26 research outputs found

    Why advocate for public service media? Perspectives from organizations for media development

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    In this commentary, we discuss how five prominent media development organizations (BBC Media Action, Council of Europe, DWA, PMA and UNESCO) define public service broadcasting (PSB)/public service media (PSM) and how they envisage its role and functions in their recent projects and reports. In view of the increasing challenges of the current media landscape, international donors are looking at models to provide a path to independent media and journalism and several international organizations support projects and institutional arrangements they label PSB/PSM. However, given the fundamental questions that existing PSBs face, is PSB a meaningful tool for media development? And how do these various advocates for PSB/PSM understand the concept and why do they feel that it is worth supporting? We find that there seems to have been a shift, common to all five organizations, towards defining PSB/PSM in terms of public service ethos, and we explain why this should be seen as a welcome development

    Talking alone : Reality TV, emotions and authenticity

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    This article examines reality TV as an illustration of contemporary confessional culture in which the key attraction is the disclosure of true emotions. This article hopes to contribute to the understanding of the production of self-disclosure through a formal analysis of international and domestic dating, adventure and lifestyle-oriented reality shows broadcast on Finnish television between 2002 and 2004. The diverse programmes verify that reality TV shows capitalize on a variety of talk situations within one programme, but it is the monologue that is used as a truth-sign of direct access to the authentic. We also suggest that the power of monologue in the reality genre promotes the transformation of television from a mass medium to first-person medium addressing masses of individuals.Peer reviewe

    measures of biological diversity overview and unified framework

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    A variety of statistical measures of diversity have been employed across biology and ecology, including Shannon entropy, the Gini-Simpson index, so-called effective numbers of species (aka Hill's measures), and more besides. I will review several major options and then present a comprehensive formalism in which all these can be embedded as special cases, depending on the setting of two parameters, labelled degree and order. This mathematical framework is adapted from generalized information theory. A discussion of the theoretical meaning of the parameters in biological applications provides insight into the conceptual features and limitations of current approaches. The unified framework described also allows for the development of a tailored solution for the measurement of biological diversity that jointly satisfies otherwise divergent desiderata put forward in the literature
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