Google’s Digital News Initiative: Picking winners in the future of journalism

Des Freedman is a Professor of Media and Communication Studies at Goldsmiths, University of London, and current chair of the Media Reform Coalition. In this article he looks into decision-making behind Google’s Digital News Initiative, the potential pitfalls, and why it is not an outline for long-term media funding

Murdoch: The End of the Affair?

By Des Freedman, Department of Media and Communications, Goldsmiths, University of Londo

Interview with Lord Inglewood: Communications Committee calls for Periodic Plurality Reviews by Ofcom and More

The Leveson Report recommended Parliament review existing law on media ownership and media plurality. Today the House of Lords Communications Committee published its Report on Media Plurality proposing policy to address concentrations that might evolve in the market as well as in instances of transactions such as mergers. LSE Media Policy Project’s Sally Broughton Micova spoke with the Committee Chairman Lord Inglewood about the report

Public service broadcasting: when the status quo won’t do

Public service media across Europe are facing new commercial and political challenges. Des Freedman, who is speaking today at the event ‘The Future of Public Service Media in Europe’ here at the LSE, writes about challenges for public service broadcasters in the UK. Des is project lead for the Inquiry into the Future of Public Service Television. He writes here in a personal capacity

Des Freedman: Four More Years to Wait for Media Plurality

Des Freedman of Goldsmiths, University of London responds to the Media Plurality Report published today by the House of Lords Communications Committee warning that the current situation in the UK does not reflect adequate plurality and arguing that the under the Report’s proposals these would not be addressed for another four years

Mapping Digital Media: United Kingdom

Examines trends in digital media access, consumption, and impact, including digital television uptake, Internet access, preferred news sources, effect on investigative journalism, the role of public interest journalism, and the regulatory environment

Home but not dry: reflections on the draft BBC Charter and Agreement

David Puttnam and Des Freedman, who led the Inquiry into the Future of Public Service Television, respond to the draft BBC Charter published last week

‘The Resilience of TV and its Implications for Media Policy’

The Routledge Companion to the Cultural Industries is collection of contemporary scholarship on the cultural industries and seeks to re-assert the importance of cultural production and consumption against the purely economic imperatives of the ‘creative industries’. Across 43 chapters drawn from a wide range of geographic and disciplinary perspectives, this comprehensive volume offers a critical and empirically-informed examination of the contemporary cultural industries. A range of cultural industries are explored, from videogames to art galleries, all the time focussing on the culture that is being produced and its wider symbolic and socio-cultural meaning. Individual chapters consider their industrial structure, the policy that governs them, their geography, the labour that produces them, and the meaning they offer to consumers and participants. The collection also explores the historical dimension of cultural industry debates providing context for new readers, as well as critical orientation for those more familiar with the subject. Questions of industry structure, labour, place, international development, consumption and regulation are all explored in terms of their historical trajectory and potential future direction. By assessing the current challenges facing the cultural industries this collection of contemporary scholarship provides students and researchers with an essential guide to key ideas, issues, concepts and debates in the field

‘Smooth operator?’ The propaganda model and moments of crisis

The propaganda model is a powerful tool for explaining systematic flaws in media coverage. But does it explain the cracks and tensions within the commercial media that are capable of arising at moments of political crisis and elite disagreement? To what extent does the model privilege a flawless structuralist account of media power at the expense of focusing on contradictory dynamics inside the capitalist media? This article looks at a key moment where critical media content was generated by a mainstream media organization: the coverage of the run-up to the Iraq War in the British tabloid paper, the Daily Mirror in 2003. It reflects on the consequences of such a moment for resisting corporate media power and asks whether it suggests the need for a revision of the propaganda model or, rather, provides further validation of its relevance

The world is changing – it’s time our media did too

The UK media’s handling of the coronavirus crisis has been a shambles, argues writer and academic Des Freedman. We need to demand more