Reviewing Australian screen history

This special issue of Studies in Australasian Cinema features a selection of papers presented at the 17th Film and History Association of Australia and New Zealand (FHAANZ) conference, held at Queensland University of Technology between 1 and 3 July 2015. This was the first FHAANZ conference to be hosted in Queensland since 1998. Informed by historical and archival research, the articles examine overlooked or underdeveloped aspects of screen history, offer new historical perspectives, or consider key contemporary issues regarding the preservation of Australian screen history

International Sales of UK Television Content: Change and Continuity in ‘the space in between’ Production and Consumption

Focusing on the UK, this article addresses key issues facing the international distribution industry arising from over-the-top digital distribution and the fragmentation of audiences and revenues. Building on the identification of these issues, it investigates the extent to which UK distribution has altered over a ten-year period, pinpointing continuities in the destination and type of sales alongside changes in the role and structure of the industry as UK-based distributors adapt to a changing UK broadcasting landscape and global production environment. At one level increasing US ownership of UK-based distributors and the arrival of OTT players like Netflix, highlight the tensions between the national orientations of UK broadcasters and the global aspirations of independent producers and distributors. At another level VOD has boosted international sales of UK drama. Although the full impact of SVOD on content and rights has yet to materialise, significant changes in the industry predate the arrival of SVOD

Two or three things i know about meaning — for Bill

Of all affairs, communication is the most wonderful. When communication occurs, all natural events are subject to reconsideration and revision; they are re-adapted to meet the requirements of conversation whether it be public discourse or that preliminary discourse termed thinking. Events turn into objects, things with a meaning. They may be referred to when they do not exist, and thus be operative among things distant in space and time, through vicarious presence in a new medium. (John Dewey 166)

Tv as cultural technology: The Work of Eric Michaels

Stories about technology play a distinctive role in our understanding of ourselves and our common history.… technology is thoroughly cultural from the outset: an expression of the very outlooks and aspirations we pretend it merely demonstrates

Journalism by numbers: trajectories of growth and decline of journalists in the Australian census 1961–2016

In this article, we use the five-yearly census of occupations to develop an historical perspective on Australian journalist employment from 1961. We do so for two reasons. First, we gauge the impact on journalist employment of online media from 1996 and media platforms since 2006 comparing these to previous media transformations. Second, we explore journalism and its occupational profile noting its close connection with authors and public relations professions. To allow for a period when the Australian Bureau of Statistics placed journalists and authors together as in a single occupational grouping (from 1961 to 1981), we track their combined employment from 1961 to 2016. From 1986, we consider journalists and authors separately. In each case, we consider numbers employed, their respective proportion of the workforce and their compound annual growth rates establishing the extent to which employment grew above – or fell below – that of the workforce as a whole. We show the gradual recalibration of journalists and their writer–author counterparts with respect to each other. From 1996, we outline the performance of different kinds of journalist over the 20 years to 2016 covering both online’s first open Internet decade and its second closed media platform from 2006 to 2016