Contemporary Media Production Research Articles

‘Grand designs?’ Investigating the cultural and spatial logics of Channel 4’s media hub workspaces in Leeds, Bristol and Glasgow

This article explores the evolving spatiality of media production through an analysis of recent developments in UK broadcaster Channel 4’s move to a multi-site operating model. Historically, media buildings have served as landmarks of power and influence, embodying the aspirations and identities of media organisations and, as such, offer a fruitful lens for the specific exploration of the spaces of contemporary media production. Through a detailed analysis of Channel 4’s decision-making process, site selections and the significance of the chosen buildings within areas with an urban regeneration focus, the study investigates the complex interplay between media industry dynamics, regional development policies, and wider political and economic forces. Drawing on a range of academic literature and evidence from media, industry and policy reporting, the article highlights the strategic motivations behind Channel 4’s decentralisation efforts, positioned by the organisation as an effort to address diversity in terms of nations and regions representation but significantly shaped by political factors. However, it also raises critical questions about the long-term sustainability, economic viability and cultural impact of these relocation decisions. The article discusses how Channel 4’s regional media spaces and decentralisation reflect the impermanence and crisis facing Public Service Media, emphasising the shifting power dynamics within the media landscape and the need for adaptive strategies in an increasingly volatile industry environment. By examining the evolving investment in media buildings, this research contributes to a growing body of research seeking to understand the complex dynamics shaping contemporary media landscapes and urban environments.

The work of documentary relationships

Relationships between documentary-makers and their subjects are a core concern of the scholarship, typically analysed in relation to issues of power and exploitation. This article instead considers documentary relationships as a form of work, examining what it means when a job entails the production of intimate connections, which are also subject to commercial pressures and imperatives. Relationship-building is an intrinsic part of the filmmaker’s job, but takes place around its margins: often unpaid and unacknowledged by the media industries. A consequence of this lack of status and recognition is that an appropriate professional framework has yet to be developed, with worrying implications for training, regulation and duty of care. Drawing upon in-depth interviews conducted over a period of 4 years, this article conceptualises the work of documentary relationships as a practice of creative labour, by considering how they function interpersonally, procedurally and organisationally. Through a discussion of emotional labour, I will explore how the permeability between work life and intimacy impacts both filmmakers and contributors alike, considering the various ways their experiences take shape within the structural context of contemporary media production.

Konzepte singulärer und pluraler Autorschaft in Filmkritik und Filmproduktion

Abstract Debates about authorship in cinema have held a privileged position in film studies since the 1950s, when the young generation of critics of the film journal Cahiers du Cinema formulated the politique des auteurs. This critical strategy proposed that the director of a film was the major creative source of the finished work. Since this assumption contradicts the industrial and collaborative character of the film medium, the politique has been questioned, attacked and reformulated ever since its beginnings. The auteur theory was appropriated and deconstructed under the influence of structuralist and poststructuralist theories that questioned the very concepts of individual creativity and self-expression. Nevertheless, questions about authorship in cinema did not vanish but were developed in many ways. If film is regarded not only as an art form but as a commodity, the director’s name cannot only be regarded as a sign of a discernible style (a ›world view‹), but as a brand name. ›Scorsese‹, ›Tarantino‹, ›Lynch‹, ›Nolan‹ – these names imply certain images, dramatic approaches, and themes. They also serve as a label for marketing a product. Directors and producers like Steven Spielberg or Ridley Scott lend their names to a certain kind of media production (film or television series) that raises expectations associated with their work. They do not necessarily work as a director. As producers – or even only as the owners of a production company – they may function as a kind of team leader, leaving the creative work to hired teams. In television, the showrunner is the major creative and managing force in the production of a series that is scripted, shot, and directed by several production crews simultaneously. Film and media studies have sought to discern the structures of collective working from historical and contemporary perspectives. Bordwell and others have described the (Hollywood) system and its mode of production, that defined the auteurs’ work. When looking closer at ›the system‹, it becomes obvious that there are different kinds of authorship in existence. Recent production studies on the working conditions in todays’ television have sought to analyse the structures of working together and ask questions about individual agency. The growing awareness of collective authorship promotes new ways of close film analysis. The German television series Babylon Berlin here serves as an example of a major contemporary media production with multiple creative influences and explicit collective authorship. A closer look at the successful series reveals the impact of this plurality on its storytelling and form.

Gestos nostálgicos en las series de televisión brasileñas: el caso de ¡Samantha!

This paper intends to discuss the instrumentalisation of nostalgias in contemporary audiovisual products, with a focus on Brazilian television series. For this purpose, we propose a content analysis of the first season of Samantha! (Netflix, 2018-2019), with the support of television and nostalgias studies. As a result, we consider that Samantha! addresses two perspectives on nostalgic gestures: one romanticized and the other critical, thus demonstrating the possibilities of working with nostalgic gestures on contemporary media production.

THE SOCIO-TECHNICAL ENTANGLEMENTS OF LIVE STREAMING ON TWITCH.TV

The website and platform Twitch.tv is the overwhelming market leader in the live broadcast (“streaming”) of user-created videos over the internet, known primarily for the streaming of video game play. In both 2016 and 2017 over two million people regularly broadcast on the platform, resulting in over a million years of video content in total viewed by over one hundred million people (Twitch, 2017). The deep newness of this phenomenon, alongside the many elements that constitute it, make it an important site for studying digital labour, co-production, and gaming culture. In this paper we focus on three elements of the conference theme: the shifting political and creative economies of streaming media, in our case Twitch; social media, platforms, podcasts, and actors in online networks; and the materialities of data, in our case a million years of video content. Specifically, we consider the entangling of the technical and social dimensions of the Twitch phenomenon: how these elements shape the labour of Twitch streamers, audience engagement with the platform, and Twitch’s wider position in contemporary media production. To do so we draw upon semi-structured interviews with over one hundred professional streamers on the Twitch platform, lasting between ten minutes and one hour, alongside at least one hour of ethnographic observation from over two hundred Twitch channels and ethnographic work from almost a dozen gaming events in the United Kingdom, United States, Germany and Poland in the past two years.

Non-Linear Documentary and Museum Exhibition Design: Interdisciplinary Inspirations

An Internet connected, data and software driven, computerized environment dominates contemporary media production, distribution, exhibition and consumption (Murray, 16). Given the non-linear and interactive affordances of this ‘new media’, what disciplines can linear filmmakers look to, to work in this space? (Manovich, Software Takes Command 92/3) My paper interrogates the intersection of the representation of the real between documentary and museum exhibition. Museums share documentary’s claim to the representation of the real (Pearce, 12, Kidd, 121). But unlike linear documentary, museum representation takes place in a non-linear setting. I explore how museums represent the real in this spatial and nonlinear setting. Like filmmakers, those in the museum sector are also grappling with the effects on their practice of an increasingly interactive, participatory and digital media environment (Kidd, 2). This paper also interrogate how contemporary museum exhibition design includes the affordances of the digital medium into the representation of the real, and what of this theory and practice may assist in the design of non-linear and interactive documentary.

Transmedia Serial Narration: Crossroads of Media, Story, and Time

Transmedia Serial Narration: Crossroads of Media, Story, and Time

Transmedia Theory’s Author Discourse and Its Limitations

Transmedia Theory’s Author Discourse and Its Limitations

Real-time? Reframing temporal consciousness in time-based and interactive media

Abstract The experience of time and temporally extended events is a fundamental property of mind, and of time-based media arts. In dealing with properties of time, does the operational logic of contemporary media production tools cohere with philosophical views on the experience of time? This article considers a range of views on the phenomenal experience of time as they relate to the production of time-based media. Embedded within our production technologies, the artist is faced with a new philosophical instrument: the production timeline. The timeline utility in most time-based media software (and non-digital precursors) adopts the cinematic model as its operating metaphor; a series of frames, assembled one after the other in sequence. But the timeline brings new temporal complications such as reversibility, hierarchy and modifiability. The timeline also contorts time into a spatialized dimension, represented as a linear vector within the software interface. Automatic adoption of the linear timeline and the frame as the base unit of temporal thinking is problematic. J. M. E. McTaggart’s argument for the unreality of time based on contradictions within a range of possible temporal modal logics is compared with approaches to animation and editing software, and also interactive media software and their unique approach to time as potential events is considered.

The journalist’s new job: Digital technologies and the reader-less quality of contemporary news production

This ethnography of digital news-making at a newspaper in Beijing, China, develops the argument that contemporary journalists’ prevalent use of digital information technologies is contributing to the rise of a ‘reader-less’ orientation within the profession. That is, a situation in which journalists increasingly feel that they can no longer afford to be guided by a commitment to meeting the informational interests of an imagined community of readers, but must instead work to advance the representational interests and agendas of various government and corporate organizations. By showing how digital news-making arrangements put pressure on journalists to construct their profession in this manner, and discipline themselves into accepting the reduced forms of socio-political agency that such constructions entail, the essay engages with broader concerns about the media’s changing logics and functions, and suggests that ‘reader-less’ orientations may be an emergent feature of contemporary media production that future ethnographies can fruitfully attend to.

How digital remix and fan culture helped the Lego comeback

The LEGO Movie, the highest-grossing animation film of 2014, surprised and impressed children, adults, and critics worldwide. The film's transfranchisal approach and its clever merchandising helped the Lego Group become the world's biggest toymaker in the following year. In order to provide context for understanding the Lego comeback, we first address the corporate history of the Lego Group and how its product range has developed over the years. Next, we take a closer look at adult fans of Lego (AFOL), in particular a German fan club that considers Lego building to be a form of art. The final part of our paper deals with brickfilming as a cultural practice bringing together fans, the brand, Lego-building, and filmmaking. Taking The LEGO Movie and the overwhelmingly positive response to it as a starting point for cultural analysis helps to deepen our understanding of contemporary media production and resulting (trans)formations of fan phenomena. Furthermore, investigating Lego allows us to tackle some of the key rules and mechanisms underlying cultural participation and creativity today. Ultimately, the difficult past and current success of the Lego brick may attest to the often challenged yet sometimes reaffirmed status of tangible objects in a now predominantly digitally mediated era.

Re-locating media production

It was arguably easier in the past to pin down media production in medium- or content-specific locales, such as the studio, the newsroom or the set. Contemporary processes of media convergence have dramatically opened up the ‘what’ and ‘where’ of media production to include all manner of quotidian practices and ephemeral places. This special issue, however, pushes back against the idea that contemporary landscapes of media production have been flattened. Each of the articles collected here accounts for significant transformations in media practices near to those that we would conventionally associate with media production, yet which are also potentially left behind in the rush to describe, theorize, celebrate and critique trends such as ‘produsage’, ‘prosumption’ and participatory media culture. Taken together, the articles in this special issue provide new insights into the locations and relocations of contemporary media production across new and under-researched liminal and peripheral geographies, and around new and unexpected objects.

Jaz između teorije i prakse u obrazovanju novinara - studija slučaja Odseka za medijske studije u Novom Sadu

The paper considers the application of theoretical and practical skills of journalism education in the contemporary media environment. For quite some time the trend of tabloidization is shrinking the space for quality information and critical discussion about key topics of public interest, and additional problems, arising more prominently in recent years, are fake news, censorship and self-censorship. Media manipulation puts into question truthfulness and ethics of reporting, as well as the very role of a journalist as a corrective of social affairs and protector of public interest. This media situation largely undermines the approaches, thought in academic programmes, which treat journalism as a humanistic profession. Further, the development of communication technologies has brought new logics of media production and enabled distribution of content on various platforms. Following these observations and using in-depth interviews with the fifteen graduates of journalism studies at the Department of Media Studies, Faculty of Philosophy in Novi Sad, the aim of this paper is to identify graduates' attitudes based on their work experience in different Serbian media and to establish the level of applicability of journalism theory and technique gained at faculties, in the Serbian media practice. On the basis of analysis several recommendations for journalism education are formulated: programmes should clearly respond to the demands of the contemporary media production and social flows, practical education should be enhanced by rising the technical capacities of faculties and reorganizing in-house media practice, teachers should have higher professional and scientific competences, the course in media literacy should be introduced at the earlier stages of education. The gap between the theory and market practice, on which contemporary media industry is based, cannot be bridged, and the battle with technological development cannot be won, but university education must remain the basis for journalism as a humanistic profession and guardians of democracy.

Glenn Gould and the Rhetorics of Sound

Abstract Given the increased attention to working with sound in multimodal and multimedia compositions, this essay summarizes current pedagogical research and scholarly conversations and then argues for more attention to the work of Canadian pianist and recording artist Glenn Gould, who was amongst the foremost artists of his time in critically thinking about and productively expanding the possibilities of sound recording and manipulation. Gould's own voice is a key feature of many of his recordings, and his brilliant radio documentaries serve as challenging models for what contemporary compositionists might do with sound and voice in the teaching of multimodal composing. Indeed, Gould anticipated so much contemporary media production, particularly a “do-it-yourself” aesthetic, from which we can still learn. Moreover, as Gould was primarily a musician and sound artist, his insights into and practice with working with sound and voice treat both sound and voice as their own material media; they are not, for Gould, metaphors and stand-ins for textual meaning making and, as such, his work might inform a multimodal compositional pedagogy that takes seriously the particular affordances of sound and voice. Attention to such work might help us consider what can be done with sound and voice in the production of multimedia “texts” where sound and voice act beyond the textual—not just as metaphors for textual meaning making, but as materialities with their own particular rhetorical and affective affordances and dimensions.

Placing International Media Production

Studies of contemporary media production have to grapple with the empirical, methodological, and theoretical challenges of internationalization. While cultural imperialism and the new international division of cultural labor theories have highlighted important power differentials internationally, they often lack empirical depth and focus on large traditional media companies and national, particularly Western, countries. In this short essay I consider how “spatialization” and the social production of space might provide a useful theoretical approach for studying international contemporary media production practices. I illustrate my argument by contrasting findings from empirical research on the factors shaping the spatialization of the digital games and broadcast animation industries: one an emerging industry struggling to legitimate its cultural standing and build international networks of production; the other a well-established cultural industry tied into national cultural policies and networks of production. An industry focus and relational approach to space allows us to capture the dynamic tension between international flows (of ideas, products, services, workers, and money) and the practices (policy, regulation, institutions, markets, technology, and content) that attempt to capture these flows in particular places.

Meios de comunicação e religiosidade. Mediações e perspectivas midiáticas na concepção das comunicações evangélicas

Os meios de comunicação e a produção cultural evangélica constituem parte da oferta comunicativa contemporânea. Neste artigo, concentramo-nos no caso de uma emissora internacional de radiofonia evangélica, que articula uma rede de emissoras na América Latina, e exploramos as concepções das comunicações evangélicas que atravessam e configuram este espaço. A análise do discurso da emissora em seu website e em suas aulas de capacitação para comunicadores nos permitiu explorar as articulações entre religiosidade e cultura midiática. Por um lado, os modos de comunicação próprios dos cultos se diversificam a partir do uso dos meios e, por outro, se consolida a vertente comunicacional evangélica com formatos heterogêneos e expressões de inserção diversa na produção midiática contemporânea.

Database Documentary: From Authorship to Authoring in Remediated/Remixed Documentary

The engagement with documentary from its inception as a film form is frequently a set of references to documentary auteurs. The names of Flaherty, Grierson, Vertov and later Ivens, Leacock and Rouch are immediate signifiers of whole documentary film practices. These practices have given rise to histories and criticism that have dominated discussion of documentary and provided the foundation for more nuanced thinking about problems of the genre. One of the seminal texts in the field, Documentary by Erik Barnouw (1974) celebrates the auteur as the structuring principle for his historical review of documentary. It may be a reflection of the influence of this book, that so much of documentary criticism reflects the auteur approach as a starting point for analysis.
 The shift towards a new documentary format, the Database Documentary, challenges the concept of an auteur in its presentation of documentary materials. This format relies on a remediation technique that recalibrates documentary media within new distributive networks supported by the web and enhanced by converged and designed visual and sonic interfaces. The reception modalities are necessarily removed from the familiar forms of projection and presentation of documentary film and television.
 The research focus for this paper is how the concept of authorship (the “auteur”) is transformed by the emergence of the relatively new screen format of the database documentary.
 The paper reviews some of the more recent examples of Database Documentary, the contexts for their production and the literature on new conceptions of documentary knowledge that may be drawn from these examples. An analysis of the authoring program, Korsakow and the documentaries that have been made using its software will demonstrate the route documentary has travelled from authorship to authoring in contemporary media production.

How It Feels to Be Viral Me: Affective Labor and Asian American YouTube Performance

How It Feels to Be Viral Me: Affective Labor and Asian American YouTube Performance Christine Bacareza Balance (bio) On March 15, 2011, just days after University of California–Los Angeles undergraduate Alexandra Wallace posted (and subsequently took down) her incendiary “Asians in the Library” video log (vlog) on YouTube, another video set ablaze Facebook walls and Twitter accounts. Jimmy Wong’s “Ching Chong! Asians in the Library Song”—a satirical love song addressed to Wallace—distinguished itself from the hundreds of other ranting and remix response videos. Opening with an excerpt from the offending party’s original post—as she mockingly renders a scene of Asians answering their cell phones in the library with an “Ooooh, Ching Chong Ling Long Ting Tong,” Wong’s video quickly shifts into a style and staging commonly associated with online vlogs. Seated and directly addressing the camera, he is framed by his home studio’s accoutrements: computer and electronic keyboard on his left side and a row of cables neatly hanging on the wall behind him. Stuttering in a thick Asian accent and, in turn, deriding Wallace’s own orientalist rendition, a guitar-strapped Wong introduces his song into a boom microphone that hangs near his face: “Greetings, Miss Alexandra Wallace. I’m not most . . . how you say . . . politically correct person. So please . . .” (head bows quickly) “do not take offensive. Thank you.” Viewers familiar with the “Asians in the Library” video would recognize that this introduction riffs on Wallace’s own preface: while she is not the most “politically correct person,” she does have Asian friends, and hopes, in the end, that viewers do not take offense. Wong strums a single chord, signaling a magical transformation, as the video again cuts to Wong, now guitarless but seated in the same position. This new version of Wong [End Page 138] purrs into the microphone without an Asian accent or tone of deference. With his recording studio–style headphones on, his seductive vocal style recalls Asian American radio disc jockey Theo Mizuhara (“Theo” on Los Angeles R&B/hip-hop station 92.3 the Beat), often assumed to be African American by unsuspecting listeners because of his deep and soothing voice. This sexier Wong calls to Wallace—“Oooh girl”—before launching into his own rendition of her library scene: “Don’t think I didn’t see you watching me talking on my phone yesterday . . . all sexy . . . All Ching Chong Ling Long . . . Baby, it’s just code . . . It’s just the way that I tell the ladies that it’s time for me to get funky.” For Wong, “getting funky” means launching into an acoustic ode to Wallace, a remix and reclamation of words and phrases lifted from her original video post. The song culminates in a repeating chorus, one that “wrings the musicality of the original Ching Chong” bit while satirizing its incommensurability: “Ching Chong . . . It means I love you . . . Ling Long . . . I really need you . . . Ching Chong . . . I still don’t know what that means.” The song’s arrangement of vocal melody and harmony, acoustic guitar, and lo-fi percussion are simple and catchy. Yet the video’s visual elements—the main frame of Wong is surrounded by small boxes or PiPs (picture in pictures) of him performing each portion of the music—requires a professional style of multichannel editing. Here, Wong’s video evidences the unstable divisions between amateur and professional that is characteristic of the video-sharing website YouTube, ones that have helped redefine contemporary media production. Since its initial posting, “Ching Chong! Asians in the Library Song” has garnered almost 4 million hits worldwide, received coverage from both Asian American and mainstream U.S. press outlets, and landed the twenty-three-year-old actor/musician a role in an upcoming indie film. As a video that was able to spread quickly and across many screens, the “Ching Chong! Asians in the Library Song,” in all respects, was a viral hit. While its popularity must be characterized as unexpected or accidental, in order for a YouTube video to “go viral,” it must actually incorporate emotional hooks: key signifiers that catch the attention and sensibility of a particular audience. While sites like YouTube, by...

The efficacy of professional experience in the ethnographic investigation of production

ABSTRACTThis article addresses the general problem of gaining access to media production settings for ethnographic research, and discusses evidence that professional media production experience in the field of study is increasingly becoming an essential criterion in gaining access for long-term ethnographic investigations. The question of prior experience further relates closely to the classic quandary of participant observation versus ‘pure’ observation of media production. The authors explore dilemmas posed by a decrease in scholarly distance, such as the potential loss of objectivity and an increased researcher effect due to intimacy with research subjects. The article reflects on the authors’ experiences as ethnographic researchers and former practitioners and the extent to which prior professional experience facilitated or inhibited ethnographic investigation as well as on the views and comments of contemporary media production researchers informally surveyed by the authors.

Bourdieu, the media and cultural production

This article evaluates Bourdieu’s analysis of cultural production in terms of its effectiveness for understanding contemporary media production. I begin by outlining the main features of Bourdieu’s work on cultural production, with an emphasis on the potential advantages of his historical account over other, competing work. In particular, I stress the importance of his historical account of ‘autonomy’ and of the emphasis on the interconnectedness of the field of cultural production with other social fields. I then draw attention to two major problems in the work of Bourdieu and others who have adopted his ‘field theory’ for the media: first, that he offered only occasional and fragmented analyses of ‘large-scale’, ‘heteronomous’ (to use his terms) commercial media production, in spite of its enormous social and cultural importance in the contemporary world; second, that Bourdieu and his key associates provide only a very limited account of the relationships between cultural production and cultural consumption. In this latter context, I briefly discuss recent debates in cultural studies about cultural intermediaries. I refer to examples from recent media production to provide evidence for my arguments. The article argues that, as practised so far, Bourdieu’s field theory is only of limited value in analysing media production. However I close by discussing the potential fruitfulness of research based on a dialogue between, on the one hand, field theory’s analysis of cultural production and, on the other, Anglo-American media and cultural studies work on media production.