bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Preparing Campaigns Students for Group Work
Authors: Beard Fred
Published: March 2018

Most educators who teach the advertising campaigns course require students to work as groups. A review of cooperative learning and group dynamics literature, however, suggests that unless students are systematically prepared for group work instructional goals will be difficult to achieve. This article describes how pre-training activities in group skills can be adapted to prepare students for the demands of group work, provides a theoretical and pedagogical framework for their use, and reports the results of an assessment of the outcomes.
Acquired von Willebrand Syndrome Complicating Nephrotic Syndrome: A Case of a Patient With Membranous Nephropathy
Authors: Sugase Taro , Akimoto Tetsu , Kimura Takaaki , Yagisawa Takashi , Kusano Eiji , Nagata Daisuke
Published: March 2018

Acquired von Willebrand syndrome (AVWS) is a rare clinical entity presenting with heterogeneous hemorrhagic manifestations, although some subsets of patients with AVWS may be asymptomatic until they are exposed to major trauma, an invasive procedure, or surgery. We herein report one such case in a 73-year-old male patient with nephrotic syndrome with a prolonged active partial thromboplastin time. We initially did not deal with this distinct abnormal clotting profile seriously, but persistent bleeding after a retroperitoneoscopic-assisted renal biopsy that allowed us to ascribe his nephrotic syndrome to membranous nephropathy fortuitously led to the discovery of concurrent AVWS. We feel that an accurate and prompt diagnosis as well as awareness of the disease remain a challenge for physicians and therefore strongly recommend the further accumulation of experiences similar to our own in a prospective manner. This report underscores the pitfalls associated with determining the bleeding risk, including an insufficient assessment and improper weighting of an abnormal clotting profile prior to the invasive procedure. Several management concerns that emerged in the current case are also discussed.
‘McLuhanist’ Societal Projections and Social Theory: Some Reflections
Authors: Jones Paul
Published: March 2018

This article seeks to develop systematically several themes alluded to in my recent account of Raymond Williams' sociological critique of Marshall McLuhan. It considers some initiatives within social theory which might meet Williams' criteria for an adequate social theory of ‘the media’. The chief target is the illegitimate projection of ‘new social orders' from limited and often asocial analyses of ‘new’ social phenomena, including those related to ‘the media’. A parallel is drawn between the technological determinism from which Daniel Bell projects his post-industrial/information society thesis and the formalism of McLuhan's conception of ‘the media’. Mark Poster's mode of information thesis is found to provide an adequate critique of Bell only to reproduce the projection of McLuhan. More satisfactory alternatives are located in the recent work of John Thompson and Craig Calhoun, both of whom develop further Joshua Meyrowitz's attempted bridging of the theoretical gap between ‘medium theorists' and sociology.
Shaping Audiences Online: Principles of Audience Development for Cultural Institutions
Authors: Gillard Patricia
Published: March 2018

Audience development is an applied form of audience analysis which reveals to an organisation the nature of its different audiences. With a clearer definition of how audiences interpret and use its programs and services, an organisation can develop those programs and communication strategies which are likely to engage audiences more effectively. This usually means an expansion of the audience base, and a clearer positioning of the organisation's work.

Cultural institutions are increasingly using Websites to communicate with external audiences and incorporating new media into exhibitions onsite. The mix of communications with both onsite and online audiences challenges earlier ways of thinking about who are the audiences for cultural institutions and how they should be measured. Fundamental conceptual questions need to be answered, and an audience development strategy adopted which builds visitation across virtual and material sites.
Bribes, Gifts and Graft in Indonesian Journalism
Authors: Romano Angela
Published: March 2018

This study of the ‘envelope culture’ — in which sources offer money or other gifts to journalists — explores the complex web of social, economic and institutional conditions that perpetuate the cultures of gift-giving, bribery and graft in Indonesian journalism. The study finds that the envelope relationship may lead to exploitation of either sources or journalists and, at its extreme, has generated a nefarious criminal subculture. This paper also explores the policy responses of the Indonesian journalists' professional association and various newsrooms. Attempts to control the envelope culture often fail because anti-envelope policies are often too ambiguous, policies are rarely accompanied by pay increases sufficiently substantial to encourage behavioural change, senior journalistic role models fail to set appropriate examples and newsrooms lack systems for detecting and prosecuting offenders.
W(h)ither Media Influence?
Authors: Cunningham Stuart , Romano Angela
Published: March 2018

During 1999–2000, the Productivity Commission's inquiry into Broadcasting, together with the ABA's ‘cash for comment’ inquiry, painted the old shibboleth of media influence in a new light. Influence has been a central term in government media regulation, but the term has rarely been interrogated from first principles in the policy domain. Assumptions have been made about the greater influence of television compared with radio, in spite of ongoing controversy centring around the cash for comment inquiry that has spotlighted both the power of talkback radio kings and their potential to misuse it. Policy-makers and politicians have also been overly optimistic about the potential of new media forms to ameliorate concentration of influence in the hands of media oligopolies. After examining the complex flows of influence within and between media organisations, this paper lists several recommendations for future directions in research on the subject.
Battling the Commercialisation of the Swedish Mediasphere
Authors: Svensson Kent , Green Lelia
Published: March 2018

The regulation of national broadcasting is a forum for the official expression of a country's media priorities. Sweden has consistently attempted to prevent foreign broadcasters from establishing themselves in the Swedish mediasphere. Subsequently, wherever a non-Swedish broadcaster has demonstrated market demand for a media product not available in Sweden, the government has attempted to create a Swedish equivalent to meet public demand and prevent the loss of audience share to non-Swedish broadcasters.

This dynamic is especially clear in terms of the introduction of commercial broadcasting. Sweden was the last country in Western Europe to license a commercial television station, in 1992. This case study addresses the accommodation of the historically socialist government to the demands for commercial broadcasting, and the policy debates which informed these deliberations. It is argued that one reason for the Swedish government resisting commercial television was an opposition to the country's further integration within global capitalism, regardless of the fact that Swedish technology has helped the expansion of transnational broadcasting systems.
Notes towards a Political History of the Internet 1950–1983
Authors: Streeter Thomas
Published: March 2018

Starling from the premise that communication regulation can be made up of informal shared systems of human belief, action and habit, this paper explores the informal political belief systems that helped regulate the Internet during its gestation, before 1984. The article focuses on the odd fact that a decentralised communication system with a strikingly libertarian ethos was created within a military-oriented research and development enterprise famous for its hierarchical, authoritarian culture and organisation. Broadly, my argument is that the larger framework of Internet development was ‘corporate liberal’ — that is, based on the theory that non-profit structures are necessary for advanced forms of experimental technological innovation, but that practical implementation is then best left to the private sector. Within that larger framework, however, a shift in the cultural habits and values within the community of computer scientists between the late 1960s and the early 1980s, partly under the influence of the Viernam War-era counterculture, allowed a distinctive vision of computer communication to take hold: computer communication as a horizontal form of collaboration. This cultural shift then helps explain how a technological system born in the heart of the military–industrial complex came to embody distinctly non-military values.
Internet Regulation in Singapore: A Policy/Ing Discourse
Authors: Lee Terence , Birch David
Published: March 2018

Little has been written critically about Singapore's approach towards Internet regulation and policy/ing. This paper therefore seeks to disambiguate the social, cultural and political aspects of Internet regulation in Singapore. We provide an analysis of Singapore's Internet content regulation, and an update of the information (technology) scene in Singapore, including its converging broadcasting, (tele)communications and media areas, all of which impact upon ‘Internet policy’. We begin with an introduction to Singapore's policy-making style and an up-to-date account of Singapore's information aims and agendas. We then explore the ideology behind Singapore's Internet policy, especially censorship of content, and examine what is known as the ‘light-touch’ regulatory framework. We conclude that media conservatism is likely to continue in Singapore despite recent moves that would appear to ‘open up’ Singapore society.
New Media in the ‘New Museums’: Much Technology, Little Historiography
Authors: Hughes Patrick
Published: March 2018

New communications technologies offer museum curators opportunities to create exhibitions that are ‘open’ to diverse interpretations and are ‘democratic’ in privileging no particular interpretation. However, a fascination with the new forms of exhibition that communications technologies offer can distract us from the fact that they inevitably represent a particular view of the past. Reconsidering the collection of articles titled ‘Museums and New Media’ (Media International Australia incorporating Culture and Policy, no. 89) highlights the need to assert the primacy of historiography over the technologies of its representation.
Australian Masculinity on the Road
Authors: Butterss Philip
Published: March 2018

In an Australia where the old images of masculinity are no longer serviceable, the road provides an ideal site for films wishing to explore ways of being a man at the dawn of the twenty-first century. The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert, True Love and Chaos, Doing Time for Patsy Cline and Kiss or Kill critique or destabilise traditional models of masculinity, and use the road as a space where masculinity is free to change. However, as Pamela Robertson (1997: 271) has pointed out, the road movie is ‘a genre obsessed with home’. The closure of all four films involves establishing a new form of home, and in doing so demonstrates how difficult it is to reintegrate credibly the changes experienced on the road into a domestic unit that is fulfilling for all its members.
The Black and White Divide More like a Thin Grey Line
Authors: Ewart Jacqui
Published: March 2018

The gap between newspaper advertising and editorial sections is narrowing. Whereas once newspaper editorial departments operated semi-independently of advertising, the divisions between these areas are no longer as clear as they once were. As the boundaries between news and advertising-driven information blur, journalistic independence and news sense are subsumed in favour of the commercial imperatives that increasingly threaten to overwhelm all sections of newspapers. Metropolitan and regional journalists in Australia are experiencing what could be the beginning of the end of editorial independence. The experiences of the regional journalists interviewed for this paper provide a timely warning about the threatened end of editorial independence and the increasing commercial pressures which journalists face.
Universal Service and Telecommunications Competition
Authors: Eason Ros
Published: March 2018

In reforming the regulation of Australian telecommunications over the last decade, successive governments have stressed that traditional community service goals would not be sacrificed. One of the most critical has been the Universal Service Obligation, which aims to make basic services accessible throughout Australia. This article explores the tensions inherent in the marriage between an ostensibly egalitarian social policy and a competitive market model, and criticises the increasing politicisation of decisions about universal service. It examines the treatment of universal service in the report of the National Bandwidth Inquiry, which, the author argues, implies an unravelling of the national project represented by the current universal service regime. She questions the extent to which Australians are likely to tolerate such an outcome.
Global Media Events and the Positioning of Presence
Authors: Rowe David
Published: March 2018

This article engages with the ‘canonical’ work of Daniel Dayan and Elihu Katz (1992) in reexamining aspects of the phenomenology of the media event, especially those of a global sporting nature. It considers a range of questions of ‘gain’ and ‘loss' in ‘being there’, and of television-inspired changes to the experience of in-person attendance. Innovations in the viewing possibilities at global media events are considered in relation to forms of sociality during competitions such as the Olympic Games and the soccer World Cup. The discussion also notes the existence of significant variations in the ‘script forms' of apparently similar media event types. Finally, it identifies interacting areas of focus important for an effective analysis of the dialectics of remote and proximate experience of global media events like the recent Sydney 2000 Olympic Games.
ABC Online: A Prehistory
Authors: Burns Maureen
Published: March 2018

This article analyses how ABC Online's early history might be used for thinking about future directions. While this history is contingent, it nevertheless leaves traces in the current structure which will affect decision-making about the future of ABC Online. There is no doubt that ABC Online is valuable. The question is how to exploit that value.
Conceptualising the Virtual and the Posthuman
Authors: Pappas Vanessa
Published: March 2018

This article aims to explore the relations between technology and the subject. With new media intensifying the provisionality of discursive structures and in turn embodied experiences, questions pertaining to virtuality have become vital, particularly since Western society's increasing reliance on technologies now permeates our everyday practices. While many theorists often resort to a reification of the subject when conceptualising the posthuman condition, this analysis will recover the notion of embodiment in order to avoid such technological determinism.

Tracing this complexity in contemporary texts can be achieved through various means. Here, the focus will remain on how narrative frameworks can create new possibilities for understanding and interpreting shifting subjectivities in the digital age. To explore this, I shall provide an analysis of a contemporary film, Being John Malkovich, which has been chosen due to its unexpected success at the box office, indicating how finely attuned the film is to contemporary concerns.
Notes on Culture Jamming
Authors: Cox David
Published: March 2018

Arguably, the media today represent the central means by which global power is mediated. The rise of global networks has consolidated the reach of corporate power such that it now rivals — and probably surpasses — that of government. People are finding innovative and alternative ways to communicate using the very means the corporate sector itself uses, to different ends. This is the world of the culture jammer, who turns the message back on the sender, the better to expose the unequal power relations at work in what Guy Debord called ‘The Society of the Spectacle’.
Packing an Unfair Advantage? Internet Culture and Commercial Television
Authors: Baumgartner Caspar
Published: March 2018

An examination of the strategies of Packer's PBL, owner of Channel Nine and the Internet portal ninemsn, suggests that the commercial agenda of the mass media — and the quest for audiences — has translated into an attempt to control access gateways to the Internet. Strategic alliances with MSN and partners who can provide transaction-driven services, such as Ticketek and Schwab, are core elements to ‘channel’ users through the ninemsn portal. Its exemplary use of interactive capabilities to establish lasting links to Web users reflects a changing notion of audiences as active, globally connected consumers. The dialogue which unfolds between the technological environment of the Internet and the existing culture of the television industry will impact on future digital cultures and upon regulatory responses.
Today's News Tomorrow: Researching Archival Television
Authors: Alysen Barbara
Published: March 2018

Television may be the most pervasive medium of mass communication but, unlike the print media, Australian television news and current affairs have largely defied the efforts of researchers to mount comprehensive retrospective research into their form and content. This paper looks at the reasons for the dearth of this research. It considers the technical and the policy issues involved in preserving Australian television and argues that media researchers need to take a greater interest in the preservation of, and access to, archival television.
Personal Reflections
Authors: Jones Margaret
Published: March 2018

Margaret Jones, a former foreign editor and literary editor of the Sydney Morning Herald. writes about her early years in journalism and her experiences as a foreign correspondent in Europe, North America and China.
Review Essay — Journalism: Print, Politics and Popular Culture
Authors: McGregor Craig
Published: March 2018

Craig McGregor reviews Ann Curthoys' and Julianne Schultz's edited collection, Journalism: Print, Politics and Popular Culture, and reflects more broadly on the role of ideas in journalism and on his own career as a public intellectual.
A Newsroom of Our Own? Community Radio and News
Authors: van Vuuren Kitty
Published: March 2018

Current media policy regarding rural and regional community broadcasting favours a competitive environment, which constrains the potential for community radio to meet its founding principles. These include the provision of alternative programming and the development of a new relationship between broadcasters and their audiences. Part of the problem stems from widespread adoption of dominant media codes and practices. A reorientation towards development journalism could offer a way forward, both in terms of facilitating community development and in terms of developing a true ‘community’ perspective for community radio news.
Mobile Telephony in Rural Australia: Is it a Natural Monopoly?
Authors: Crase Lin , Patullock Evan , Lamb Peter , Dollery Brian
Published: March 2018

Considerable debate surrounds the provision of mobile telephony to remote and rural Australians. Disquiet about the closure of the analogue network, controversy over its replacement and recognition of potential rural competitiveness from digital technologies are all significant aspects of this debate. Within the discussion surrounding regional and rural development, there is a growing concern over the standard of mobile telecommunications infrastructure in non-metropolitan Australia. Of particular interest are the mechanisms by which infrastructure is provided. More specifically, there appears to be a need for public subsidies for mobile networks since demand may be insufficient to stimulate provision through normal market processes.

This paper explores these arguments by drawing on data from the Upper Murray region of New South Wales and Victoria. Empirical results indicate a significant current expenditure by present mobile telephony users and a preparedness to increase this expenditure under an improved service scenario. There is also evidence of relative price inelasticity. This evidence is used to question the conventional wisdom of providing public funds to telecommunications firms to encourage extension of the mobile network to all rural communities.
What's the Big Idea? Production, Consumption and Internet Regulatory Discourse
Authors: Young Sherman
Published: March 2018

The internet is most often described in technical terms — as a combination of network protocols, infrastructure and access devices. However, rather than reduce the internet to a technical specification, it is more useful to understand it as an assemblage of technology, people and ideas. The dominant idea informing the internet has been one of openness —embracing a desire for freedom of information and the cultural potential of new communicative possibilities. This ‘meme’ of freedom is predicated on expanded notions of consumption, production and distribution of information, Internet technologies open up a space of possibility that allows for innovative options for information creation and dissemination. This article considers the possibilities of consumption and production that the internet has so far allowed, and suggests that the imposition of new limitations on those activities is indicative of a reconfiguration of the dominant idea of the internet — a reconfiguration that is currently being contested, but one that threatens its ultimate shape.

Some suggest — deterministically — that the internet is a technology of freedom, and that openness is embedded in its design. I argue that, far from being intrinsic to the technology. the ‘idea’ of openness is merely one of several competing ideas which might define the internet. Recent constraints on internet consumption and production are evidence that a less open network is not merely possible, but central to the more recent imaginings of government and corporate actors.
Regulating for Content on the Internet: Meeting Cultural and Social Objectives for Broadband
Authors: Goggin Gerard , Griff Catherine
Published: March 2018

Much of the present debate about content on the internet revolves around how to control the distribution of different sorts of harmful or undesirable material. Yet there are considerable issues about whether sufficient sorts of desired cultural content will be available, such as ‘national’, ‘Australian’ content. In traditional broadcasting, regulation has been devised to encourage or mandate different types of content, where it is believed that the market will not do so by itself. At present, such regulatory arrangements are under threat in television, as the Productivity Commission Broadcasting Inquiry final report has noted. But what of the future for certain types of content on the internet? Do we need specific regulation and policy to promote the availability of content on the internet? Or is such a project simply irrelevant in the context of gradual but inexorable media convergence? Is regulating for content just as quixotic and fraught with peril as regulating of content from a censorship perspective often appears to be? In this article, we consider the case of Australian content for broadband technologies, especially in relation to film and video, and make some preliminary observations on the promotion and regulation of internet content.
The Politics of Internet Policy and (Auto-)Regulation in Singapore
Authors: Lee Terence
Published: March 2018

As an extension of my earlier work on ‘Internet Regulation in Singapore’ (Lee and Birch, 2000), this paper provides an update on Singapore's relentless drive towards new media regulation and ideological/political control. Taking on board the discourse of auto-regulation — that regulating the internet in Singapore is really about ensuring an ‘automatic functioning of power’ for the sake of political expedience and longevity — this paper offers some new insights into the politics of internet auto-regulation in Singapore, from its humble beginnings of censorship and ‘sleaze’ control (in the mid-1990s) to recent attempts at restricting free flows of information via new laws governing foreign broadcasters and the ‘liberal’ stifling of online political campaigning and debates (in 2001). I conclude that, despite its authoritarian leanings, the ‘success' of Singapore's internet and cultural policy of auto-regulation gives it the potential to become the global-accepted regulatory mindset.
Creative Industries and Cultural Development — Still a Janus Face?
Authors: Gibson Lisanne
Published: March 2018

Since the 1970s, it has been possible to discuss cultural policy in terms of the discourses ‘art as industry’ and ‘cultural rights' (for a discussion of this history, see Gibson, 2001). ‘Creative industries' is the policy ‘buzz term’ of the moment. The ways in which the terms ‘creative industries' and ‘cultural rights' are understood in contemporary cultural policy encapsulate the ways in which the economic and humanistic benefits of creative practice have been articulated as existing in competition. I argue that it is counterproductive to understand these discourses as mutually exclusive. Are these discursive constructions — art as profit versus art as identity — constitutively oppositional? To pose this same question using the terms which frame contemporary policy debate, how do we negotiate between the (seemingly) competing logics of the creative industries and cultural development policy discourses?
The other Road to Media Citizenship
Authors: Rennie Elinor
Published: March 2018

‘Citizens’ media’ is a deliberate attempt to move beyond existing approaches to community and alternative media. This paper navigates its way through the citizens' media debate (via the articles presented in this issue), looking towards the new possibilities for community media policy arising from this shift.
The Middle Years of Radio 4EB: Acting Locally, Thinking Nationally
Authors: Davies Chris Lawe
Published: March 2018

Ethnic public radio station 4EB started life as a local political response to an urgent social problem: giving migrant communities minimal recognition of their heartland biographies — nearly 20 years late for some of them. Within five years, the station's enigmatic but steely president. Tony Manicaros, had taken the same project into the national arena. Tony and the station which had enabled his conviction of the importance of ethnic radio to Australian national identity, and therefore federal government policy, dominated the important middle years of the station, with Tony becoming an important lobbyist and instigator of reforms in federal communications policy.
Factual Hybridity: Games, Documentary and Simulated Spaces
Authors: Flynn Bernadette
Published: March 2018

Documentary theorist John Corner's suggestion that we might be moving into a post-documentary period echoes concerns raised earlier by Brian Winston that the documentary is facing some type of crisis. This paper argues that this is only the case if one ignores a broader notion of media hybridity that takes into account directions offered by new technologies and aesthetic regimes. This paper proposes that, rather than signalling an unravelling of documentary's purpose, emerging forms of factuality point towards more localised forms of communication that have been effaced in ‘discourse of sobriety’ with their distrust of the popular. Using examples from reality TV (Big Brother) and a simulation computer game (The Sims), I suggest that these multi-platform ‘gamedocs' relate to older and often ignored histories of representing the real. These histories connect to the lineage of George Méliès' actuality projects and the scientific and morality loops found in the mutoscope and entertainment diorama. Aspects of play and actuality remerge in the contemporary forms of Big Brother and The Sims which trade on documentary's cultural cache as the site of the real whilst simultaneously adopting a self-conscious, sometimes critical relationship to the authentic seeming. In so doing, they construct a type of docobricolage in which narrative and representation become subservient to navigable geography, mastery of the game environment and the pleasures of gameplay itself.
Documentary Comedy
Authors: Middleton Jason
Published: March 2018

While documentaries like Roger and Me and mock documentaries such as This is Spinal Tap differ in terms of the ontological status of their referents, they share many formal characteristics, particularly in their editing strategies. This essay examines the editing techniques in these two influential films of the 1980s in order to theorise exactly how film-makers combine conventions of documentary with those of comedy in an attempt to produce laughter in audiences. Having demonstrated the formal qualities of an editing technique prevalent in these films which I term ‘cutting on the absurd’, the essay then explores the broader implications of this comic style in more recent documentary film-making. With a particular focus on Chris Smith and Sarah Price's American Movie (1999), it examines how the editing strategies in documentary films characterised as ‘offbeat character studies' alternately position viewers to laugh at and laugh with the subjects, to occupy a position that can be at once derisory and empathetic.
Televisi Bangsa Baru: Television, Reformasi and Renewal in Indonesia
Authors: Kitley Philip
Published: March 2018

For nearly 30 years, television in Indonesia was dominated by the state broadcaster TVRI and five commercial channels with very close links to former President Soeharto. In the reform period since Soeharto's resignation, there has been a new sense of public and publicness, an expansion of the public sphere and the break-up and re-imagination of the Indonesian audience. These developments have been led by media sector insiders. This paper argues that, despite the progressive work of new licensees and civil society media groups, it is media sector outsiders which are needed to lead television in Indonesia out from under the totalising, essentialist models of the past to establish televisi bangsa baru — television for a new nation.
Ratings in Transition: Industry Implications
Authors: O'Regan Tom , Garland Ian , Muir Ian , Chard Robert , Thomas Abigail , Hartley John
Published: March 2018

This seminar discusses the implications for the industry of changes in the provision of ratings services in the metropolitan television markets in Australia. It brings together key players from the ratings companies, media planners and buyers, public broadcasters and leading academics. A particular focus of the seminar was the different results emerging from the ACNielsen and OzTAM people meter panels in the first half of 2001. This discussion illuminates the complex relationship among audience measurement industries, television companies, and media planners and buyers, and foreshadows the challenges facing audience measurement in new media environments.
Afterword: Developments in New Media Audience Research
Authors: Thomas Abigail , Phillips Gail
Published: March 2018

Abigail Thomas, Research Manager, ABC New Media, reflects on developments in new media audience research since the 2001 Ratings in Transition seminar. Abigail Thomas was interviewed by Gail Phillips.
The Future of Television Audience Measurement: Nielsen Media Research's View
Authors: Garland Ian
Published: March 2018

Changing television delivery technology has presented huge challenges to the industry charged with tracking audience usage. Niche programming and personal recording technologies are making the concept of mass audiences increasingly problematic. This raises questions about how to capture exactly what the illusive viewer is doing in a way that is relevant to media buyers, advertisers and media companies. In this paper. Ian Garland reports on how Nielsen Media Research is tackling the problem.
Programming in a PPM World: Arbitron's View
Authors: Rogerson David , McVay Mike
Published: March 2018

The initial results coming out of the Arbitron portable people meter (PPM) tests suggest the current approach and thinking applied to radio station programming may have to undergo a thorough review in the future. The data from pilot surveys are revealing listening patterns which differ considerably from those recorded using the traditional diary system. There are indications that the audience tunes in to more services but for less time, and that listening is far more evenly spread around each quarter-hour than previously assumed. In this paper, David Rogerson, Managing Director of Strategic Media Solutions, and Mike McVay, President of the US-based company McVay Media, present some of the key data to emerge from work already done by Arbitron and discuss the implications for radio programmers.
If Media Planning and Buying Hadn't Existed, Would We Have Invented it This Way?
Authors: Green Lelia , Trevaskis Martin
Published: March 2018

This paper argues that the profession of media planning and buying is subject to a variety of forces that operate together to create an over-reliance on ratings and circulation data. Such a dynamic suits the needs of mainstream media proprietors and offers advertisers a sense of confidence since they are dealing with established quantitative indicators. The status quo in media planning and buying is increasingly problematic, however, in the face of changes in the mediasphere and in audience consumption practices. What is more, advertisers are hungry for a qualitative dimension which is often missing from raw quantitative figures. New and alternative media offer a way through the impasse into the future, but lack the credibility offered by ratings data. Courage will be required from advertisers and their media planner/buyers to break these constraints and make optimum use of emerging, niche and community media.
Beyond Exposure: Interactive Television and the New Media Currency
Authors: Balnaves Mark , Varan Duane
Published: March 2018

Significant effort in advertising is directed towards maximising exposure — to ensure that, for example, a broadcast audience is exposed to an optimum number of messages in a media planning schedule. ‘Interactivity’ as it is emerging, however, has a dramatic effect on traditional assumptions about frequency and reach (how many times the message is repeated and how extensively it is received). Interactivity potentially shifts choice back to the audience, allowing a ‘bypassing’ of attempts to repeat messages. Audiences, given the choice, simply will avoid advertisements that are designed primarily for exposure. Audiences in an environment where they can personalise and customise a medium according to their preferences — and indeed become ‘producers' of content themselves — will be looking for content that is designed for elaboration, rather than only repetition. There is a background to this emerging trend and it is explored in this paper.
Acts of War: Military Metaphors in Representations of Lebanese Youth Gangs
Authors: Noble Greg , Poynting Scott
Published: March 2018

The media representations of the terrorist attacks of September 11 in the United States and their aftermath bear strong similarities to the media coverage of ‘Lebanese youth gangs' over the last few years — both rely significantly on the metaphor of war. This paper explores two media narratives about Lebanese youth gangs which draw on this metaphor — the first deploys a simple us/them structure which, like the dominant Western reportage of the terrorist crisis, turns on a form of moral reduction in which the forces of good and evil are relatively clear. The accumulated imagery of Lebanese gangs, drugs, crime, violence and ‘ethnic gang rape’ articulates a dangerous otherness of those of Arabic-speaking background — echoed in the coverage of the terrorist ‘attack on America'. This simple narrative, however, gives way to a second, emerging narrative about Lebanese youth gangs which also relies on the metaphor of war but acknowledges the moral duplicity of both ‘combatants' — registering the culpability of the state and its police service but distancing ‘the ordinary Australian ‘from this culpability. The second narrative, like the first, tries to recuperate a moral innocence for the ‘ordinary Australian’, but in doing so underlines a crisis in Australian multiculturalism.
Commissioning Difference? The Case of SBS Independent and Documentary
Authors: Smaill Belinda
Published: March 2018

SBS Independent (SBSI) is the arm of SBS Television responsible for commissioning new work. Since 1994, SBSI has been working in conjunction with other screen funding bodies to commission feature film, short drama, animation and documentary. The charter that dictates the practices of SBS Television also provides guidelines for SBSI, which is consequently required to focus on work that is innovative and concerned with Indigenous issues and cultural diversity. This article focuses on the case of documentary in Australia and the impact of SBSI on a filmmaking community and contemporary documentary culture with particular reference to the Australia by Numbers and Hybrid Life series of half-hour programs. The focus on diversity, and the fact that this is the first Australian television institution to adopt an outsourcing model for almost all production, means that SBSI has formed a unique relationship with independent documentary. Here I examine the specificity and efficacy of this relationship.
Magazine Features and Infotainment Values
Authors: Bonner Frances , McKay Susan
Published: March 2018

The determinants which privilege selection of articles for mass market women's magazines have been little investigated. Conventionally, the articles are seen to convey information didactically in the service sections and entertain through the feature stories. Many feature stories combine information and human interest to produce a hybrid form of article. This paper appropriates the term ‘infotainment’ to describe them. It draws on health articles to develop an argument about infotainment values as they operate in mass market Australian magazines, identifying nine determining characteristics and suggesting that they can be found more widely.
In Search of the ‘Mysterious’ Australian Male: Editorial Practices in Men's Lifestyle Magazines
Authors: Mikosza Janine
Published: March 2018

The men's lifestyle magazines FHM (For Him Magazine) and Ralph are a significant presence in the Australian market, and both target a specific readership of young, heterosexual men. My central research question concerns how desired audiences are constructed or imagined at the ‘front end’ of magazine production. One of the major tasks of the editors and publishers of these magazines is to access, and compete for, an audience. This paper aims to examine the contradictions apparent in the editorial practices of defining or envisioning an audience for Ralph and FHM. To understand the process of how they produce the magazines, I examine the editorial staffs' conceptions of the ‘audience’; the ways in which it is created and for what purposes, as well as the terms used to describe this integral part of the industry. How the audience is defined and constructed highlights how contradictions, creativity and constraint operate in defining the audience.
Promoting Healthier Journalism
Authors: Sweet Melissa
Published: March 2018

The media are often not rigorous in their coverage of health and medical issues, and have a tendency towards uncritical amplification of the claims of researchers, doctors and others, including commercial interests. Many journalists are not skilled at evaluating studies and research claims, and news values tend to be driven by factors other than the validity of research evidence. Media coverage of medicines tends to be overly promotional, highlighting the positives and often failing to mention the negatives. Media and public relations activities are a high priority in pharmaceutical industry marketing strategies. Tactics include: using medical opinion leaders and experts to raise awareness of diseases or treatments; generation of ‘new’ medical conditions to expand product markets; sponsorship of conferences; and even funding of journalism prizes. Critical reporting of health, medical and scientific issues could be promoted through appropriate education and workplace training.
Home Grown: The Strange and Savage Times of the Australasian Weed
Authors: Stockwell Steve
Published: March 2018

The 1970s newspaper Australasian Weed remains a remarkable chronicle of a very different time when a flourishing counter-culture created the space for a regular pro-drug publication at the edge of legality. Content analysis of the Weed and associated publications reveals an expected preoccupation with legalisation campaigns, instructional material and zany antics but a more surprising interest in detailed investigations of the legal process, the history and literature of drugs and health and safety issues. While influenced by the US underground press and drug writers like Hunter S. Thompson, the Weed was nevertheless in the Australian tradition of larrikin, alternative press with a crusading agenda and a confrontational approach to authority. The Weed's stormy career and eventual demise point clearly to the limits of a free press in Australia and raise questions about the efficacy of government drug education programs.
The Tabloid, the Dance Party and the Premier: The Policy Legacy of Anna Wood
Authors: Homan Shane
Published: March 2018

This paper reviews one of the nation's most intense recent contemporary moral panics, the media and public concern about ecstasy use at dance parties that raged immediately after the death of Sydney schoolgirl Anna Wood in 1995. The reportage of one Sydney tabloid, The Daily Telegraph Mirror, is assessed for the roles it played in producing this panic: first, its visible and self-proclaimed task in setting the key terms of debate about ecstasy consumption and dance parties; and second, in influencing the policy responses of the stale government at the time. The ongoing legacy of the moral panic engendered by Anna Wood's death is evident in the ways that media and government articulate discourses of ‘risk’ in relation to young people's ecstasy consumption when compared with the contexts and uses of alcohol. Further, the paper reveals how these different discourses have produced clearly iniquitous policing strategies in relation to Sydney dance clubs and hotels.
Representations of Public Risk: Illegal Drugs in the Australian Press
Authors: Blood R. Warwick , Williams Jordan , McCallum Kerry
Published: March 2018

The paper draws upon recent research investigating news frames, and risk theory to analyse Australian national news coverage of illegal drugs. Recent research has elaborated how risks are socially defined and acted upon, especially given changing media representations of risks. Public understandings of the risks associated with illegal drug use, policing and policies develop through the continuing and often changing representations of these risks in the media, as well as through other social practices. This paper questions the role of some prominent newspapers in setting alarmist and sensational frames to define risk in this context, and demonstrates how journalism can heighten community fear.
The House, the Senate and the Media Ownership Bill: An ‘Unacceptable Three-Way Control Situation’?
Authors: Wilding Derek
Published: March 2018

Over the past year media ownership and control have been at the forefront of media policy debates in the United States and the United Kingdom. In Australia, the Media Ownership Bill was debated — and defeated in the Senate — in the last week of June. The Bill seeks to remove many of the regulations on ownership and control in the Australian media. It is expected to return to the Senate later this year and has been lipped as one of the handful of triggers for a double dissolution. In this article Derek Wilding provides an outline of the Bill following a number of recent amendments, as well as the key policy issues and points of contention in this long-running debate on diversity, convergence and media influence.
Recalibrating Policies for Localism in Australia's Commercially Networked Tv Industry
Authors: Dwyer Tim
Published: March 2018

This article considers the emergence of policies for localism within the Australian commercially networked TV industry. By historically reflecting on the construction of equalisation policies of the late 1980s, their trajectory is traced through to the ABA's regional TV news inquiry in 2001–2002. Against a background of late twentieth century international trends to deregulation, the reregulation of Australian regional TV is linked with a discussion of possible alternative rules for content distribution. The origins of localism in US commercial TV and comparable recent US developments in TV news are reviewed. It is questioned whether the intended beneficiaries of the equalisation policy — under-served rural and regional TV audience — have in fact had their promise of increased television choices compromised, with the winding back of the key genre of local news programs in some areas. It is further argued that broader contextual data — for example, information arising from economic and social policy research in rural and regional Australia — could appropriately inform the development of localism policies for the longer term.
Doing Game Studies: A Multi-Method Approach to the Study of Textuality, Interactivity and Narrative Space
Authors: Carr Diane , Schott Gareth , Burn Andrew , Buckingham David
Published: March 2018

The emergence of game studies is provoking a struggle between adapted older disciplines in the effort to forge a new, discrete field of study. This paper reports on a two-year project titled Textuality in Video Games1 and the range of research techniques that were employed in order to begin answering questions about role-play, pleasure, agency and narrative. The paper outlines how narratology and film theory, social psychology and social semiotics were deployed separately and in various combinations to analyse computer role-play games, the interaction between player and text, and the cultural work of player and fan communities.
Games as Inhabited Spaces
Authors: Flynn Bernadette
Published: March 2018

This paper introduces questions about how space might be considered in studying computer games. It argues that established concepts of media aesthetics and narrative are no longer adequate for understanding the inhabited spaces of the computer screen. First, it considers a communications ‘post-narrative spatialisation’ as a foundation for game play. Second, it reads the work of social space theorists Lefebvre, Massey and De Certeau into a discussion of how the navigation of space is a cultural act. Third, building on the evidence of role-playing games and Merleau Ponty's notion of embodiment, the paper suggests that gameplay is a form of spatial practice that is grounded in the player's lived-in bodily experience and subjective viewpoint.