Industry events surfaced finance-driven project funding worth an entire book

Evidence

Though political economy of media and cultural studies both loom large in this project, the book’s origin lies in ethnographic fieldwork. While writing my dissertation at UCLA, on what was originally a different topic, I attended many film and television industry conferences and would occasionally notice a panel of investors talking about how projects were increasingly being funded through financial means outside of the traditional system. I spoke with some of these investment bankers and venture capitalists, started looking into these companies, and decided to reorient my project around this rabbit hole I had fallen into. — Andrew deWaard, Derivative Media, 41

Categorization

• QUESTION: Authors’ testimony that investors themselves talk about a shift to funding ‘outside the traditional system’ is valuable empirical grounding for the ownership-structure-leaves-fingerprints thesis — worth noting how direct a source this is.