aejmc quarterly — AEJMC Hot Topics

Book Review – Fashioning Teenagers: A Cultural History of Seventeen Magazine

Fashioning Teenagers: A Cultural History of Seventeen Magazine. Kelley Massoni. Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press, 2010. 256 pp.

Walk into any shopping mall and you’ll see a variety of stores peddling merchandise aimed at teenagers—clothing, jewelry, music, etc. Although this focus on teen consumers might seem like the recent brainchild of a savvy marketing guru, its roots can actually be traced to a magazine.

When Seventeen made its debut in 1944, it was the first publication to recognize the potential of the teenage population, specifically, teenage girls. The magazine was initially created to provide information to teen readers who, up to that point, had no such written material produced specifically for them. The promotion of the magazine ultimately prompted an awareness of this population on the part of marketers and merchandisers, which led to the creation of an industry catering to their retail needs. [Read more...]

Book Review – Explaining News

Explaining News. Cristina Archetti. New York, NY: Palgrave/Macmillan, 2010. 257 pp.

Cristina Archetti is a British political scientist with teaching experience in Washington and Amsterdam and an interest in international news. Explaining News is her ambitious study of eight newspapers in four countries that explores what shapes the news. The book, based on her Ph.D. thesis at the University of Leeds, is a tough read. It is clearly written, but densely packed with data, hypotheses, and theories. Advanced graduate students and faculty can perhaps fully appreciate it, especially for its wealth of data. [Read more...]

Book Review – Envisioning Media Power: On Capital and Geographies of Television

Envisioning Media Power: On Capital and Geographies of Television. Brett Christophers. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield/Lexington Books, 2009. 467 pp.

In a sometimes quite complex book, Brett Christophers develops an original geographical perspective on the nature and exercise of power in the international television economy, essentially a study of programming trade.

He applies theories of political economy as the basis for a comparative empirical examination of the television markets in both Britain and New Zealand, while considering those markets’ respective relationships with the far larger American market and its globally influential media corporations. That power is often expressed in terms of money accumulation is made clear. Sharing a common (well, largely common) language across the three nations makes for ready comparisons. [Read more...]

Book Review – Convergence Media History

Convergence Media History. Janet Staiger and Sabine Hake, eds. New York, NY: Routledge, 2009. 211 pp. $125 hbk. $34.95 pbk.

Drawing on papers from a conference held at the University of Texas-Austin, where both editors teach communication and culture, the eighteen papers included in this anthology explore a variety of kinds of convergence—not simply the digital kind we are living with today.

Many of them raise provocative ideas, some from media studied before, but not with modern concepts. Most of the papers utilize motion pictures as the means and medium of study.

The papers appear in four sections. “New Methods” reviews such things as franchise histories as a study of the “negotiated process of expansion,” the study of the leftists in Hollywood from both theory and political economy approaches, the many factors once used to sell cigarettes on television, and exploring the inter-medial borders of media history. [Read more...]

Book Review – Can Journalism Be Saved? Rediscovering America’s Appetite for News

Can Journalism Be Saved? Rediscovering America’s Appetite for News. Rachel Davis Mersey. New York, NY: Praeger, 2010. 167 pp.

There is a considerable and growing body of literature about the future of journalism. Most of it paints a bleak picture, for a variety of reasons. Audiences appear to be shrinking for both print and broadcast news. Resources are being reduced—nationally, daily newspaper newsrooms have been cut by nearly 25% during the past ten years. Many mainstream news organizations are losing money on their legacy operations, and they have yet to figure out or embrace alternative business models that could lead to profitability online. The problem is the result of two major simultaneous changes in the business environment of news organizations—emergence of digital technologies and the increased diversity of communities. [Read more...]

Book Review – Bring on the Books for Everybody: How Literary Culture Became Popular Culture

Bring on the Books for Everybody: How Literary Culture Became Popular Culture. Jim Collins. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010. 288 pp.

During the last two decades, the popularity of books has grown exponentially. According to Bowker, book production through traditional avenues in the United States alone has grown from just over 100,000 titles in 1993 to nearly 300,000 in 2008, and the number of fiction titles has more than doubled. This does not account for the more than 750,000 self-published and print-on-demand books published in 2009 alone. In a nutshell, books are big business. In Bring on the Books for Everybody: How Literary Culture Became Popular Culture, Jim Collins, professor of film and television and English at the University of Notre Dame, explores the impact of the convergence of literary, visual, and material cultures on the book publishing industry. [Read more...]

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

Audience Evolution: New Technologies and the Transformation of Media Audiences. Philip M. Napoli. New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 2010. 272 pp.

Philip Napoli’s new book, Audience Evolution: New Technologies and the Transformation of Media Audiences, is a good combination of a critical approach to audience measurement as well as a thorough review of the development of audience information systems. His key argument is that technologies foster the collection and compilation of audience information beyond the traditional exposure model, and allow new dimensions of audience information be incorporated into business use. [Read more...]

Book Review – Alarming Reports: Communicating Conflict in the Daily News

Alarming Reports: Communicating Conflict in the Daily News. Andrew Arno. New York, NY: Berghahnbooks, 2009. 216 pp.

Based on an unusual anthropological approach, Alarming Reports offers sharp insights into the dynamics of the news as it moves through complex social systems. The first published monograph in the University of Hawaii’s new Anthropology of Media series, Andrew Arno’s work contributes to a new media anthropology. The book thus is part of advancing the theory of media and communication studies in ways that dovetail with cultural activism (e.g., Ginsburg, 2008), transnational media (e.g., Mankekar, 2008), and so forth. However, Arno goes beyond these methods by deploying an anthropological approach to news as a special speech genre. Alarming Reports is thus refreshingly original, and deserves the special attention of media and communications scholars. [Read more...]

Book Review[s] – Pen and Sword & Evaluation and Stance in War News

Pen and Sword: American War Correspondents, 1898-1975. Mary S. Mander. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2010. 188 pp.

Evaluation and Stance in War News: A Linguistic Analysis of American, British, and Italian Television Reporting of the 2003 Iraqi War. Louann Haarman and Linda Lombardo, eds. London: Continuum International Publishing Group, 2009. 256 pp.

Both these books concern an increasingly vexing contemporary issue: the role of a free press during wartime. They use cultural history and analysis to examine the subject, and this approach will be frustrating to some journalists or historians seeking a treatment that might tell the story of the challenge of war reporting or shed light on its chronological development. Nor are the authors firsthand witnesses, having neither worked as journalists nor served in the military. [Read more...]

Book Review – When News Was New

When News Was New. Terhi Rantanen. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009. 154 pp.

The clever title of this brief historical study harks back to earlier times as changing technology provided a constantly renewed window through which to view what was happening in the world. Ranging from medieval storytellers through nineteenth-century news agencies to the bloggers of today, the book’s theme is that “news” has meant very different things at different times.

Director of the global media and communications master’s program at the London School of Economics and Political Science, and long a student of news agencies, Terhi Rantanen provides a brief but insightful survey of how technology has helped to shape our perception of what “news” is and means. [Read more...]