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Contents
Abstracts
Louise North
‘Blokey’ newsroom culture
This paper seeks to address the gap in Australian media studies and feminist media scholarship relating to the way newsroom culture is embodied. How does the numerical dominance of men in journalism, particularly in decision-making roles, affect newsroom culture? How do male and female journalists understand this inequality? The paper first briefly attends to research into occupational culture and feminist theories of the body to address the central question ‘How is newsroom culture embodied?’ It then engages with this question more thoroughly via an analysis of my own interviews with 17 Australian male and female print news media journalists. It finds that, even though women have entered the industry in unprecedented numbers, a ‘blokey’ or hegemonic masculinity continues to shape news newsroom culture.
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Brian L. Massey and Jacqui Ewart
Australian journalists and commitment to organisational change: A longitudinal study
This paper investigates the commitment of journalists to change programs, which is a previously unexplored aspect of organisational change. Studies of organisational change in newsrooms have until now focused on journalists’ attitudes to change, rather than their commitment to change. This paper draws on the findings of a longitudinal survey of Australian journalists involved in an ongoing corporate change program in order to enrich the literature and theory-building around corporate change in media organisations. The organisational science literature is used to explore whether commitment to change operates among journalists in similar ways to other types of workers. The data are drawn from three annual surveys of journalists in 14 newsrooms operated by the Australian corporation APN News & Media. The paper explores the trajectory of the journalists’ commitment to APN’s corporate-change program across more than three years of change. Although the study is limited in that it examines only one media organisation’s change program, it has implications for those researching in the field of organisational change in newsrooms — particularly at a theoretical level. It also has practical implications for those managing, planning and implementing change at the newsroom level.
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Michael Bromley and Regan Neal
Farewell old friend or bye-bye bully boy? The closure of a ‘media icon’ and challenging the ‘free press’ paradigm
The closure of The Bulletin magazine was widely reported and commented on by journalists and others in the media who sought to apportion blame for this rupture, to explain it as an aberration and to reassert the norm of the ‘free’ press and the Fourth Estate. In the past, such paradigm repair would have gone unchallenged as those in the media controlled what appeared there. With the advent of accessible digital information and communication technologies, however, members of the public are encouraged to have their say. This study compared the ways in which journalists and their sources and members of the public framed the closure of The Bulletin. In the era of dialogic mediated communications, journalists and others in the media can no longer assume that contrary voices will be silenced.
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Marc Edge
How the camel got in the tent: The Canadian assault on Australia’s foreign media ownership limits
Before 1991, Australia enforced strict limits on foreign ownership of licensed broadcasters and also limited foreign ownership of newspaper publishers. In the early 1990s, however, a pair of Canadian entrepreneurs succeeded in first raising and then circumventing those limits. Conrad Black bought 15 per cent of the Fairfax newspaper chain in 1992, and shortly before the ensuing national election lobbied to increase his stake to 25 per cent. In his 1993 autobiography, Black described backroom political dealings that resulted in a Senate inquiry. The Australian Broadcasting Authority soon began an investigation into another Canadian challenging the country’s foreign media ownership limits. Israel ‘Izzy’ Asper, a former tax lawyer, found a way to legally purchase 57.5 per cent of Network Ten in 1992 by holding 42.5 per cent in the form of non-voting debentures. The ABA absolved his CanWest Global Communications of controlling Network Ten in 1995. Non-voting shares were outlawed in 1997, but CanWest was allowed to retain its debentures. The inquiries into Canadian purchases contributed to a decade-long process of re-evaluating media ownership limits that resulted in restrictions on foreign ownership being eliminated in 2006.
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Alan McKee
Is Doctor Who Australian?
As part of an ARC Discovery project to write a history of Australian television from the point of view of audiences, I looked for Australian television fan communities. It transpired that the most productive communities exist around imported programming like the BBC’s Doctor Who. This program is an Australian television institution, and I was therefore interested in finding out whether it should be included in an audience-centred history of Australian television. Research in archives of fan materials showed that the program has been made distinctively Australian through censorship and scheduling practices. There are uniquely Australian social practices built around it. Also, its very Britishness has become part of its being — in a sense — Australian. Through all of this, there is a clear awareness that this Australian institution originates somewhere else — that for these fans Australia is always secondary, relying on other countries to produce its myths for it, no matter how much it might reshape them.
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Lisa Hill
Play School keeps it real
This article examines the television show Play School and the consistency with which it has engaged Australian children for over 40 years. Drawing on Susan Howard’s findings that relate the effects of television on children to their perceptions of reality, Play School is deconstructed to reveal the techniques used to appeal to the pre-school aged child’s own experience of what is ‘real’. Examining episodes produced 20 years apart, these strategies are seen as constants throughout the show’s history, and are further shown to accommodate a changing socio-cultural landscape and remain relevant to their young audience.
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Janet Pagan, Stuart Cunningham and Peter Higgs
Getting creative in health care
Health care accounts for a substantial and growing share of national expenditures, and Australia’s health-care system faces some unprecedented pressures. This paper examines the contribution of creative expertise and services to Australian health care. They are found to be making a range of contributions to the development and delivery of health-care goods and services, the initial training and ongoing professionalism of doctors and nurses, and the effective functioning of health-care buildings. Creative activities within health-care services are also undertaken by medical professionals and patients. Key functions that creative activities address are innovation and service delivery in information management and analysis, and making complex information comprehensible or more useful, assisting communication and reducing psycho-social and distance-mediated barriers, and improving the efficiency and effectiveness of services.
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John Sinclair and Rowan Wilken
Sleeping with the enemy: Disintermediation in internet advertising
The advent of internet advertising has changed the basis of the intermediary role which the advertising agency traditionally has occupied between advertisers and the media. This is disintermediation, or ‘cutting out the middle man’. The intrinsic and distinctive properties of the internet as a commercial medium, and its interactive character, have given rise to the phenomenon of search advertising, which diminishes the need for an advertising agency. This article outlines and analyses the challenge which Google and the other search services pose to advertising agencies, and the strategies which the global advertising industry has been taking up in response. In particular, evidence of Google’s steps towards assuming the functions of an advertising agency, and even of a traditional advertising media owner, are canvassed, and set against an account of the global agency groups’ moves into specialist digital companies, and how they are working with the search services.
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Amos Owen Thomas
Regional variations on a global theme: Formatting television for the Middle East and beyond
The issue of cultural interchange of foreign programming is growing ever more pertinent within the deregulated television industries of emergent economies and regions. Adaptation of global program formats has become a common practice around the world, though it has proven more challenging in the Middle East, in a context of variable religious conservatism, political freedoms and economic affluence. Drawing on case histories of format adaptations that have experienced differing degrees of success within the region, this paper develops inductively a typology for contingent creative strategies, namely replica, indigene, collage and hybrid. With an eye to targeting both advertisers and audiences, television networks and program producers might thus cater to diverse cultural sensibilities across sub-regional audiences when broadcasting regionally. Finally, the paper highlights under-researched issues surrounding media reproduction for geolinguistic regions.
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Jock Given
Bothering about broadband: Review essay
Ergas, Henry, Wrong Number: Resolving Australia’s Telecommunications Impasse
Fletcher, Paul, Wired Brown Land? Telstra’s Battle for Broadband
Fotheringham, Vern and Sharma, Chetan, Wireless Broadband: Conflict and Convergence
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Reviews edited by Susan Bye
In this issue:
Feature review
Albert Moran (with John Davies) responds to Terry Bolas, Screen Education: From Screen Education to Media Studies
Also in this issue
Babington, Bruce, A History of the New Zealand Fiction Feature Film
Banet-Weiser, Sarah, Chris, Cynthia and Freitas, Anthony, Cable Visions: Television Beyond Broadcasting
Bang, Henrik P. and Esmark, Anders (eds), New Publics With/out Democracy
Bell , Wendy, A Remote Possibility: The Battle for Imparja Television
Bennett, W. Lance, Lawrence, Regina G. and Livingston, Steve, When the Press Fails: Political Power and the News Media from Iraq to Katrina
Bloustien, Gerry, Peters, Margaret and Luckman, Susan (eds), Sonic Synergies: Music, Identity, Technology and Community
Burkitt, Ian, Social Selves: Theories of Self and Society
Cryle, Denis (with assistance from Christina Hunt), Murdoch’s Flagship: Twenty-five years of The Australian newspaper
Grimes, Tom, Anderson, James A. and Bergen, Lori, Media Violence and Aggression: Science and Ideology
Hall, Sandra, Tabloid Man: The Life and Times of Ezra Norton
Jones, Meredith, Skintight: An Anatomy of Cosmetic Surgery
Kim, Hyowon, Adopted Colours: Identity, Race, and the Passion for Other People’s Nationalism
Ling, Rich, New Tech, New Ties: How Mobile Communication is Reshaping Social Cohesion
Maingard, Jacqueline, South African National Cinema
Marschall, Nicolas, Methodological Pitfalls in Social Network Analysis: Why Current Methods Produce Questionable Results
Mayra, Frans, An Introduction to Game Studies
Rotman, Brian, Becoming Beside Ourselves: The Alphabet, Ghosts, and Distributed Human Being
Servaes, Jan and Lui, Shuang (eds), Moving Targets: Mapping the Paths Between Communication, Technology and Social Change in Communities
Stadler, Jane with McWilliam, Kelly, Screen Media: Analysing Film and Television
Sturken, Marita, Tourists of History: Memory, Kitsch, and Consumerism from Oklahoma City to Ground Zero
Whissel, Kristen, Picturing American Modernity: Traffic, Technology, and the Silent Cinema
Wilson, Pamela and Stewart, Michelle (eds), Global Indigenous Media: Cultures, Poetics and Politics
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