The continuing lure of the mediated centre in times of deep mediatization: Media Events and its enduring legacy

Dayan and Katz’s book Media Events was so crucial because it challenged the dominance of quantitative communications research focused on measurable discrete ‘media effects’. But meanwhile new challenges have emerged which we called ‘deep mediatization’ – datafication, deeper fragmentation of the audience, and over the longer-term threats to the underlying economic viability of the large-scale integrated media producers that could put on ‘media events’. This makes it necessary to rethink the original definition of media events.