Future directions of international communication research?
long before the arrival in office of George W. Bush and the neo-conservatives, Washington was a company town, and a small one at that ... The company is government, and the product is money and power, the two intimately related and in the Bush administration all but indistinguishable. The town's sources of information have steadily diminished over the years. Serious newspapers have disappeared, broadcast news became entertainment ... Virtually no attention is paid to information generated from non-US sources, which are considered irrelevant or hostile. The result, so far as international affairs are concerned, is that nobody knows much of anything about what really is going on. Those who do, who have worked in the field ... professional diplomats and intelligence people, experienced journalists, have increasingly been cut out of the policy making chain ... Washington people think they are informed, but they actually deal in a limited number of ideologically constructed stories about the world that rely heavily on stereotype and prejudice ... Iran's phantom weapons of mass destruction and the fantasy of quasi-spontaneous democratisation of Iraq are the two most recent examples. (10 October 2003, p.12)
How to Make Thin Journalism Strong?
The concepts of audience and public create an interesting division within media studies. On the one hand, the empirical research on readers and viewers talk primarily about ‘the audience’; if any mention is made of ‘the public’, it will usually be used interchangeably with ‘the audience’. Thus, if the distinction between the audience and the public should be analytically meaningful, as some scholars insist (see Dahlgren 1995, 19), then audience studies seem to have refused to take it seriously. On the other hand, for scholars who take an interest in the media and democracy, this distinction is of great importance. Even if they seem to have an analytical advantage over audience researchers, it is not quite clear what this distinction means empirically. Is the public anything else but a slogan? This article explores the empirical meanings of the public through a case study. It is inspired, firstly, by the theory and practices of public journalism (see Rosen 1999; Glasser ed. 1999). Secondly, it echoes a more general interest that has been re-emerging in Finland (among other places) in the concept of the public. Some scholars have gone so far as coining a brand new word (julkiso) into Finnish language to denote the public in contrast to the audience (yleisö), because hitherto the word yleisö has covered in addition to the meaning of the audience also that of the public (Pietilä & Ridell 1997, 95). Later this initiative has been elaborated both theoretically and empirically.
Managing Media Convergence: Pathways to Journalistic Cooperation
* Managing Media Convergence: Pathways to Journalistic Cooperation. Kenneth C. Killebrew. Ames, IA: Blackwell Publishing, 2004. 218 pp. $39.99 pbk. Managing Media Convergence: Pathways to Journalistic Cooperation addresses a wide array of topics related to media convergence, including the increasingly corporate nature of media in the United States, workplace satisfaction, resistance to change, government regulation, ethical decision making, and the like. There are many things about convergence that make critics and practitioners nervous. Will there be fewer voices heard because only a handful of corporations control most news outlets? Will convergence converge me as a working journalist right out of job? Will I have to learn HTML or how to operate a video camera in addition to my normal duties? Will fewer and fewer journalists have to cover enlarging news holes on multiple platforms with little additional training? Where will the incentive come from to do the additional work involved? What exactly is convergence anyway? In the preface the author notes that "Convergence is, above all else, about information and how we prepare, post and transfer that information from one place to the other." The author adds that complexity comes after that, and involves people and their perceptions of what convergence means to them and to the organizations for which they work. Unfortunately, we hear very little from the people involved in convergence, although the author notes that in some sixty media markets, at least two media organizations are involved in partial or full convergence. The book is instead a look at various theories that bear on the many aspects of convergence listed above. It leaves the reader hoping for something that never comes to pass, something the reader might legitimately expect based on the title. A case study approach would likely make the book less of a difficult read. What are the pathways that various media organizations are taking as they decide whether convergence is right for them? Which ones work and which ones don't? How do you meld two or more cultures (print and broadcast, specifically) into one media outlet with a minimum of bloodletting? How do you foster creativity in such an environment? What are the overall challenges? Rather than how news operations might deal with these challenges based on theories, the author might give readers an idea of how workers and managers in converged newsrooms are actually dealing with the challenges in real-world applications. …