on the Internet as well as on social media or social networks. However, there are also papers which examine traditional channels of political communication in the era of new technologies. Moreover, to the advantage of this book, the chapters explore the phenomenon of political communication not only in the USA and Western Europe, but also in Central Europe, Latin America and Africa.

Inspired by the recent achievements on comparing media systems and research on models of media and politics in Western Europe and the US, this title extends the findings to Central and Eastern Europe. It addresses five major interrelated themes: concepts and history of comparative media research - how ideological and normative constructs gave way to systematic empirical work; the role of foreign media groups in post-communist regions - the effects of ownership in the context of economic and political pressures on media organizations as well as in terms of impacts on media freedom; political parallelism in mature and new democracies - the various dimensions of the relationship between mass media and political systems in a comparative perspective; professionalization of journalism in different political cultures - autonomy of journalists, professional norms and practices, political instrumentalization and/or commercialization of the media etc; and, the role of the state intervention in media systems, above all in public service broadcasting.