Engaging Citizens with Televised Election Debates through Online Interactive Replays

In this paper we tackle the crisis of political trust and public engagement with politics by investigating new methods and tools to watch and take part in televised political debates. The paper presents relevant research at the intersection of citizenship, technologies and government/democracy, and describes the motivation, requirements and design of Democratic Replay, an online interactive video replay platform that offers a persistent, customisable digital space for: (a) members of the public to express their views as they watch online videos of political events; and (b) enabling for a richer collective understanding of what goes on in these complex media events

Getting in, getting on, getting out? Women as career scramblers in the UK film and television industries

This article looks at the predominance of freelancing in the film and television industries as a lens to examine the persistence of gender inequalities within these fields. Previous research has indicated that women fare better in larger organizations with more stable patterns of employment, and in this article we explore why that might be the case, by focusing on the experiences of female freelancers at a moment when project-based, precarious work and informal recruitment practices are increasing in the UK film and television sector. We highlight in particular the ways in which gender inequality is mediated by age and parental status, and the impact of intersectional identities on women's ability to sustain a career in film and television

Money, (Co)Production and Power in Digital

This article discusses the contribution of critical political economy approaches to digital journalism studies and argues that these offer important correctives to celebratory perspectives. The first part offers a review and critique of influential claims arising from self-styled new studies of convergence culture, media and creative industries. The second part discusses the contribution of critical political economy in examining digital journalism and responding to celebrant claims. The final part reflects on problems of restrictive normativity and other limitations within media political economy perspectives and considers ways in which challenges might be addressed by more synthesising approaches. The paper proposes developing radical pluralist, media systems and comparative analysis, and advocates drawing on strengths in both political economy and culturalist traditions to map and evaluate practices across all sectors of digital journalism

Youth Jury Policy Deliberation: Towards a Fair and Responsible Internet

Young people aged between 12 and 17 across three major British cities — London, Leeds and Nottingham — were invited to play the role of ‘jurors’ on a case where ‘the Internet was put on trial’. The recommendations reported in this paper are intended to improve digital experience and online safety as contributions to policy. These recommendations derive from the ‘youth jurors’ policy deliberations designed to encourage young people to reflect on their digital experience and collectively develop their own problem definitions and solutions

British Film Policy in an Age of Austerity

British film policy in an age of austerit

A novel method to gauge audience engagement with televised election debates through instant, nuanced feedback elicitation

Despite a steep increase in the use of the Internet and handheld computing devices for media consumption, television is still of critical importance for democratic citizenship. Television continues to be the leading source of political information and its relevance has been recognised at policy level. In addition, television keeps evolving technologically and in how it is experienced by viewers. Nonetheless, the ways researchers have measured audience engagement with televised political events in real-time is often limited to small samples of viewers and is based upon a narrow range of responses. In this paper we look at the audience of televised election debates, and propose a new method to gauge the richness and variety of citizens' real-time responses at scale by capturing nuanced, nonintrusive, simple and measurable audience feedback. We report on a paper prototype experiment, in which we used a set of flashcards to test the method in an actual televised election debate scenario. We demonstrate how the method can improve our understanding of viewer responses to the debaters' performances, to the contents in their arguments, and to the debate as media event. We conclude with design guidelines to implement the method on a mass scale in order to measure audience engagement with televised election debates in distributed contexts through audience feedback web and mobile applications

Deregulation or democracy? New media, news, neoliberalism and the public interest

This article began from the premise that news media are in crisis. The crisis is being managed by closing papers or shedding staff. Drawing on extensive empirical research the paper argues that these cuts are having a devastating effect on the quality of the news. The cuts are being delivered to news so that shareholder profits remain in an increasingly deregulated news environment. This is having a particularly negative impact on local news. While new technology is opening up new spaces for the engagement of local communities and communities of interest, and new news spaces are emerging these are far from being adequate replacements for a quality, genuinely local, independent news service. The paper suggests that at the heart of this dilemma is a contradiction between the democratic potential of new technologies and the stifling constraints of the free market