The Scottish media and politics

This chapter will explore the performance of the Scottish media in post-devolution political life, before turning its attention to the specific coverage of the 2007 election.

Diversity in action : minority group media and social change (text-only version)

This magazine, written by Melissa Giles, features three Brisbane-based media organisations: Radio 4RPH, Queensland Pride and 98.9FM. The PDF file on this website contains a text-only version of the magazine. Contact the author if you would like a copy of the text-only EPUB file or a copy of the full digital magazine with images. An audio version of the magazine is available at http://eprints.qut.edu.au/41729/

���Queer��� ��� does not have a uniform : articulations of queer identity in Australian queer student activist media

This article explores articulations of queer identity in recent Australian queer student media. Print media is of particular importance to queer communities because, as Cover argues, it provides a crucial grounding for community development and a model of queer to guide the positioning of identity and activism. This article uses discourse analysis of queer student activists��� media representations of diversity and inclusiveness to investigate the articulations of queer identity in one specific context: metropolitan Australian universities. This reveals real-life appropriations of this contentious term and contributes to a genealogy of sexuality, documenting one visible moment in history.

YouTube and the formalisation of amateur media

This chapter describes how, as YouTube has scaled up both as a platform and as a company, its business model and the consequences for its copyright regulation strategies have co-evolved, and so too the boundaries between amateur and professional media have shifted and blurred in particular ways. As YouTube, Inc moves to more profitably arrange and stabilise the historically contentious relations among rights-holders, uploaders, advertisers and audiences, some forms of amateur video production have become institutionalised and professionalised, while others have been further marginalised and driven underground or to other, more forgiving, platforms.

Eight simple rules for losing your doctoral virginity

Right now, there are thousands of brand new PhD candidates entering universities around the country. Many of them will be highly anxious, knowing that they have a long, difficult journey ahead of them which, statistically speaking, they have less than a 75 per cent chance of completing successfully...

Doing blog research

Blogs and other online platforms for personal writing such as LiveJournal have been of interest to researchers across the social sciences and humanities for a decade now. Although growth in the uptake of blogging has stalled somewhat since the heyday of blogs in the early 2000s, blogging continues to be a major genre of Internet-based communication. Indeed, at the same time that mass participation has moved on to Facebook, Twitter, and other more recent communication phenomena, what has been left behind by the wave of mass adoption is a slightly smaller but all the more solidly established blogosphere of engaged and committed participants. Blogs are now an accepted part of institutional, group, and personal communications strategies (Bruns and Jacobs, 2006); in style and substance, they are situated between the more static information provided by conventional Websites and Webpages and the continuous newsfeeds provided through Facebook and Twitter updates. Blogs provide a vehicle for authors (and their commenters) to think through given topics in the space of a few hundred to a few thousand words ��� expanding, perhaps, on shorter tweets, and possibly leading to the publication of more fully formed texts elsewhere. Additionally, they are also a very flexible medium: they readily provide the functionality to include images, audio, video, and other additional materials ��� as well as the fundamental tool of blogging, the hyperlink itself. Indeed, the role of the link in blogs and blog posts should not be underestimated. Whatever the genre and topic that individual bloggers engage in, for the most part blogging is used to provide timely updates and commentary ��� and it is typical for such material to link both to relevant posts made by other bloggers, and to previous posts by the present author, both to background material which provides readers with further information about the blogger���s current topic, and to news stories and articles which the blogger found interesting or worthy of critique. Especially where bloggers are part of a larger community of authors sharing similar interests or views (and such communities are often indicated by the presence of yet another type of link ��� in blogrolls, often in a sidebar on the blog site, which list the blogger���s friends or favourites), then, the reciprocal writing and linking of posts often constitutes an asynchronous, distributed conversation that unfolds over the course of days, weeks, and months. Research into blogs is interesting for a variety of reasons, therefore. For one, a qualitative analysis of one or several blogs can reveal the cognitive and communicative processes through which individual bloggers define their online identity, position themselves in relation to fellow bloggers, frame particular themes, topics and stories, and engage with one another���s points of view. It may also shed light on how such processes may differ across different communities of interest, perhaps in correlation with the different societal framing and valorisation of specific areas of interest, with the socioeconomic backgrounds of individual bloggers, or with other external or internal factors. Such qualitative research now looks back on a decade-long history (for key collections, see Gurak, et al., 2004; Bruns and Jacobs, 2006; also see Walker Rettberg, 2008) and has recently shifted also to specifically investigate how blogging practices differ across different cultures (Russell and Echchaibi, 2009). Other studies have also investigated the practices and motivations of bloggers in specific countries from a sociological perspective, through large-scale surveys (e.g. Schmidt, 2009). Blogs have also been directly employed within both K-12 and higher education, across many disciplines, as tools for reflexive learning and discussion (Burgess, 2006).

If it���s sick, how can we well? : Four criteria for evaluating the health of journalism

This paper seeks to address the highly pervasive discourse that journalism is ���in crisis��� by outlining four criteria by which we might evaluate the ���health��� of the practice (measures of both quantity and quality of output). It offers an extremely brief meta-level analysis of existing research, and posits that when judged according to these four criteria, journalism might actually in reasonable health,and that we ought to be far more optimistic about its future. This assessment therefore challenges the ���business-centric��� evaluation which often dominates discussions (in the media as well as academia) about the profession���s supposedly dire future.

Globalization, media policy and regulatory design : rethinking the Australian media classification scheme

This paper considers the debate about the relationship between globalization and media policy from the perspective provided by a current review of the Australian media classification scheme. Drawing upon the author���s recent experience in being ���inside��� the policy process, as Lead Commissioner on the Australian National Classification Scheme Review, it is argued that theories of globalization ��� including theories of neoliberal globalization ��� fail to adequately capture the complexities of the reform process, particularly around the relationship between regulation and markets. The paper considers the pressure points for media content policies arising from media globalization, and the wider questions surrounding media content policies in an age of media convergence.

Confrontation and cooptation : a brief history of Australian political blogs

The history of political blogging in Australia does not entirely match the development of blogospheres in other countries. Even at its beginning, blogging was not an entirely alternative endeavour ��� one of the first news or political blogs was Margo Kingston���s Webdiary, hosted by the Sydney Morning Herald. In the United States, whose political blogosphere has been examined most comprehensively in the literature (see e.g. Adamic & Glance, 2005; Drezner & Farrell, 2008; Shaw & Benkler, 2012; Tremayne, 2007; Wallsten, 2008), blogging had a clear historical trajectory from alternative to mainstream medium. The Australian blogosphere, by contrast, has seen early and continued involvement from representatives of the mainstream media, blogging both for their employers and independently (Garden, 2010). Coupled with the incorporation of blog-like technologies into news websites, as well as with obvious differences in the size of the available talent pool and potential audience for political blogging in Australia, this recognition of blogging by the mainstream media may be one reason why, in political and news discussions at least, Australian bloggers did not bring about their own, local equivalents to the resignations of Dan Rather or Trent Lott in the U.S. ���events which were commonly attributed in part to the work of bloggers (Simons, 2007). However, the acceptance of the blogging concept by the mainstream media has been accompanied by a comparative lack of acceptance towards individual bloggers. Analyses and commentary published by bloggers have been attacked by journalists, creating an at times antagonistic relationship between the mainstream media and bloggers (Flew & Wilson, 2010; Young, 2011). In this article, we examine the historical development of blogging in Australia, focussing primarily on political and news blogs. In particular, we review who the bloggers are and how the connections between different blogs and other titles have changed over the past decade. The paper tracks the evolution of individual and group blogs, independent and mainstream media-hosted opinion sites, and the gradual convergence of these platforms and their associated contributing authors. We conclude by examining the current state of the Australian blogosphere and its likely future development, taking into account the rise of social media, and in particular Twitter, as additional spaces for public commentary.

The committee on public information : a transmedia war propaganda campaign

This thesis develops an understanding of how propaganda entered the realm of journalism and popular culture in the United States during World War I through an examination of materials created by the Committee on Public Information (CPI). The CPI was a US governmental propaganda organisation created during World War I to persuade the nation to mobilise for war. Three of its divisions were chosen for this study: the Division of News (DoN), the Division of Four Minute Men (FMM) and the Division of Pictorial Publicity (DPP). Chapter 1 provides a general context for the thesis, outlines the research questions and details previous research on the CPI. Chapter 2 outlines the methods of analysis for interpreting the case study chapters and provides contextual information. The case studies are presented in Chapters 3, 4 and 5. These chapters are structured in the order of context, medium and content, and contain historical contextual information about each particular division, medialogical aspects of its propagated form and thematic groupings created from close reading of CPI materials. A semiotic analysis in the Peircian tradition is also performed on visual forms of propaganda in Chapter 5. Chapter 6 discusses how the expectations of persuasion, truth and amusement relate to each other when mediated in culture, using Lotman���s concept of the semiosphere. This further develops an understanding of propaganda as a cultural system in relation to other cultural systems ��� in this case, journalism and popular culture. Chapter 7 provides conclusions about the study, outlines relative strengths and weaknesses regarding the selection and deployment of methods, makes recommendations for future research, and summarises the key contributions of the thesis.

The Convergent Media Policy Moment

This paper will consider some of the wider contextual and policy questions arising out of four major public inquiries that took place in Australia over 2011���2012: the Convergence Review, the National Classification Scheme Review, the Independent Media Inquiry (Finkelstein Review) and the National Cultural Policy. This paper considers whether we are now witnessing a ���convergent media policy moment��� akin to the ���cultural policy moment��� theorized by Australian cultural researchers in the early 1990s, and the limitations of various approaches to understanding policy ��� including critiques of neoliberalism ��� in understanding such shifts. It notes the rise of ���soft law��� as a means of addressing the challenges of regulatory design in an era of rapid media change, with consideration of two cases: the approach to media influence taken in the Convergence Review, and the concept of ���deeming��� developed in the National Classification Scheme Review.