"A step into the abyss" Transmedia in the UK Games and Television Industries

This article uses a media industries studies perspective to investigate the current state of transmedia production in the UK. Analysing the discursive statements of a range of industry participants from both UK television and games industries, the article reveals a series of contradictions and misunderstandings that may be limiting the effectiveness of multi-platform projects. By comparing overlapping discursive patterns around attitudes to risk, measures of success, authorship between the two industries, and repeated concerns over the balance of creative and commercial imperatives, the article argues that existing hierarchies of power between media industries threaten to derail future convergence

“You Must Construct Additional Pylons”: Building a Better Framework for Esports Governance

The popularity of “esports,” also known as “electronic sports” or competitive video gaming, has exploded in recent years and captured the attention of cord-cutting millennials—often to the detriment of sports such as basketball, football, baseball, and hockey. In the United States, the commercial dominance of such traditional sports stems from decades of regulatory support. Consequently, while esports regulation is likely to emulate many aspects of traditional sports governance, the esports industry is fraught with challenges that inhibit sophisticated ownership and capital investment. Domestic regulation is complicated by underlying intellectual property ownership and ancillary considerations such as fluctuations in a video game’s popularity. Since analogous reform is nigh impossible, nascent governance organizations have been created to support the professionalization of esports as a new entertainment form. As esports consumption continues to grow, enterprising stakeholders are presented with the unique opportunity to create regulatory bodies that will shape the esports industry. This Note analyzes how the professional sports industry and foreign esports markets have addressed governance challenges that arise from differences between traditional sports and competitive video gaming. It concludes by exploring two potential pathways for domestic esports governance. View PD

Studying soap operas

This present issue of Communication Research Trends will focus on research about soap operas published in the last 15 years, that is, from the year 2000 to the present. This more recent research shows one key difference: the interest in soap opera has become worldwide. This appears in the programs that people listen to or watch and in communication researchers who themselves come from different countries

In the Battle for Reality: Social Documentaries in the U.S.

Provides an overview of documentaries that address social justice and democracy issues, and includes case studies of successful strategic uses of social documentaries

Reinventing Media Activism: Public Interest Advocacy in the Making of U.S. Communication-Information Policy, 1960-2002

This report is a long-term analysis of citizens' collective action to influence public policy toward communication and information. The work discusses in greater detail what is meant by communication and information policy (CIP) and why we think it is worthwhile to study it as a distinctive domain of public policy and citizen action. The report concentrates on citizen action in the United States and looks backwards, tracing the long-term evolutionary trajectory of communications-information advocacy in the USA since the 1960s. We focus on the concept of citizen collective action and explain its relevance to CIP.Research supported by the Ford Foundation's Knowledge, Creativity and Freedom Program. The views expressed are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of the School of Information Studies, Syracuse University, or the Ford Foundation

Mapping the Money in Public Media

Provides an overview of emerging "user-centric" business models for public media that utilize the interactivity of digital technologies as a way to integrate content, communication, commerce, and community through participatory media creation

Cultural and economic complementarities of spatial agglomeration in the British television broadcasting industry: Some explorations.

This paper considers the processes supporting agglomeration in the British television broadcasting industry. It compares and contrasts the insights offered by the cultural turn in geography and more conventionally economic approaches. It finds that culture and institutions are fundamental to the constitution of production and exchange relationships and also that they solve fundamental economic problems of coordinating resources under conditions of uncertainty and limited information. Processes at a range of spatial scales are important, from highly local to global, and conventional economics casts some light on which firms are most active and successful

Digital Democracy: Episode IV—A New Hope*: How a Corporation for Public Software Could Transform Digital Engagement for Government and Civil Society

Although successive generations of digital technology have become increasingly powerful in the past 20 years, digital democracy has yet to realize its potential for deliberative transformation. The undemocratic exploitation of massive social media systems continued this trend, but it only worsened an existing problem of modern democracies, which were already struggling to develop deliberative infrastructure independent of digital technologies. There have been many creative conceptions of civic tech, but implementation has lagged behind innovation. This article argues for implementing one such vision of digital democracy through the establishment of a public corporation. Modeled on the Corporation for Public Broadcasting in the United States, this entity would foster the creation of new digital technology by providing a stable source of funding to nonprofit technologists, interest groups, civic organizations, government, researchers, private companies, and the public. Funded entities would produce and maintain software infrastructure for public benefit. The concluding sections identify what circumstances might create and sustain such an entity

The founding of new firms and efficient decision-making structures in localized production networks. The example of television production in the Cologne media cluster (Germany)

Much literature often discusses localized production networks as possible engines of prosperous regional development. In this literature, vertical disintegration and corresponding further specialization of individual firms within a commodity chain is seen as an essential factor in the success of such localized production networks. Additionally, this literature emphasizes the importance of information intensive economic transactions and the resulting interdependence between complementary firms in the production network. In turn, this type of interdependence makes the specific, specialized competencies of a single firm available to other firms in the commodity chain. Furthermore, such a production system is regarded as highly flexible. Firstly, thanks to their specialization in a small subset of the production chain, the single enterprises are in a position to develop a wide range of special solutions in their field of production. As a result, they are able to react very quickly to changing and unstable market conditions. Secondly, there is an enormous flexibility and adaptability because of the production chain's frequent renewal. In extreme cases, a new chain is built specifically to meet the demands of a specific project and is dissolved after the project is completed. Thus, production could take place with almost completely new partners (i.e., firms) from one project to the next. The numerous interactions required to sustain the reorganization of production for each new project in turn depend on spatial proximity, trust and embeddedness within a common socio-institutional context. In turn, these features are further reasons for the success of such a production network. These regionally-anchored, flexibly-specialized networks are often called "industrial districts". These networks not only operate in small niches of certain industries, but are also found in some parts of the sevice sector. The proposed presentation analyses the decision structures operating inside the production network of TV-programs in Cologne´s TV-production dominated Media-cluster. This research empirically confirms that competencies for decision-making are very unevenly distributed among the single units of the production chain. The research goes on to argue that the co-ordination of a highly disintegrated production network is possible only with a clear and plain hierarchy for decision making, execution and control processes. For this reason the network producing a TV-program is mainly designed and steered by only a handful actors. Although the competencies for decision-making are distributed unevenly through the production network, selection of subordinate partners by dominant firms is shaped by strong socio-institutional relations like trust based on previous positive working relations as well as common conventions, rules and routines. The final goal of the actual (December 2001) empirical research in Cologne is to analyse the decision-making structures affiliated with specific TV programs. This leads to a deeper understanding of how localized networks with uneven power structures work. In this context the question arises of how spatial concentration determines the respective decision-making process. At the same time there are still some indications that - besides some evolutionary factors - these special decision-making processes are a crucial factor in explaining the spatial concentration of TV-production in Cologne´s Media Cluster.