Book Review – Digital Media Law

October 25, 2011 By Leave a Comment
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Digital Media Law. Packard, Ashley (2010). Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell. pp. 352.

The Internet is a predominant “change agent” in the continually evolving communication law. Professor W. Wat Hopkins at Virginia Tech prefaced the 2011 edition of Communication and the Law: “The Internet is having an increased impact on regulation of expression, and that impact is addressed in this edition” (p. v). (Disclosure: The reviewer has contributed the “Defamation” chapter to Hopkins’s book since 1998.)  [Read more...]

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Book Review – Cultural Meaning of News

October 25, 2011 By Leave a Comment
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Cultural Meaning of News. Berkowitz, Daniel A. (ed.) (2011). A Text-Reader. Los Angeles: SAGE. pp. 408.

When reviewing a text for a course, I often stop and make sure to read the preface, prologue, or other material before the first chapter for thoughts, ideas, and motivations of authors. This allows me some insight into what will make the text work or not work, how ideas will be presented in the text, and whether or not I might ultimately adopt the text for my courses. This is the same process I followed for Daniel Berkowitz’s Cultural Meaning of News. A Text Reader. The passion and dedication found within the text will make perfect sense after reading these first few pages.  [Read more...]

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Book Review – Understanding Ethnic Media: Producers, Consumers, and Societies

October 24, 2011 By Leave a Comment
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Understanding Ethnic Media: Producers, Consumers, and Societies. Matsaganis, Matthew D., Vikki S. Katz, and Sandra J. Ball-Rokeach, (2011). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, Inc. pp. 314.

Press theory can be complex: Who does or should the press serve? What informs it? What sustains it? What goals drive it? In a classic essay published 1918, Hilaire Beloc, the Catholic apologist, described the press as capitalist in origin, evolution, and effect. Beloc wrote of “the evil of the great modern Capitalist Press, its function in vitiating and misinforming opinion and in putting power into ignoble hands.” In the same breath, he offered “its correction by the formation of small independent organs, and the probably increasing effect of these last” (p. 1).  [Read more...]

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Book Review – Global Journalism Ethics

October 24, 2011 By Leave a Comment
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Global Journalism Ethics. Ward, Stephen J.A. (2010). Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press.  pp. 296.

Ward notes that traditional journalism values and practices are being questioned due to the global nature of modern journalism and the rapid changes brought about by digital and wireless technologies. Ward concludes that journalists are struggling to maintain a “credible ethical identity as they sail the roiling sea” of the modern media world (p. 3). Ward’s bold objective is to look at journalism’s future and offer conceptual inventions to help move journalism ethics forward, with an eventual goal of converging theoretical foundations and practical proposals. Although those looking for concrete practical proposals to follow in a global setting might be disappointed that Ward doesn’t get quite that far, his impressive theoretical framework provides an excellent starting point for scholars interested in journalism ethics in a wired, globalized world. As Ward writes, the goal of the book is to supply “the basic philosophical concepts to begin the invention of a detailed and theoretically solid global [journalism] ethics” (p. 235).  [Read more...]

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Book Review – Mediactive

October 24, 2011 By Leave a Comment
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Mediactive. Gillmor, Dan (2010). Self-published under Creative Commons license. pp. 183.

Journalism is broken, and with Mediactive, Dan Gillmor aims to fix it. But he doesn’t start where you would expect—with a new financial model for the digital age.

He starts with educating the audience. After all, classic, “capital J” journalism is but a small part of the information we consume. Gillmor correctly aims more broadly, including blogs, targeted e-mails, user-generated content—the entire rabble of the web today. His goal is to help us become active users of mediated information. His principles? Be skeptical. Exercise judgment. Open your mind. Keep asking questions. Learn media techniques. In essence, the media consumer needs to think like a journalist, curate his or her own feed, and create meaning from examination of layers of linked sources. Gillmor then offers specific tools to navigate the Internet, from basic search and RSS to specific ways to evaluate the credibility of web-based information. It’s a useful primer in media literacy, especially useful to young audiences whose first instinct is to just “Google it.”  [Read more...]

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Book Review – Production Management for Television

October 19, 2011 By Leave a Comment
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Production Management for Television (2009). Mitchell, Leslie. London: Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group. pp. 115.

Journalism and communication education focus on developing student’s skills and practices, but there is a gap between classroom teaching and media operations. Leslie Mitchell, a senior teaching fellow at Stirling University and author of Freelancing for Television and Radio (2005), utilizes his vast professional experience to blend basic theories with practices and ethics.  [Read more...]

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Book Review – America’s First Network TV Censor

October 19, 2011 By Leave a Comment
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America’s First Network TV Censor (2010). Pondillo, Robert. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press. pp. 254.

Federal Communications Commission regulation of sexual and other content has been limited, confusing, and often without resolution. Against this backdrop, one may argue that self-regulation within broadcast organizations is worthy of careful examination. Robert Pondillo is an associate professor of electronic media communication at Middle Tennessee State University. As a film writer and director, he recognized the value of analyzing the papers of Stockton Helffrich, NBC’s first manager of censorship. Pondillo utilized the papers, interviews, and other primary sources to paint a picture of how early censorship developed within one organizational context.  He has interpreted this through a cultural and historical lens and argues that this period influenced future media.  [Read more...]

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Book Review – Cultural Diversity and Global Media: The Mediation of Difference

October 19, 2011 By Leave a Comment
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Cultural Diversity and Global Media: The Mediation of Difference (2010). Siapera, Eugenia Ames, Iowa: Wiley-Blackwell. pp. 222.

A thorough, complete introduction to the major theorists and theories on the complex relationship between mass media and multiculturalism couldn’t be more timely—and Eugenia Siapera provides such a textbook. This is an authoritative reference tool that posits global media as an institutional practice of representation, then sets out to explore key debates and approaches to understanding how they participate in the production and circulation of meaning. “Representation is found at the heart of mediation,” writes Siapera, so “without representation neither production nor consumption would have any meaning” (p. 111). By examining processes of media production, representation, and consumption as they engage with cultural diversity, she explains that “cultural diversity in this particular historical juncture must be seen as mediated, that is, traversing processes of the production, circulation, representation and reception/consumption of meaning that characterize late modern, technologically evolved societies” (p. 75).  [Read more...]

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Book Review – Audience Evolution: New Technologies and the Transformation of Media Audiences

October 19, 2011 By Leave a Comment
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Audience Evolution: New Technologies and the Transformation of Media Audiences. Napoli, Philip M. (2011). New York: Columbia University Press. pp. 240.

Philip M. Napoli provides a critical cultural examination of the evolution of the concept of audience, beginning with its twentieth-century definition by media theorists and media practitioners. Persons within media industries, academia, and the consumer have redefined the conceptualization of audience, given the onset of the Internet in the twenty-first century. Napoli’s ideas help to shed light on the conceptualization of “audience” for the future. Scholars of journalism, mass communication, and cultural studies (as well as business) will find useful information in Napoli’s book, which provides new entrees into understanding how socially constructed definitions of audience are changing.  [Read more...]

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Book Review – The Media Economy

October 19, 2011 By Leave a Comment
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The Media Economy. Albarran, Alan B. (2010). New York: Routledge. pp. 201.

With everyone looking for the business model that puts the economy back in media economy, books with that title raise great hope. The difficulty in writing a book about the media economy is that the ecosystem is so fluid that any attempt to describe it is in danger of becoming a history and not a model for the future.  [Read more...]

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