Special legislation associated with mega sporting events has enabled new forms of cultural enclosure, effectively commoditising aspects of cultural expression that previously remained in the public domain. In this article, the authors examine the tension between economic and political justifications for hosting the Olympics and the intellectual property enclosures that are imposed upon host nat…
What does open source mean for culture? For knowledge? As cultural production has come to be characterized by contribution as well as consumption and as alternative modes of intellectual property transfer challenge the ‘dominant paradigm’ that knowledge and information should be protected and monetized, the logic of ‘open sourcing’ has extended into many cultural spheres. This article positions…
The position of copyright in the arena of sports content rights and property rights of sporting organizations is a highly contested area of legal and commercial interest in the digital age. At its core is the issue of whether copyright can be incorporated into sports rights contracts as it has been for many years. This article identifies the ramifications of this debate for the existing busines…
While there is research into consumer attitudes to copyright and downloading, and the music industry has made clear its own views in evidence to the Hargreaves Review and other forums, relatively little is known about musicians’ attitudes to copyright. This article reports on those musicians who are negotiating the new terrain created by digitization and its accompanying business models. Are th…
This editorial outlines the important role that IP issues are increasingly playing across the media industries. It identifies some of the key sectors discussed in this issue of the journal and why particular media industries face specific IP challenges even in an age of converging media.
The article analyses the presence of radio in the workplace. Victor Turner’s work concerning the liminal sphere in social life provides the theoretical underpinning for examination of the specific features of radio communication in the context of the blurring boundary between work and leisure. Radio appears the medium best suited to the workplace, on one hand creating an environment conducive t…
Social media have an increasingly important place in the lives of citizens, and their potential to expand the reach of communication messages beyond individual networks is attractive to those looking to maximise message efficiency. The influence of Facebook in Obama’s 2008 campaign success galvanised many politicians into taking it seriously as a campaign tool. Our study explored the Facebook w…
Despite wide recognition in media studies, the significance of technology is often understated or overlooked in radio and sound studies. This article addresses this absence in a longitudinal study of uses by radio listeners and radio hosts of an ‘automatic telephone tape recorder’ (ATTR) in a Danish youth radio segment. The study shows that the two groups developed a range of uses for the ATTR …
This article aims at demonstrating the relevance of the concept of ‘media witnessing’ as an analytical lens for the study of audience engagement with media reports of distant suffering. Drawing upon existing theoretical work on the concept, the article approaches media witnessing as a distinct modality of audience experience and constructs an analytical framework for its study. Applying this fr…
This article examines a recent bizarre phenomenon on China’s Internet – the enormous popularity of a scatological Chinese neologism called diaosi, which literally translates as ‘dick string’. Seeing the diaosi phenomenon as a case of ‘infrapolitics’, a space of nuanced discursive practices mediating overt online politics and benign online entertainment, we analyse the ways in which an infrapoli…
This study interrogates the relationship of gender and power in the journalistic coverage of leading politicians. As an exemplar, we compare the coverage of German chancellor Angela Merkel and her (then) male counterpart, the social-democrat Frank-Walter Steinmeier. In a qualitative textual analysis of news and entertainment print media, we explain how politics is inscribed as a male field whil…
We review the research conducted to date on media events and media spectacles. We posit that the main phenomena challenging the current conceptualizations of media event and media spectacle are (1) the understanding of risk, (2) the context of disasters and (3) globalization and the mediation of news in the context of transnational and transitional societies. We suggest that more research on di…
Recent scholarship has offered a modification to audience labour theory in the context of social media, suggesting that rather than merely working by watching advertisements, social media users also produce data, which is commodified by social media companies. This article offers a further analysis of audience labour in social media using Facebook’s Sponsored Stories as a case study. Sponsored …
Health and medicine are major topics of news coverage, but research on health and medical reporting has remained mainly confined to specialist subfields, with less impact on broader academic fields, including journalism studies, than would seem warranted by its importance. This article argues that assumptions implicit in much of this literature have limited the development of a wider tradition …
Much of our knowledge of team information processing has been influenced by the hidden-profile paradigm. In this review, we employ the input–mediator–outcome (IMO) team effectiveness framework to organize a systematic and comprehensive review of the knowledge accumulated in this area during the last three decades. The use of the IMO framework highlights important aspects of team dynamics that h…
Within this article, I interrogate the mediated ‘narratives of nation’ told through the London 2012 Olympic Opening Ceremony. Such narratives are not just pedagogic, they are political and ideological processes that require us to pose questions about the place of the past in the present and with regard to who is entitled to speak that past. I suggest that the ceremony performed an ‘aesthetic of…