Sauver les médias:Capitalisme, financement participatif et démocratie

Les médias sont en crise. Pas seulement la presse écrite, mais toute la chaîne de production de l’information. Confrontés à une concurrence croissante et à une baisse inexorable des recettes publicitaires, les journaux, les radios, les télévisions, les pure players sont tous à la recherche d’un nouveau modèle. Fondé sur une étude inédite des médias en Europe et aux États-Unis, ce livre propose de créer un nouveau statut de « société de média à but non lucratif », intermédiaire entre le statut de fondation et celui de société par actions. Ce statut permettrait d’œuvrer pour des médias indépendants des actionnaires extérieurs, des annonceurs et des pouvoirs publics, mais dépendants de leurs lecteurs, de leurs salariés et des internautes. Il s’agit d’un modèle économique adapté à la révolution numérique et aux enjeux du XXIe siècle. Le débat est ouvert : il en va, tout simplement, de l’avenir de notre démocratie. Normalienne, titulaire d’un doctorat de l’université de Harvard, Julia Cagé est professeur d’économie à Sciences Po Paris. Elle est également membre de la Commission économique de la nation. (résumé éditeur

FEMEN and Malala as feminist protest ‘brands’ – Some polarities in feminist activism

On Sunday, October 20 2013, a friend and I had an amazing day of feminism: in the morning we watched the documentary Ukraine is not a Brothel about the controversial protest group FEMEN, followed by a Q&A with one of their members, Sasha Shevchenko, and in the afternoon we saw Malala Yousafzai speak about her campaigning work for girls’ education

Qui possède les médias ?

Qui possède les médias ? Il s’avère extraordinairement difficile de répondre à cette question simple. En France, l’ordonnance du 26 août 1944 du Conseil National de la Résistance rendait obligatoire – entre de multiples autres règles – la publication sur chaque exemplaire de journaux du nom des actionnaires et de leur profession. Ces règles n’ont, de fait, jamais été appliquées. Il est plus important que jamais d’améliorer les connaissances de la structure de l’actionnariat des médias d’information politique et générale. L’objectif de cette recherche est de mettre à jour, pour l’ensemble des médias d’information, la liste de leurs actionnaires ainsi que le secteur d’activité de ces derniers. Ce Policy Brief se concentre sur les cas de la France et de l’Espagne. Pour ces derniers, nous montrons que l’actionnariat des médias d’information se caractérise par sa complexité et son manque de transparence. De plus, une large part des actionnaires privés des médias tire l’essentiel de leurs ressources d’activités financières et d’assurance. En France, 51% des actionnaires des médias sont dans ce cas ; ils sont ainsi près de trois fois plus nombreux que les actionnaires issus du secteur de l’information et de la communication (18%). Au-delà de l’élargissement à d’autres pays, la prochaine étape logique de cette recherche consistera à mesurer l’impact de la structure de l’actionnariat sur la couverture médiatique

Behavior, Energetics, And Swimming Performance Of The American Paddlefish, Polyodon Spathula, In A Lower Mississippi River Oxbow

Paddlefish often frequent oxbows and backwater habitats between periods of migration. Speculation as to the use and energetic savings associated with this seasonal residence has not been substantiated. This study used radio telemetry to track the seasonal movements and swim tunnel respirometry to estimate metabolic rates and swimming efficiency of paddlefish within an oxbow located just north of Clarksdale, Mississippi (Moon Lake). Paddlefish overwintered in the deepest portions of Moon Lake with little movement into shallower areas. Paddlefish swimming performance was measured at four swimming speeds (76.04, 91.27, 106.50, and 121.72 cm/s) to determine the cost of locomotion over season as measured by oxygen consumption and reported as the cost of transport: cost in calories to move one gram of body mass one kilometer. The optimal swimming speed (uopt), the swimming speed at which the cost of transport is the lowest, for any given month (January, February, May, and September) was between 106.50 and 121.72 cm/s and was estimated to be 0.078 calories/g/km for February, May, and September, and 0.045 calories/g/km in January. The caloric availability within the lake was monitored by zooplankton sampling to determine the potential energetic gain from paddlefish filter feeding. The ratio of calories expended to calories gained (cost: benefit ratio) was calculated for each of the four swimming speeds tested during swimming trials. The cost-to-benefit ratios in January and February were less than 1 at all speeds tested and suggested that paddlefish swimming efficiency was high and zooplankton abundance was adequate to support energetic gain. The most efficient swimming speed during January and February was 121.17 and 91.27 cm/s, respectively. Cost-to-benefit ratios in January and February were 0.20 and 0.50 cal/g/km, respectively. Costs began to exceed benefits in May and September as zooplankton densities dropped drastically. This was evidenced by the decline in average caloric value of lake water (29.89 and 4.79 calories/cubic meter for May and September, respectively. In September the cost of locomotion was around 200 to 400% of benefit. The significant drop in zooplankton may have cued paddlefish to move out of Moon Lake

Media Competition, Information Provision and Political Participation

This paper investigates the impact of increased media competition on the quantity and quality of news provided and, ultimately, changes in political participation. Drawing from the literature on vertical product differentiation to model the production choices of newspapers, I show how an increase in the number of newspapers can decrease both the quantity and quality of news provided. I build a new county-level panel dataset of local newspaper presence, newspapers' costs and revenues and political turnout in France, from 1945 to 2012. I estimate the effect of newspaper entry by comparing counties that experience entry to similar counties in the same years that do not. These counties exhibit similar trends prior to newspaper entry, but newspaper entry then leads to substantial declines in the total number of journalists. More newspapers are also associated with fewer news articles and lower hard news provision. These effects are concentrated in counties with homogeneous populations, as predicted by the model, with little impact on counties with heterogeneous populations. Newspaper entry, and the associated decline in information provision, is ultimately found to decrease voter turnout

Painful Discourses: Borders, Regions, and Representations of Female Circumcision from Africa to America

This project considers issues of representation and how literature, personal testimony, popular culture, and African film script a narrative of change and/or participate in change in the female circumcision debate. Texts that currently shape the female circumcision debate are increasingly focused on viable methods of social change and couch issues of change in dynamics of discourse and representation, including Obioma Nnaemeka’s Female Circumcision and the Politics of Knowledge: African Women in Imperialist Discourses, Rogaia Mustafa Abusharaf’s Female Circumcision: Multicultural Perspectives, and Oyèrónké Oyewùmi’s African Women and Feminism: Reflecting on the Politics of Sisterhood, all of which I cite in the dissertation. These texts resist “othering” and focus instead on how African women self-identify in a world that often images them as helpless and devoid of agency and power. This project not only brings new information to bear about how female circumcision is transnationally discoursed, but also offers new ideas of how members of the global community view the “other.” In addition, Painful Discourses offers new readings of literary texts that have female circumcision as a major theme; positions literary texts as key in discourse-making about FC; emphasizes the necessity of women’s personal accounts of circumcision to educate nations about this practice; and privileges African perspectives about FC. The project details central issues in female circumcision discourse, particularly the dynamics that fuel how female circumcision and the millions of girls and women who have and will undergo the procedure are represented, as well as crucial moments, persons, and representations that have created a moment of “border crossing” in our transnational understandings about the practice, including “travelogues,” ethnography, autobiography, and US print media. The project also features the personal narratives of two women who were circumcised in East Africa. The project appropriately ends with the consideration of African novelist and filmmaker Ousmane Sembène’s 2004 film, Moolaadé. The film is a cinematic representation of anti-circumcision discourse as well as an aesthetic masterpiece that confronts the changing identity of an unnamed village caught between traditions of the past and “modernities” of the present. I conclude the project by offering new ideas for representation