What's in a Name?

These words critique the ongoing tendency to create false dichotomies between different approaches in media studies. Delivered as part of a panel on the future of media studies at the 2013 Society for Cinema and Media Studies, I offer a definition of critique that all critical media scholars should share.     

什么是媒介经济学?

媒介与传播学研究传统上是以非经济原则为主导的。但是,对媒介研究者来说,经济学也是一个非常有价值的研究领域,经济学与理解媒介产业如何运营有着密切的关系。本文对媒介经济的一些基本概念作了介绍,内容包括媒介经济涉及哪些方面?宏观经济与微观经济的区别有哪些?什么是媒介经济的特殊性?媒介经济的有哪些主要特征?     

Reviving audience studies

Audience measurement data are increasingly central to what many media corporations produce, yet much of these data are inaccessible to scholars. I therefore argue that cultural studies is in need of an audience studies revival. Fan studies continues at strength, but a wider range of audience studies is required to counter and to interrogate the occasional proclamations that companies such as Netflix, Facebook, and Google share with us about audiences and users.     

开拓国家形象、文化创新研究的新领域——上海交大人文艺术研究院院长、美国杜克大学教授刘康访谈录

在本访谈中．刘康教授结合我国目前所面临的传播环境,就如何提升中国的软实力．如何打造艮好积极的国家形象．媒介应如何提高传播策略提出了自己的看法和建议。     

“Epistemology Not Ideology OR Why We Need New Germans”

This article argues for a shift away from ideology critique as the primary focus of critical communication and media studies. Instead, the author suggests enlisting the work of German Media theorist Friedrich Kittler's Foucault-inspired approach to the epistemological dimensions of media. This focus is relevant to digital media in terms of the selection, storage, and processing of data that are the fundamental concerns of Kittler's media studies. Advertising and drone warfare are used as examples of how this approach differs from ideological critique.     

文化差异环境下的跨国界沟通策略——对“西班牙烧鞋事件”的反思

2004年9月发生在西班牙东南部城市埃切尔的“烧鞋事件”震惊了国内 外。事件发生后,中国国内的诸多媒体把舆论的焦点集中在对温州鞋制造商的评论上, 认为此次事件的发生很大程度上是由于温州鞋的价廉以及温州经营模式的缺陷。事实 上温州鞋的价廉并不违反市场经济条件下的游戏规则。此事件的发生,不得不让我们 反思中国企业的国际化生存问题。最根本的还在于文化差异及其由此而引起的沟通失 衡和误解问题。     

STRUCTURAL CHANGE AND JOURNALISM PRACTICE

This paper examines structural changes to Chinese news organisations in the new millennium and their impact on journalism practice, with a particular focus on the Xinhua News Agency. The paper attempts to understand the complexity of these changes and their implications for journalism, media and communications studies.     

The Formation of Swedish Media Studies, 1960–1980

Around 1960, the politics of the emerging media society in Sweden tended to fixate the formative functions of mass communication. The monopoly of public service broadcast media, press subsidies and new tendencies in film policy were some of the issues around which uncertainty prevailed. New methods to provide reliable data were sought by politicians, since empirical facts were required as arguments for an updated media policy. This article examines the different ways that the field of media studies was introduced in Sweden between 1960 and 1980. We argue that Swedish academic media studies departed from, and emerged within, a rather diffuse borderland between industry, politics and academia. The formation of national media research in Sweden can partly be seen as an effect of politicians and the media industry wanting to be better informed on issues such as media influence, media ownership and the habits and composition of the media audience.     

Color,Caste and the Public Sphere

Broadcast network newsrooms are powerful gatekeepers, setting cultural standards and attitudes for America at large via the stories they tell and the images they project. In 1968, the federal Kerner Commission chastised American news media for ignoring race, and seeing through the “white man’s eyes” and speaking from “the white perspective.” Grounded in critical and cultural studies and organizational theory, this study analyzes the experiences of 23 post-Civil Rights generation black journalists working in broadcast newsrooms who continue to struggle against anti-black cultural norms and attitudes at great physical, psychological and financial cost.     

Rethinking a Curricular Icon: The Institutional and Ideological Foundations of Walter Lippmann

This essay explores the use of Walter Lippmann’s ideas in three areas of mass communications research: message-driven media effects research and related studies of agenda setting, priming, and framing; social histories of U.S. journalism, advertising, and public relations; and interpretive accounts of the field’s genesis. It offers a new understanding of the role Lippmann played in yoking together a range of communication-related issues under a single problematic. In the process it exposes a critical lacunae stretching across (and beyond) scholarship in communications research: a lack of attention to the rhetorical deployment of Lippmann, characterized by an inclination to endow this figure’s political philosophy with the power to stand in for a range of developments occurring across an emerging communications field. This essay addresses the implications of being positioned to speak not only for a field of research but for history as well, being able to so perfectly mirror shifts in cultural attitudes and emerging institutional practices.     

国家图书馆与美国“中国学”（汉学）文献交换的回顾与展望

中关两国政府间的图书交换始于1869年,可谓历史悠久,而国家图书馆有意识地交换美国“中国学”文献则是近几十年的事情,在此,对国家图书与美国“中国学”文献交换的历史做一个回顾和展望,对我们了解美国“中国学”发展的脉络,做好交换工作大有裨益。     

New media,new panics

ABSTRACT

When Stuart Hall and his Birmingham School colleagues argued that media technologies were essential to the production of moral panics, they focused on the relationship between mass media and the state. Because new technologies have altered our cultures of ostracism and punishment, we offer a revised analysis of this relationship that examines the role of online shaming in current moral panics. Not only do we analyze the new technological affordances of digital media, we argue that our current shaming culture is symptomatic of a deep-seated political disenfranchisement that leaves subjects grasping to “do something.” Contributing to a social media-driven panic culture that punishes and ostracizes deviants thus stands in for meaningful political participation. Ultimately, we argue that the evolving orientation to public life fostered by these new technologies has created a culture of shaming whereby citizens often prosecute their own discrete moral panics amid the more sustained sense of political crisis that characterizes contemporary life.     

Find Your Niches: A Guide for Managing Intermedia Effects Among Content Distribution Channels

Abstract

This empirical study examines potential size effects in the US media and communications industry. Motivated by investors’ demand for continuous profit growth, media and communications executives attempt to leverage size effects, be it by growing the core business or by diversifying into other media segments, thereby exploiting cross‐media synergies. However, contrary to conventional wisdom, the authors could not find a general correlation between size and diversification on the one hand and performance on the other hand. The authors’ reason that exploiting size effects in the media and communications industry is far from simplistic and cross‐media synergies may take more time and effort to leverage than assumed. Therefore, research is recommended to focus on the operational level of size effects and their development over time. For media managers, the findings imply that more emphasis should be placed on strategy implementation and operational effectiveness, rather than on sophisticated M&A and growth initiatives.     

When News is Everywhere

This article contends that not only journalism but also journalism studies can benefit from a stronger commitment to the public. While the bodies of literature on “popular journalism”, “public journalism” and “citizen/participatory journalism” have, in different contexts and from different angles, made a strong case in favour of a public-oriented approach to journalism, it is remarkable how few of the empirical studies on journalism are based on user research. As the control of media institutions over the news process is in decline, we should take the “news audience” more seriously and try to improve our understanding of (changing) news use patterns. Besides this rather obvious theoretical point, there are also societal and methodological arguments for a more user-oriented take on the study of journalism. Starting from a reflection on the key trends in news use in the digital age—participation, cross-mediality and mobility—this article attempts to show the theoretical and societal relevance of a radical user perspective on journalism and journalism research alike. Furthermore, we look at new methodological opportunities for news user research and elaborate on our arguments by way of an empirical study on changing news practices. The study uses Q-sort methodology to expose the impact a medium's affordances can have on the way we experience news in a converged and mobile media environment. The article concludes by discussing what the benefits of a radical user perspective can be both for journalism studies as for journalism.     

Cultural Journalism and Cultural Critique in a changing Media Landscape

This special issue addresses a topic of journalism studies that has previously been somewhat neglected but which has gained increasing scholarly attention since the mid-2000s: the coverage and evaluation of art and culture, or what we term “cultural journalism and cultural critique.” In this introduction, we highlight three issues that serve to frame the study of cultural journalism and cultural critique more generally and the eight articles of this special issue more specifically: (1) the constant challenge of demarcating cultural journalism and cultural critique, including the interrelations of “journalism” and “critique”; (2) the dialectic of globalisation’s cultural homogenisation, on the one hand, and the specificity of local/national cultures, on the other; and (3) the digital media landscape seen in terms of the need to rethink, perhaps even redefine cultural journalism and cultural critique.     

国家图书馆德国“中国学”（汉学）文献交换的历史与展望

书刊国际交换是图书馆采访工作的一部分,也是国外文献来源的一个渠道,由于东西德经历了分裂与合并的过程,国家图书馆德国＂中国学＂（汉学）的文献国际交换工作同样经历了一个曲折的过程,本文对此做一个历史的回顾与展望,对我们了解德国＂中国学＂的发展,做好今后的交换工作大有裨益。     

How to play the game of intellectual property rights in China: the impact of party affiliation and media location on the use of media frames

This paper explores the dynamic between media and social-political forces through a content analysis of Chinese media coverage of intellectual property rights (IPRs) since China's accession to the World Trade Organization in 2001. We examined how media attributes, such as party affiliation and media location, have influenced the use of media frames. Three media frames were extracted from previous studies: (1) national interest; (2) cost and benefit; and (3) legal/contractual. Our results demonstrate that both media attributes exert significant influence on the use of media frames in IPRs coverage: the closer a news organization is affiliated with the Chinese Communist Party, the more likely it would adopt a national interest frame. Moreover, national press and party newspapers are more likely to adopt the national interest frame in covering IPRs-related issues; whereas, regional/popular and professional press are more likely to report the IPRs-related issues from economic and legal perspectives.     

Radiating Emergency: The Perils and Promise of the Broadcast Signal in the Atomic Age

This essay argues that the development of CONELRAD marked a pivotal—and often overlooked—moment in the history of media and communications in the United States. As the nation's first coast-to-coast emergency broadcast system, CONELRAD established a new paradigm of networked communications for a new world order. Through close critical examination of the institutional events and discursive controversies surrounding CONELRAD's development, I show how those events and controversies were inflected by both contemporaneous atomic anxieties and older hopes and fears associated with over-the-air communications. I also suggest how they articulated, in the domain of electronic mass media, the politico-legal theory and practice of the state of exception.     

Promoting Diversity and Pluralism in Contemporary Communication Policies in the United States and the United Kingdom

Recent revisions of media regulation and legislation have emphasized diversity and pluralism as key objectives. Both the Federal Communication Commission's rewriting of broadcasting ownership rules in 2003 and the United Kingdom government's 2003 Communications Act insist that the public interest is best met through providing a dynamic, market-led approach to communications regulation. This article highlights definitions of diversity and pluralism that are increasingly ubiquitous in legislative and regulatory instruments that seek to "modernize" media systems in our present "communications cornucopia." This approach involves conceptualizing media diversity and media pluralism as twin outcomes of strategies designed to maximize consumer choice and market competition. The article argues that we need to challenge the assumption that meaningful forms of diversity can be brought forth only through market structures and questions the validity of quantitative assessments of media sectors that equate choice and competition with diversity. The article suggests that we need to win back a notion of diversity that is based on citizens' engagement with and interrogation of the world rather than the idea that diversity can be measured simply through the number of organizations and channels in the contemporary media environment.     

From Ivory Tower to Cross-Media Personas

This article introduces a theoretical typology of four rival yet converging ideal types of cultural critics in contemporary media culture and in cultural journalism, more specifically, encapsulated by the term the heterogeneous cultural critic and characterized by different kinds of authority and expertise: (1) the intellectual cultural critic, who is closely connected to an aesthetic tradition, bohemia and/or academia, or institutionalized cultural capital; (2) the professional cultural journalist, who is first and foremost embedded in a media professional logic; (3) the media-made arbiter of taste, whose authority is closely linked to practical experience with cultural production and repeated charismatic media performances; and (4) the everyday amateur expert, who offers subjective opinions and represents experience-based cultural taste. The aim is to provide an analytical minimum model for future empirical studies by outlining the contours of the multiple, objective and subjective, professional and non-professional cultural “authorities” of contemporary media culture.