Deuzeblog

Media, News, and the US Election (1)

2008-08-08T13:03:00.002-04:00

As from this week, I'll try to regularly visit the topic of the role media in general and the news industry in particular plays in the American political campaigns and Presidential election of 2008. My focus, as always, will be on the professionals and practitioners (often unpaid volunteers) directly involved in covering the process one way or another, looking at what the news on these issues may tell us about media work and media life.

Via Michael Calderone's blog on Politico here's a great quote from an otherwise rather shallow (if not recognizable) column on UK's The Guardian website about the quality of the political coverage on US broadcast networks:

"Anything reported on the TV news instantly becomes something to be reported on."

Indeed - there is a documented trend of journalists increasingly covering themselves and each other, and this not necessarily to enhance self-critical and deeply reflective perspectives, but rather putting journalists and journalism much more center-stage.

You have all heard about the shrinking soundbyte... But did you ever wonder where all those other seconds of sound went? That's right: directly to the words of the reporters. Journalists and "experts" babbling endlessly among themselves and increasingly about themselves. It makes for cheap content - because no actual reporting is involved.

All of this is especially awkward considering declining ratings and sales figures for the news, as well as regarding the ongoing decline of public trust in most kinds of institutions, and particularly the news industry.

Social Theory & Journalism Studies

2008-07-23T16:10:00.007-04:00

This post could also be titled Newswork and Holiday II - as we just got back from an amazing trip (the picture is ours this time), and I got some great news about a paper on social theory and journalism studies - the companion piece to the newswork essay published in the WPCC special issue on "News Journalism in Transition" earlier this month - that got published as a feature essay in the International Journal of Communication today.

As some of you have noticed, this journal and WPCC are both academic, peer reviewed, open access (OA) journals. Their content is freely accessible and downloadable online, and is intended for the widest possible distribution, access, and use.

After co-editing (with Henry Jenkins) a special issue for the wonderful journal Convergence earlier this year after which one of the authors, danah boyd, raised the issue of boycotting locked-down academic journals, I made the decision to support the open access publishing system more deliberately. One of the ways I can do this, is to submit my work for peer review much more frequently to these kinds of journals, and to offer such journals - for what it is worth - my assistance as manuscript reviewer or even editorial board member. I realize this "decision" is a cowardly one, perhaps (as I just got tenured here in the US and am a full professor back in The Netherlands), but I genuinely did not reflect much on this issue earlier until danah raised it so pointedly.

Although I do not agree with danah that a boycott is in order, I do think it is healthy and important that open access-publication becomes a completely equal and relevant alternative to this model for academic publishing, especially regarding criteria for hiring junior faculty, and making decisions on tenure and promotion.

Please note that I am not doing this because I feel that corporations or the people working for them (or who are engaged in service to closed journals as editors, staffers, or board members) are evil, or wrong. I am doing this because it is an important and exciting new way of getting taxpayer-funded research and knowledge out in the open, make our work as academics more inclusive and transparent, and because overall it just seems like a really good idea at this time.

Next to these pieces in the International Journal of Communication (IJoC) and the Westminster Papers in Communication and Culture (WPCC), you can expect a third paper I just finished to be published soon in the first issue of what promises to be yet another excellent new open access space: the Journal of Media Sociology. Of course, I have earlier pieces in First Monday, and will be submitting more work there very soon.

Other journals can be found easily, for example through the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ). I hope you'll download my work and the works of other authors in these journals, and be able to use it widely in your research and teaching - and as always, I look forward to any comments and discussion.

For now, I'm reprinting title and the abstract of the IJoC piece below. Go check this journal out if you have not already - it is edited by Larry Gross and Manuel Castells over at my old stomping grounds (for a brief while at least) at USC.

The Changing Context of News Work: Liquid Journalism for a Monitorial Citizenry

Abstract

In this paper, the relationships between theories of (new) citizenship and (new) journalism are explored. The meaning of citizenship has changed in the last few decades. People still tend to be seen by most politicians, scholars, and journalists alike as citizens that need to inform themselves widely about issues of general interest so that they can make an informed decision at election time. However, this model of the informed citizenry is a thing of the past - a prescriptive and rather elitist notion of both how people should make up their minds and what (political) representation means to them. Today's citizen is not only critical, self-expressive, and distinctly anti-hierarchical (Beck, 2000), he is also what Schudson (1999) calls "monitorial": scanning all kinds of news and information sources for the topics that matter to him personally. People are not necessarily disengaged from the political process, they just commit their time and energy to it on their own terms. This individualized act of citizenship can be compared to the act of the consumer, browsing stores of a shopping mall for that perfect pair of jeans — it is the act of the citizen-consumer. In journalism, a similar trend is emerging, where traditional role perceptions of journalism influenced by its occupational ideology - providing a general audience with information of general interest in a balanced, objective, and ethical way - do not seem to fit all that well with the lived realities of reporters and editors, nor with the communities they are supposed to serve. In the context of a precarious and, according to the International Federation of Journalists, increasingly "atypical" professional work life, ongoing efforts by corporations to merge and possibly converge news operations, and an emerging digital media culture where the consumer is also a producer of public information, the identity of the journalist must be seen as "liquid" (Bauman, 2000). Such a liquid journalism truly works in the service of the network society, deeply respects the rights and privileges of each and every consumer-citizen to be a maker and user of his own news, and enthusiastically embraces its role as, to paraphrase James Carey, an amplifier of the conversation society has with itself.

Full Text: PDF

Newswork and Holiday

2008-07-15T16:03:00.005-04:00

Two bits of news this week... we're going on a holiday (see the stock photo), and second, the cool open access journal Westminster Papers in Communication and Culture published its new issue - a special issue on News Journalism in Transition. It features several excellent papers - including the always fascinating work of friend and colleague Steve Paulussen from Belgium - and I'm honoured to be included in the line-up with an essay based on the research for the Media Work book (link to PDF: "Understanding Journalism as Newswork: How it Changes, and how it Remains the Same."

Here's the abstract:

For a media profession so central to society’s sense of self, it is of crucial importance to understand the influences of changing labor conditions, professional cultures, and the appropriation of technologies on the nature of work in journalism. In this paper, the various strands of international research on the changing nature of journalism as a profession are synthesized, using media logic as developed by Altheide and Snow (1979 and 1991) and updated by Dahlgren (1996) as a conceptual framework. A theoretical key to understanding and explaining journalism as a profession is furthermore to focus on the complexities of concurrent disruptive developments affecting its performance from the distinct perspective of its practitioners – for without them, there is no news.

Last Media Work Book Tour Talk

2008-07-01T20:41:00.006-04:00

Well... today is the day! The more or less informal "booktour" in support of Media Work (Polity Press, 2007) is closing down today with a final talk in Sydney, Australia at the Australian Centre for Independent Journalism (if you are around and want to come: University of Technology, Building 2, 15 Broadway, Level 4 (entrance level), Room 11, from 6pm onwards). Perhaps (or rather: hopefully) fittingly the talk orignally would be videotaped by the new online video Fora of the ABC (Australia), which organization I had the pleasure of visiting yesterday. Especially the wonderful folks over at Triple J were amazing - and I have the tshirts to prove it! However, it seems the good people of the ACIJ will do the taping now. Very cool.

All things considered, this touryear was truly amazing. I've had the privilege of talking about the book, the research, and more specifically about what it is really like to work in the global media industries all over the world, including in my home country The Netherlands, my second home the United States, the UK, Italy, Norway, Finland, Australia, and New Zealand, with additional dates scheduled (but unfortunately not always realized or only present in videofeeds) in Switzerland, Canada, Sweden, Brazil, Denmark and Portugal. In a way I feel I could just go on. Indeed, there are plenty more stops on the road, and to this day I am honored to receive regular invites from universities and media organizations to drop in for a chat, which is truly awesome.

But now the book has been out for almost a year, and with the research that went into the book now even older than that, perhaps it is time to move on, focus on new things. To that effect I organized my recent conference keynote at the ARC Centre of Excellence for Creative Industries and Innovation in Brisbane around the basic premise of my forthcoming (...) book for Polity Press, titled Beyond Journalism. Good friend and colleague Axel Bruns has done a stellar job in summarizing that talk, and his summary clearly marks the path beyond media work that I am trying to take: using contemporary social theory and the lessons learned from media workers to conceptualize completely new forms of media organizations. Organization can be seen here both in a cultural (ways of sensemaking practices) and a physical (structural design of the company or workfloor) sense.

Other projects that lie ahead: teaching a graduate course built around understanding media work, interviewing one of my favorite scholars Richard Sennett in New York, reading the new book "The Art of Life" by Zygmunt Bauman, and yes: a short but sweet holiday in Holbox (Mexico).

Hopefully many of the colleagues, students, visitors, and media workers who've been kind enough to attend any one of my presentations this last year and/or who I have had the privilege to meet will keep in touch - either via comments on this blog, at my Facebook profile, or via e-mail. Students who would like to spend some time at Indiana University to work on media work issues are welcome to contact me. Also, if you would like to do a MS, MA, or PhD in this area, please get in touch with me and/or our Director of Graduate Studies - we always have (sometimes funded) positions available and look forward to seeing you in Bloomington...

Martha, RIP (25 May 2008)

2008-05-25T12:09:00.001-04:00

Booknote on Media Work

2008-05-18T10:40:00.005-04:00

As far as I know, reviews of Media Work have yet to appear in academic journals (I really hope they do... can't wait to see what I need to do better next time). Goldsmith's Natalie Fenton did a great job of critiqueing the book in the Times Higher Education Supplement of 23 November 2007. There she writes about what I feel in a nutshell summarizes my own struggle with the workstyles in the media industries:

"[...] we discover that structure (market) and agency (informal networks) coexist in organisations; that production includes commercial ends and creative means; that it is too simplistic to pitch creativity against commerce or flexibility against stability. These are valid reminders of the complexity of the world of work, but they leave us wanting and skirt around the critical question of power - where it resides, how it is manifest, who wields it and with what consequences."

In the most recent issue (23/1, pp.124-5) of the European Journal of Communication, the book has been briefly discussed in a booknote, with some critical and some supportive comments (of course, publisher Polity only printed the positive lines on its website). As that is a "closed" journal, I'm taking the liberty to reproduce the booknote here:

Mark Deuze, Media Work. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2007.

"In this book on media work and working in the media, Mark Deuze argues that understanding the media is not a side-activity of sociology or economics, but central to gaining analytical sense of contemporary life around the world, and most particularly in western capitalist democracies. Examples of features of life for which the cultural industries are indicative include the management of creativity, the culturalization of work and the defining of professional identities. Deuze maps out the conditions of media work today, focusing especially on mainstream news journalism, major studio film production, leading computer and video game development, advertising and marketing communications. He draws on material from trade as well as scholarly publications, practitioner weblogs and e-zines, and in-depth interviews with media workers in the US, the Netherlands, Finland, New Zealand and South Africa. Deuze tends to exaggerate the degree of identity between contemporary media work and other forms of work or indeed between these and everyday cultural life. He also draws rather uncritically on Bauman's social theory and in particular his conception of the ‘liquidity’ of contemporary modernity. At the same time, Deuze ably synthesizes a wide range of sources, writes lucidly even as he marshals a considerable amount of detail, moves unjarringly between different media sectors and offers a valuable synoptic account of the major characteristic features of media work in the so-called digital age."

Media Work in Amsterdam

2008-05-17T13:41:00.003-04:00

Just got back from a quick trip to The Netherlands, hanging out in Leiden, visiting cool people at media companies such as RTL Nieuws, the Telegraaf Media Group, EenVandaag, and the NOS Journaal, and giving a couple of Media Work related talks in Amsterdam.

Of one of those talks, on a sunny Tuesday afternoon (May 13) at the University of Amsterdam, Michael Stevenson did a phenomenal write-up, arguably the best summary of the main premises of the book I've ever seen, and better than I could have done it! Nice little addition Michael made by relating my concerns about the way the digital revolution heralded by academics and pundits gets experienced by the creative workers in less than ideal ways to Douglas Coupland's jPod problem.

Obama in Bloomington

2008-05-01T07:57:00.004-04:00

And yes, that is me on the right, on stage with Obama, instead of applauding or cheering wielding my camera just as the batteries went dead on me. Media life posterboy, all right.

Picture information: "Democratic presidential hopeful, Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., center in white, arrives at a rally in Bloomington, Ind.", Wednesday, April 30, 2008. (copyright: AP Photo/Jae C. Hong).

First Obama, now an Earthquake (in Bloomington)

2008-04-18T16:25:00.002-04:00

Barack Obama in Bloomington (IN)

2008-04-13T10:14:00.002-04:00

Very cool - just got back from Italy (great time, wonderful people), and here's Barack Obama visiting our town, walking the streets, hanging out...

Media Work in Milano

2008-04-01T10:12:00.003-04:00

I'm on my way to Milan, Italy for a talk at the "Global Screens" conference at the Triennale Design Museum (drop by if you can: its at the Viale Alemagna).

My presentation will focus on the promises and perils of convergence culture for journalism, with a particular focus on the emerging digital culture in Italy. Over the last few days, several prominent Italian bloggers - Luca Conti (Pandemia), Dario Salvelli (Talk About Technology), and Alberto D'Ottavi (Infoservi) - have been kind enough to give me advice, tips and information about the situation in their country - and in doing so, suggested something really powerful about the potential of non-mainstream, bottom-up collaboration and co-creation enabled online.

Some points I will cover in the presentation:

- the ongoing labor disputes in Italy and elsewhere between newsworkers and employers (in Italy: between the FNSI and FIEG) regarding the increase of "atypical" working arrangements in especially digital journalism

- a comparison of multimedia newsroom designs and Bentham's Panopticon, relevant in the context of increased worker monitoring and surveillance associated with new technologies in media companies

- the pros (journalism as a conversation) and cons (media use turned into free labor) of citizen journalism and other forms of User-Generated Content (UGC) in the gathering, editing, and distribution of news.

- future perspectives on large scale broadband mobile internet access, focusing on startups in the multimedia social network domain (ex.: Zingku, Bliin, Jaiku, Floobs, Meemi).

Its all part of the 2008 tour...

Media Layoffs, Staff Cuts, Hiring, and New Power

2008-03-27T09:47:00.003-04:00

Somewhat depressing, yet also interesting: keeping track of media layoffs and staff cuts. In the United States, this can be done for example through Poynter's Romenesko's news service (specifically for the news industry) and the I Want Media layoffs pages.

What is especially compelling is the discourse around such layoffs, and the shift from print to digital - however, that shift is not equal: loss of print jobs is not matched with gains in digital.

Furthermore, my own research and that of many others suggests that the shift in symbolic power within media organizations to the digital side of things corresponds with less control in the hands of editors and creative as "the show" increasingly gets organized around not just hardware and software, but the IT-savvy people (sometimes "techies") that control the machines. See for example case studies in the global news industry (note: I had the privilege of contributing a chapter to that book, "Making Online News", edited by David Domingo and Chris Paterson).

This not to say tech-savvy people within the media are evil, but they used to be at the bottom of the informal hierarchy. With their newfound power, will they share? Of course not. In the informal nature of workforce relationships throughout the creative industries, symbolic power, (peer review-based) status and prestige are your primarcy source of social capital.

And that kind of capital is switching to digital. In the words of AdRants: "Sadly, in a technologically-driven medium, the creative element sometimes gets a bum deal."

As I wrote: its somewhat depressing, yet also very interesting.

Media Work in Second Life

2008-03-13T09:45:00.004-04:00

Photo courtesy of Mark Bell

Media Work Tour 2008 Dates

2008-03-02T12:35:00.011-05:00

Well, after last year's "tour" things are shaping up wonderfully for a round of meetings, talks, presentations, workshops, and keynotes on topics related to Media Work in 2008. Thanks to everyone who has been kind enough to invite me or is willing to host me along the way! I'll update and specify the list as I go along, but as always: hope to see you there, drop by if you have the chance, and if you have an event in the neighborhood don't hesitate to contact me.

February 12
SUNY Buffalo, USA

February 27
Indiana University School of Informatics, USA

April 2-3
Catholic University of Milan/Triennale, Alta Scuola in Media, Comunicazione, Spettacolo conference, Italy

April 28-29
Media Management and Transformation Centre, Jönköping, Sweden

May 2-3
University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada

May 8
Free University Amsterdam, The Netherlands

May 13
New Media @ University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands

[CANCELLED] Four Freedoms Debat FreeVoice, Middelburg, The Netherlands

May 22-25
ICA Conference, Montreal, Canada

June 18
Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand

June 20
University of Canterbury, Christchurch, New Zealand

June 24
Griffiths University, Brisbane, Australia

25-28 June
Creative Industries Faculty at the Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane, Australia

July 1
Australian Broadcasting Corporation, Sydney, Australia (presentation from noon to 1.30pm)

July 2
Australian Centre for Independent Journalism, Sydney, Australia (UTS, Building 2, 15 Broadway, Level 4 (entrance level), Room 11, from 6pm onwards)

September 1
Institute for Media and Communications Management, University of St.Gallen, Switzerland

September 2-3
MAZ The Swiss School of Journalism, Lucerne, Switzerland

September 4
Leiden University, The Netherlands

Media Workforce Shrinking

2008-02-18T20:46:00.009-05:00

Sometimes you do not want to be right. And I certainly do not want to claim credit. To a large extent many have written about it, signaled it at various talks and debates, blogged about it, and heard about it from many sources throughout the industry: the media workforce is steadily shrinking.

Via Patrick Phillips, editor at IWantMedia, comes this report on AdAge: "Media Work Force Sinks to 15-Year Low. Newspaper Slump and the Shift to Digital, Direct Take Toll on Employment." This follows last year's reports by IWantMedia and by Challenger, Gray & Christmas (as reported by UPI) on media industry job cuts, signaling a rise of 88% of job cuts throughout the US media industry in 2006 over the year before.

Interestingly, AdAge reports that the only area in the media industry that is booming, is that of marketing consultant... Indeed: all the creative talent is disappearing into the void of contingent, uncontracted, farmed out, atypical, and otherwise sans papiers labor (the kind that works "on spec" and does not show up in census data or workforce statistics).

Jobs are being are offshored (advertising holding firms sending creative accounts to China and Brazil, networks moving TV investments to India, newspapers sending their online, business news, and acquisition departments overseas in attempt to "remote control journalism"), outsourced (to citizen-consumers under the heading of "user generated content"), or alltogether deleted.

Part of what i additionally talk about in Media Work is this false notion of "replacement" of old media jobs by new media ones often claimed by web-pundits, but in the real world new media jobs are added at a much slower pace (and with substiantially worse labor conditions) than older ones are deleted.

Perhaps it is time for worldwide organized networks of creative workers. Perhaps the often-discussed "talent wars" in the business sector should get the attention of managers in the creative industries, as the vast majority of CEOs in the knowledge industries seem to be increasingly convinced that talent acquisition, retention and development is the key to future success and indeed survial (link to Accenture's 2006 High Performance Workforce report).

At this rate, we'll all be stuck in an endless reality TV and (its offspring) UGC nightmare. Forever.

Backup Profile Page

2008-02-16T14:56:00.008-05:00

At the moment I am in the process of updating and reworking my faculty profile page, especially with the purpose to provide easier (and free) access to all my publications and to provide students with some guidance and links to places online where they can find information about jobs and internships in the US media. I will use this entry as a backup, so bear with me...

Publications

Publications of my work include a number of books, and articles in journals such as New Media & Society, Journalism Studies, the International Journal of Cultural Studies, The Information Society, and Media Culture & Society. For an overview of these publications, see the listing via Google Scholar. Several articles have appeared in (or are under review at) open access journals such as eJournalist, First Monday, and the Journal of Media Sociology.

Save most of my books, all my publications can be downloaded directly and for free from Indiana University’s open access digital repository IUScholarWorks. There you can also find published works by many other IU researchers in the field of (new) media.

For instant access to all my publications, please follow [LINK TO COME SOON]. Of course, I always sincerely appreciate any thoughts or feedback you may have.

Below is a list of my books with direct links to the publisher pages, BOL or Amazon, whichever place lists the lowest price. If you are looking for a specific chapter from any of these works (for example to including in a reader or class materials), please contact me via e-mail, I would be happy to provide you with a PDF copy.

Deuze, M. (edited volume; work in progress). Managing Media Work. London: Sage.

Deuze, M. (under contract; planned for 2010). Beyond Journalism. Cambridge: Polity Press.

Deuze, M. (work in progress; planned for 2009). Leven in Media. Amsterdam: Nieuw Amsterdam.

Deuze, M. (2008). Guerilla winkels, het SoCo Experiment en een volgende Big Bang. Leiden: Leiden University Press. Full text of this (Dutch language) book can be downloaded for free here.

Deuze, M. (2007). Media Work. Cambridge: Polity Press. Chapter five, on the profession of journalism, can be downloaded for free here. Publisher website (including links to buy the book).

Blanken, H., Deuze, M. (2007). PopUp. Amsterdam: Atlas. Website uitgever (met bestel links)

Deuze, M. (2004). Wat is Journalistiek? Amsterdam: Het Spinhuis. Website uitgever (met bestelformulier).

Blanken, H., Deuze, M. (eds.) (2003). De Media Revolutie. Amsterdam: Boom. Two individual chapters of this (Dutch language) edited volume are available for free online. Download chapters on online journalism by Pleijter & Deuze; and on multimedia users by Van Driel. Bestelbaar via Bol.com.

Deuze, M. (2002). Journalists in The Netherlands. Amsterdam: Aksant/New Jersey: Transaction. Full text of this book available via the Digital Academic Repository of the University of Amsterdam.

Teaching

At the Department of Telecommunications I generally teach the University Division-course Media Life (T101; open to all IU students), Global Media Issues (T413), and Creative Industries (T451) in some form or another. On a graduate level, you can expect me to be teaching courses related to the history, organization and culture of media work (T505 Media Organizations). Especially in the 400-level courses, the issues as mentioned above will be the most important topics on the class agenda. In T451, part of the classtime is spent on a community service learning project in collaboration with Rhino's Youth Center and All-Ages Music Club in Bloomington, Indiana.

Media Work: Students

As my classes and studies are primarily focused on the working lives of media professionals and thus on media work in general, I consistently try to give students at Indiana and Leiden (and elsewhere) grounded and realistic advice on what it is like to work and to get (or keep) work in the creative industries in general, and the media in particular.

It is perfectly possible to build a course list that will prepare for a career in the media. The best advice I can give you is not to pick courses because you think they will help you landing a job, but to pick courses about topics, issues, skills and competences that you -individually, personally- are deeply passionate about. As the media industry is a precarious, unpredictable, fast-changing and generally crazy place, the thing that will always keep you going is your own passion. Anything else will perhaps land you a job, but will not empower you to be creative, to do what you want to do, to be among those an organization cannot afford to let go when the next round of cost-cutting lay-offs comes around.

Please check out my Facebook profile page and my weblog (Deuzeblog) for regular postings and links to news related to work and jobs in the media industry. I encourage students to contact me for information and feedback on internship and job opportunities, and especially appreciate it if young professionals and/or alumni keep in touch to tell their story on working in the media. For those who are looking for resources for finding jobs and internships in the media, please check the following websites listed below. Of course, take good care before contacting the addresses and people found here. Do not consider these links and organizations as my personal recommendations; these are just some often-mentioned websites in the US media industry for job- and internship seekers.

Advertising
American Assocication of Advertising Agencies Jobs: LINK
International Advertising Association New York Jobs: LINK
AdWeek Jobs: LINK

Film, Radio & TV
Film & TV Jobs: LINK
Careerpage for the Broadcasting Industry: LINK
Hollywood Reporter Jobs: LINK
Entertainment Careers: LINK
National Association of Broadcasters Career Center: LINK
Showbiz Jobs: LINK
TV and Radio Jobs: LINK
Broadcast Employment Services: LINK
Broadcast Executive Search: LINK
Variety Careers: LINK
Indiana Broadcasters: LINK

Journalism
Journalism Jobs: LINK
Journalism Jobs Links: LINK
J-Jobs & Internships Page (including Career Help): LINK

Computer and Video Games
Game Jobs: LINK
Interactive Selection Game Recruiter: LINK
Gamasutra Jobs: LINK
Creative Heads: LINK
Games Jobs News: LINK
Game Career Guide: LINK

Media (general)
Mass Media Jobs: LINK
Media Job Links: LINK
MediaLine: LINK
Media Jobs: LINK

Please contact me for more information on any of the issues mentioned in this post.

My Radio Show on WIUX

2008-02-15T14:53:00.005-05:00

Some of you may or may not know this, but I host a weekly radio show on the student-run radio station WIUX here on campus. The show is called Global Riffs and features indie music (anything from rap, metal, punk, techno, grunge, pop and inbetween) from all over the world. I often have studio guests: foreign students or faculty members (such as myself) talking about their home country and playing their favorite tunes.

If you are in town (Bloomington, Indiana) tune in to 99.1 FM, or log in and listen to our online live stream.

Global Riffs at WIUX is on every Friday from 4 to 6pm EST (if you want to check when to tune in where you live, check the World Clock).

You are also more than welcome to IM me during the show with comments and/or requests: station ID is wiuxrequest.

Media Work @ SUNY Buffalo

2008-02-14T11:10:00.001-05:00

Convergence Culture

2008-02-07T17:59:00.000-05:00

Perhaps you will remember that on 20 July 2006 I posted a call for papers for a special issue of the journal Convergence that MIT's Henry Jenkins and I would be guest co-editing on the topic of convergence culture, based on his book of the same title, and as a theme running throughout my recent book on how convergence culture affects media work.

Well, the special issue is out now (February 2008), and we're very excited about the stellar authors and papers in the issue. Indeed, we received many more excellent submissions than we had room for in this issue, many of which papers will appear in forthcoming issues of the journal.

Of course, this being academic publishing, all the content is hidden behind lock and key - something that one of the authors in our issue, danah boyd, justifiably takes issue with. Indeed, danah calls for a boycott of academic journals that "lock down" their content.

Another author in our issue, Christy Dena, has been cool enough to build a special site around the special issue, including a version of her contribution - a piece on Alternate Reality Games.

Of course, if you are looking for one or more of the pieces in this special issue and your library does not have print or electronic access to the journal, do not hesitate to contact me (mdeuze at indiana dot edu). To provide a bit of context for the issue, here are the opening paragraphs of our introductory essay on convergence culture.

Introduction to: Special Issue on Convergence Culture

by Henry Jenkins and Mark Deuze

"We are living at a moment of profound and prolonged media transition: the old scripts by which media industries operated or consumers absorbed media content are being rewritten. As those changes occur, we need to work across the historic divide in academic research between work on media industries and work on media audiences. Media companies can no longer be meaningfully studied in the absence of an understanding of how they relate to their consumers. By the same token, consumers, audiences, fan communities, users, call them what you wish, can no longer be meaningfully understood without a better understanding of the economic and technological contexts within which they operate. The essays contained within this special issue of Convergence, each in its own way, represents a raproachment between industry studies and audience research.

In this context, media can be seen as the key drivers and accelerators of a growing integration between culture and commerce. Brought down to first principles, media mediate – between people, communities, organizations, institutions, and industries. In the classic model, a small number of media companies were homogenizing culture through their dominance over the means of production and distribution of media content. And individuals were defined through their roles as "consumers" rather than being seen as producers of -- or better yet, participants within -- the surrounding culture. Over the past several decades, the expansion of new media resources has led to what Yochai Benkler has described as a "hybrid media ecology" within which commercial, amateur, governmental, nonprofit, educational, activist and other players interact with each other in ever more complex ways. Each of these groups has the power to produce and distribute content and each of these groups are being transformed by their new power and responsibilities in this emerging media ecology. And in the process, the focus on individual consumers is giving way to a new emphasis on the social networks through which production and consumption occurs. In this context, it may no longer be of value to talk about personalized media; perhaps, we might better discuss socialized media. We might see YouTube, Second Life, Wikipedia, Flickr, and MySpace, to cite just a few examples, as meeting spaces between a range of grassroots creative communities, each pursuing their own goals, but each helping to shape the total media environment.

These shifts in the communication infrastructure bring about contradictory pulls and tugs within our culture. On the one hand, this "democratization" of media use signals a broadening of opportunities for individuals and grassroots communities to tell stories and access stories others are telling, to present arguments and listen to arguments made elsewhere, to share information and learn more about the world from a multitude of other perspectives. On the other hand, the media companies seek to extend their reach by merging, co-opting, converging and synergizing their brands and intellectual properties across all of these channels. In some ways, this has concentrated the power of traditional gatekeepers and agenda setters and in other ways, it has disintegrated their tight control over our culture.

Convergence therefore must be understood as both a top-down corporate-driven process and a bottom-up consumer-driven process. Media companies are learning how to accelerate the flow of media content across delivery channels to expand revenue opportunities, broaden markets and reinforce consumer loyalties and commitments. Users are learning how to master these different media technologies to bring the flow of media more fully under their control and to interact (and co-create) with other users. Sometimes, these two forces reinforce each other, creating closer, more rewarding, relations between media producers and consumers. Sometimes the two forces conflict, resulting in constant renegotiations of power between these competing pressures on the new media ecology."

Table of Contents

Henry Jenkins and Mark Deuze: Convergence Culture

danah boyd: Facebook's Privacy Trainwreck: Exposure, Invasion, and Social Convergence

Neil Perryman: Doctor Who and the Convergence of Media: A Case Study in Transmedia Storytelling

Christy Dena: Emerging Participatory Culture Practices: Player-Created Tiers in Alternate Reality Games

Hector Postigo: Video Game Appropriation through Modifications: Attitudes Concerning Intellectual Property among Modders and Fans

Daren C. Brabham: Crowdsourcing as a Model for Problem Solving: An Introduction and Cases

Larissa Hjorth: Being Real in the Mobile Reel: A Case Study on Convergent Mobile Media as Domesticated New Media in Seoul, South Korea

Gunn Sara Enli: Redefining Public Service Broadcasting: Multi-Platform Participation

Mr. Oizo's Flat Beat f. Flat Eric

2008-01-28T09:05:00.000-05:00

You know, I have no idea why - this isn't even my kind of genre or anything - but for months now I have had this tune and clip in my head. Finally found it online (hurray for the interwebs)... might as well share it.

Gratis Download Oratie

2008-01-28T08:27:00.001-05:00

[in Dutch] De formele, uitgeschreven tekst van mijn oratie (van 18 januari ll.) is nu gratis te downloaden vanaf de Website van de Universiteit van Leiden en natuurlijk direct via deze link (PDF). Titel: "Guerilla winkels, het SoCo Experiment en een volgende Big Bang. Over de rol van nieuwe media en de toekomst van journalistiek in een vloeibare samenleving."

De tekst wordt uitgegeven in een serie 'Oraties' bij Leiden University Press. Mijn plan is de tekst in de loop van dit jaar uit te werken tot een boeklang (Nederlandstalig) manuscript, waarvoor ik zowel nog tijd als een passende titel zoek - iemand een goede tip?

Media Work back on Amazon

2008-01-25T14:13:00.000-05:00

Very excited about the fact that as of this week Media Work (Polity Press, 2007) not only is in its third printing, but it is also back on Amazon in the US after a brief absence due to a system error in the distribution network. I'll be heading to Australia and New Zealand over the Summer (2008) to promote the book, so if you're interested... I'd be happy to come down and hang out and talk about what it is like to work in the media today!

Independent Minds

2008-01-25T08:28:00.000-05:00

[in Dutch] Ik kende dit online magazine nog niet, maar het lijkt er eentje om van dichtbij te volgen: Independent Minds. Enneh... ik schrijf dat heus niet omdat ze zo goed waren om middels een vraaggesprek wat aandacht te besteden aan mijn oratie en het werk bij Journalistiek en Nieuwe Media in Leiden.

Best Companies to Work for? Not Media

2008-01-24T10:41:00.001-05:00

Fortune has released its annual list of 100 Best Companies to Work For (in the United States).

Of course, not a single media company in the list. That just kills me. This is the industry relying on creativity, innovation, talent and entrepreneurship more so than any other - and at the same time it is arguably the shittiest industry to work in if one considers the way it treats its workers (writers' strike, anyone?).

On the other hand, three of the 'Fab Four' companies are in the list: Microsoft (#86), Yahoo (#87), and Google (#1). Not AOL. What can we learn from this?

I'd like to see a list of best places to work for in the various media industries (advertising, film and tv production, computer and video games, news). Let's start compiling reports!

Working in the Media

2008-01-23T16:45:00.000-05:00

Great piece by Richard Sambrook, Director of BBC Global News, on what it is like to work in the media - yesterday, today, and after 2015 (posted January 14 on his blog/linkdump, SacredFacts).

Some quotes... on what it was like to build a career in the 20th century (anomalous) heyday of mass media: "Find an organisation you like and dig in for the long haul." Then, on what it is like right now: "Your last boss offered you a corner desk to get you to stay - wtf? You never sit at one anyway."

So what is it like tomorrow? "You have to have a network of contacts to thrive - there is no distinction between home and work."

A funny - if not slightly cynical - view of the future, that is completely 'hyperindividualized', yet also strangely 'social' in that it privileges collective intelligence over solipsistic expertise.