Retail Tales and Tribulations: Transmedia Brands, Consumer Products, and the Significance of Shop Talk

This article challenges media studies scholars to pay closer attention to retail spaces as sites that mediate how entertainment franchises engage consumers. Examining retail through a media industries lens, it argues that retail is a site of struggle among retailers and brand owners over how brand stories are told, if at all. The article explores both the storytelling devices used in telling Frozen and Sesame Street stories at Target and how shop talk among retailers, brand owners, and manufacturers shapes the kinds of stories that entertainment properties can tell at retail, especially as those stories intersect with retail imaginings of why consumers shop and how consumer behaviors might be divided along gender, class, race, and age configurations. It ends with a case study analyzing how Sony\u27s Annie (Gluck, 2014) brand story was told at Target in light of the near-complete absence of blackness as either a viable brand attribute or a recognizable consumer category in that space

Mediated Merchandise, Merchandisable Media: An Introduction

There are many reasons why film and media scholars ought to take merchandise seriously. That filmrelated merchandise is a lucrative part of the film business is only a starting point, but still a good place to start. In 2018, character and entertainment licensing accounted for 44.7% of retail sales of licensed merchandise, generating 121.53 billion in sales. [1] [#N1] This earned entertainment companies approximately 6.2 billion in royalties. [2] [#N2] Not surprisingly, five of the top ten licensors are entertainment companies, with Disney positioned at the top with $53 billion in merchandise sales. Universal Studios is ranked 4th ($7.3 billion), Hasbro 5th ($7.1 billion), Warner Brothers 7th ($7 billion), and Nickelodeon 9th ($5.5 billion). All of the major film studios are ranked in the top 150: 21st Century Fox is 41st, Sony 87th, and Paramount 114th. [3] [#N3

MediaCommons: Social Networking Tools for Digital Scholarly Communication

New York University, working with the Institute for the Future of the Book, seeks Level II funding in order build a working prototype of a set of networking tools that will serve as the membership system for MediaCommons, an all-electronic scholarly publishing network in the digital humanities. This set of tools, which one might imagine as bringing together the functionalities of e-portfolio software, social networking systems, and electronic publishing platforms, will enable the users of MediaCommons to find one another, collaborate, and disseminate their work in new ways. Within this social network, scholars would be able to make available a wide range of their work, including published texts ranging from the monograph to the article, works-in-progress, blogs and other more informal online writing, and other activities that often go unnoticed as forms of scholarly production, such as reviews of other scholars' work, as well as syllabi and other teaching resources

Particle-yield modification in jet-like azimuthal di-hadron correlations in Pb-Pb collisions at sNN\sqrt{s_{\rm NN}} = 2.76 TeV

The yield of charged particles associated with high-$p_{\rm T}$ trigger particles ($8 < p_{\rm T} < 15$ GeV/$c$) is measured with the ALICE detector in Pb-Pb collisions at $\sqrt{s_{\rm NN}}$ = 2.76 TeV relative to proton-proton collisions at the same energy. The conditional per-trigger yields are extracted from the narrow jet-like correlation peaks in azimuthal di-hadron correlations. In the 5% most central collisions, we observe that the yield of associated charged particles with transverse momenta $p_{\rm T}> 3$ GeV/$c$ on the away-side drops to about 60% of that observed in pp collisions, while on the near-side a moderate enhancement of 20-30% is found.Comment: 15 pages, 2 captioned figures, 1 table, authors from page 10, published version, figures at http://aliceinfo.cern.ch/ArtSubmission/node/350