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 focussed 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 longerterm threats to the underlying economic viability of the large-scale integrated media producers that could put on ‘media events’. This makes it necessary to re-think the original definition of media events.