Tourism TV commercials : a delicate balance between aural and visual information load

This article content analyzes music in tourism TV commercials from 95 regions and countries to identify their general acoustic characteristics. The objective is to offer a general guideline in the postproduction of tourism TV commercials. It is found that tourism TV commercials tend to be produced in a faster tempo with beats per minute close to 120, which is rare to be found in general TV commercials. To compensate for the faster tempo (increased aural information load), less scenes (longer duration per scene) were edited into the footage. Production recommendations and future research are presented.

A profile of Australian travel journalists' professional views and ethical standards

Despite significant changes in mainstream journalism in recent decades, journalistic fields beyond the news have been little explored. In an attempt to contribute to a deeper understanding of such fields, this article examines the role perceptions of 85 Australian travel journalists. By viewing travel journalism as a distinct field of practice that is affected by a unique mix of influences, this study identifies five dimensions of practitioners’ role perceptions. These relate to travel journalists’ views of themselves as Cultural Mediators, Critics, Entertainers, Information Providers and Travellers. In addition, the study examines in some depth the ethical standards of travel journalists. Determinants of these views and standards are explored. The study argues that, in light of travel journalists’ increasingly important role in reporting about foreign places, more remains to be done to promote travel stories that show a deeper understanding of other cultures and which contain a more critical appraisal of destinations.

Mediating orientation and self-expression in the world of consumption : Australian and German lifestyle journalists' professional views

Despite having experienced rapid popularity over the past two decades, lifestyle journalism is still somewhat neglected by academic researchers. So far mostly explored as either part of wider lifestyle programming, particularly on television, or in terms of individual sub-fields, such as travel, fashion or food journalism, lifestyle journalism is in need of scholarly analysis particularly in the area of production, based on the increasing importance which the field has in influencing audiences’ ways of life. This study explores the professional views of 89 Australian and German lifestyle journalists through in-depth interviews in order to explore the ways in which they engage in processes of influencing audiences’ self-expression, identities and consumption behaviors. The article argues that through its work, lifestyle journalism is a significant shaper of identities in today’s consumer societies.

Australian journalism students' motivations and job expectations : evidence from a survey across six universities

The value of tertiary journalism education is an often hotly-debated topic among journalism educators and in the industry. Yet, the voices of students are often not heard in these debates. For example, we know relatively little about why young people actually decide to study journalism, what area of journalism they want to work in and what they are looking for in a job. To shed more light on the student perspective, this paper reports on a survey of 320 undergraduate journalism students at six Australian universities. The results show that only a minority actually want to work in news journalism, while most prefer entertainment-focussed areas. Students are motivated mainly by a love for writing and because they like journalism as a profession. In terms of job characteristics, they are particularly interested in their own career progression, but also in the extent to which they can provide a public service.

'The Australian we all aspire to be' : commemorative journalism and the death of the Crocodile Hunter

This article examines the news coverage the death of Steve Irwin, widely known as the Crocodile Hunter, generated in Australia. In line with past research on commemorative journalism, the study demonstrates the dominant discourses employed in the reporting of Irwin's death. It is argued that Australia's newspapers invoked a number of national myths, such as mateship, larrikinism and anti-elitism, in order to re-assert notions of Australian identity and social values and to deal with the grief over his loss. Most importantly, the study sheds new light on how news media deal with challenges to the dominant memorialising discourse. Past studies had not been able to investigate in much detail alternative discourses, but in examining Irwin's death, we are able to see how the media deal with such an unwanted interruption. It is argued that newspapers appropriated the alternative perspective within the mythical terms of their memorialising discourse, thereby not allowing it to disrupt the memorialisation itself and in fact further strengthening the process of mythologising the Crocodile Hunter.

Representing Death in the News : Journalism, Media and Mortality

Recent years have seen a renewed interest in the relationship between the news, media and death. Driven by a perceived ubiquity of death and dying on television, in newspapers and on the internet, many scholars have attempted to more closely examine aspects of this coverage. The result is that there now exists a large body of scholarly work on death in the news, yet what has been lacking is a comprehensive synthesis of the field. This book seeks to close this gap by analyzing the scholarship on death in the news by way of a thematic approach. It provides a historical overview, looks at the conditions of production, content and reception, and also analyzes emerging trends in the representation of death online. This fascinating account provides a much needed overview of what we currently know about death in the news and provides food for thought for future studies in the field.

Is there an app for that? A case study of the potentials and limitations of the participator turn and networked publics for classical music audience engagement

The participatory turn, fuelled by discourses and rhetoric regarding social media, and in the aftermath of the dot.com crash of the early 2000s, enrols to some extent an idea of being able to deploy networks to achieve institutional aims. The arts and cultural sector in the UK, in the face of funding cuts, has been keen to engage with such ideas in order to demonstrate value for money; by improving the efficiency of their operations, improving their respective audience experience and ultimately increasing audience size and engagement. Drawing on a case study compiled via a collaborative research project with a UK-based symphony orchestra (UKSO) we interrogate the potentials of social media engagement for audience development work through participatory media and networked publics. We argue that the literature related to mobile phones and applications (‘apps’) has focused primarily on marketing for engagement where institutional contexts are concerned. In contrast, our analysis elucidates the broader potentials and limitations of social-media-enabled apps for audience development and engagement beyond a marketing paradigm. In the case of UKSO, it appears that the technologically deterministic discourses often associated with institutional enrolment of participatory media and networked publics may not necessarily apply due to classical music culture. More generally, this work raises the contradictory nature of networked publics and argues for increased critical engagement with the concept.

Digital Literacy and the Spaces of Academic Discourse

Digital literacy poses a particular challenge to the research-led university. Although these universities are often at the forefront of introducing digital literacy initiatives—such as e-learning platforms, technological infrastructure, and digital repositories—these applications of digital literacy tend to be more instrumental or functional than critical or creative. Certainly, this clash of cultures between the instrumental/functional and the critical/analytical is at the heart of debates over the uses of digital literacy in higher education. However, this simple equation of political forces with instrumentality and the corresponding equation of the university with a tradition of reflective thought that brings criticism to bear on instrumentality elide the fact that this conflict is more deeply rooted within the academy. This essay argues that, in fact, much of the resistance to critical uses of digital literacy comes from within the institution of the university itself. That is, the university is bound up in a scriptural economy that prioritises the printed word and that reinforces its power by way of a normative, political, and spatialised academic discourse. It is this print-based scriptural economy—in which this essay must acknowledge its own complicity—that a critical approach to digital literacy threatens to disrupt or lay bare.

Pockets of Change : Adaptation and Cultural Transition

Pockets of Change collects fourteen essays that address issues of cultural adaptation and transition in the Arts. Based on insights into a range of primary texts and cultural practices—from visual art to film, from literature to theatre—these essays investigate the ways in which traditions, art-forms, cultures and ethics adapt to challenge established boundaries.

Academics and the new public intellectual

In this essay, we outline an emerging form of public intellectualism in the humanities sector of Australian higher education. We argue that debates over public intellectualism and its relation to the academy in Australia have largely been focused on the tension between polemics and politics. These debates have also tended to ignore or overlook policy drivers within the sector and alternative or new media sites of public intellectualism. Shifting the focus towards policy drivers in the knowledge economy—such as knowledge transfer and third-stream funding—and understanding the nature of the university as a public sphere in itself reveals a new economy of the public intellectual as a professional knowledge worker. This new economy, we argue, may well render obsolete many of the previous debates over public intellectualism in the humanities. However, we anticipate that it will generate new debates over the relationship between the individual and the institutional, and between the concepts of public profile and public role—debates that will affect, in particular, early career academics who are the inheritors of this new economy of the public intellectual.

The politics of open-access publishing : M/C Journal, Public Intellectualism, and Academic Discourses of Legitimacy

This article investigates the discourses of academic legitimacy that surround the production, consumption, and accreditation of online scholarship. Using the web-based media and cultural studies journal (http://journal.media-culture.org.au) as a case study, it examines how online scholarly journals often position themselves as occupying a space between the academic and the popular and as having a functional advantage over print-based media in promoting a spirit of public intellectualism. The current research agenda of both government and academe prioritises academic research that is efficient, self-promoting, and relevant to the public. Yet, although the cost-effectiveness and public-intellectual focus of online scholarship speak to these research priorities, online journals such as M/C Journal have occupied, and continue to occupy, an unstable position in relation to the perceived academic legitimacy of their content. Although some online scholarly journals have achieved a limited form of recognition within a system of accreditation that still privileges print-based scholarship, I argue that this, nevertheless, points to the fact that traditional textual notions of legitimate academic work continue to pervade the research agenda of an academe that increasingly promotes flexible delivery of teaching and online research initiatives.

'A small space of chaos’ : Elizabeth Grosz’s chaos, territory, art : Deleuze and the framing of the earth

Review of Elizabeth Grosz’s Chaos, Territory, Art: Deleuze and the Framing of the Earth

The strange death and curious after-lives of the academic journal

Discussion at a session featuring a panel of editors of six leading media and communication journals. Annual conference of the Australian and New Zealand Communication Association, University of Melbourne, July 2007.

A Cyber-Physical System Simulator for risk-free transport studies

The article introduces a novel platform for conducting controlled and risk-free driving and traveling behavior studies, called Cyber-Physical System Simulator (CPSS). The key features of CPSS are: (1) simulation of multiuser immersive driving in a threedimensional (3D) virtual environment; (2) integration of traffic and communication simulators with human driving based on dedicated middleware; and (3) accessibility of multiuser driving simulator on popular software and hardware platforms. This combination of features allows us to easily collect large-scale data on interesting phenomena regarding the interaction between multiple user drivers, which is not possible with current single-user driving simulators. The core original contribution of this article is threefold: (1) we introduce a multiuser driving simulator based on DiVE, our original massively multiuser networked 3D virtual environment; (2) we introduce OpenV2X, a middleware for simulating vehicle-to-vehicle and vehicle to infrastructure communication; and (3) we present two experiments based on our CPSS platform. The first experiment investigates the “rubbernecking” phenomenon, where a platoon of four user drivers experiences an accident in the oncoming direction of traffic. Second, we report on a pilot study about the effectiveness of a Cooperative Intelligent Transport Systems advisory system.

Unintended consequences : satellite policy and Indigenous television

This article examines two instances of media policy involving satellite transmission and Indigenous television: the introduction of the Viewer Access Satellite Television (VAST) platform in 2010 and the introduction of AUSSAT in the mid-1980s. The government’s failure to provide community and Indigenous broadcasters with an access regime at the time of AUSSAT resulted in Australia’s first and only Indigenous commercial television licensee, Imparja. Over a quarter of a century later, Imparja now forms part of the joint-venture company that runs VAST, a key component of Australia’s digital switchover planning. During the passage of the legislative amendments required to establish VAST, the issue of access resurfaced – this time in relation to Australia’s national and community Indigenous television channels. The article recounts the events leading up to the 2010 Bill, and examines the intended and unintended consequences of satellite policy in relation to Indigenous media, including equalisation and transparency of government funding programs.