Robert G. Picard (1951–) is an American writer and scholar.
One of the leading academic experts on media businesses and considered the father of the media economics studies. He is the author and editor of more than 24 books including The Economics and Financing of Media Companies, Media Product Portfolios, Media Economics: Concepts and Issues, and Joint Operating Agreements: The Newspaper Preservation Act and Its Application.
He is Director of Research at the Reuters Institute at University of Oxford, editor of the Journal of Media Business Studies, author of the blog The Media Business, and was previously editor of the The Journal of Media Economics.
Picard received a Ph.D. from the University of Missouri, a M.A. from California State University, Fullerton, and a B.A. from Loma Linda University. He has been a fellow at the Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University and the Reuters Institute, Department of Politics and International Relations, University of Oxford.
He has been on the faculties of Louisiana State University, California State University, Fullerton, Turku School of Economics (Finland), and Jönköping International Business School (Sweden). He has been a visiting professor at the University of Paris, Shanghai University, and the University of Amsterdam, and Catholic University in Lisbon, Portugal.
He chairs the World Media Economics and Management Conference, a global gathering of scholars and practitioners that meets every two years. The 10th conference will be held in Tessolaniki, Greece in 2012. Previous conferences have been held in Canada, China, Colombia, Finland, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, and the United Kingdom.
He has consulted for media firms on three continents and provided testimony and consulting in court cases, congressional and parliamentary hearings, and administrative hearings in North America and Europe. He regularly works with media associations worldwide and is widely quoted in both the trade publications and the general press.
An annual award for the best published work was named after him by the Media Management and Economics Division of the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication in 2000 and the European Media Management Association presented him it 2010 award for lifetime contributions to the field.