Sarah Niblock and David Machin bring us a much needed book that bridges the gap between journalistic theory and practice. The authors respond to a recent and growing recognition in academia and indeed journalism of the importance of reflective practice based on consultation of the sociological literature on journalism and the media industry. There is a distinct lack of up-to-date publications on journalists at work, the most recent ethnographies having been published in the 1980s. This book will provide detailed ethnographies of eight different news production settings. Each chapter follows two news workers through their daily routines, detailing the exact nature of their jobs, the constraints they may encounter, how they cope with those constraints and finally to what extent their work can be understood through reference to the sociological theory and vice versa. Chapters include "News agencies: something to please everyone," "The roving reporter," "Photojournalism" and "The new reporter learning the ropes."
The book is set in context by two opening chapters on the "History of News" and the "Sociology of News gathering." The former holds the premise that it is impossible to understand journalistic practice, the workings of the industry, or news values and the morality of "objectivity" without looking at the way that the news industry has grown up over the past 100 or so years. The emphasis of this chapter is very much on looking forward to the ethnographies which follow. "Sociology of news gathering" similarly details the sociological theory relevant to the ensuing chapters, theories which will be constantly referred back to throughout the course of the book. The section will becomprised of a review of the sociological literature on news agencies, news gathering, news values, the public sphere and tabloidisation.
This book will be an invaluable and much-needed real-life account of reporting in the context of contemporary newsrooms. For students taking practical units in news reporting, sub-editing and even law and ethics, this text will provide the type of concrete examples they will need to consolidate their skills-based training. The ethnographies will provide case-studies against which they can compare their experiences. Most journalism and media courses require their students to complete work-based assignments which are assessed through reflective reports. This book will help students prepare for their placements by gaining a strong sense of the working environment and tasks. It will also help students raise questions about their placements to form the basis of their reports. These reports expect them to synthesise the practice of journalism with the critical accounts of the profession by academics. No other journalism text does this.

In this short book, Evans interrogates the implications of VR's re-emergence into the media mainstream, critiquing the notion of a VR revolution by analysing the development and ownership of VR companies while also exploring the possibilities of immersion in VR and the importance of immersion in the interest and ownership of VR enterprises. He assesses how the ideologies and desires of both computer programmers and major Silicon Valley industries may influence how VR worlds are conceived and experienced by users while also exploring the mechanisms that create the immersive experience that underpins interest in the medium.

Few modern innovations have spread quite so quickly as the cell phone. This technology has transformed communication throughout the world. Mobile telecommunications have had a dramatic effect in many regions, but perhaps nowhere more than for low-income populations in countries such as Jamaica, where in the last few years many people have moved from no phone to cell phone. This book reveals the central role of communication in helping low-income households cope with poverty. The book traces the impact of the cell phone from personal issues of loneliness and depression to the global concerns of the modern economy and the transnational family. As the technology of social networking, the cell phone has become central to establishing and maintaining relationships in areas from religion to love. The Cell Phone presents the first detailed ethnography of the impact of this new technology through the exploration of the cell phone's role in everyday lives.

Are children today growing up too soon? How do they - and their parents - feel about media portrayals of sex and personal relationships? Are the media a corrupting influence, or a potentially positive and useful resource for young people? Drawing on an extensive research project, which investigated children's interpretations of sexual content in films, TV and print media, this book considers how young people (ages 9-17) use such material to understand their experiences and build their identities; and how they and their parents respond to public concerns about these issues. The book offers a clearly-written and entertaining insight into children's and parents' perspectives on these difficult issues - perspectives that are often ignored or trivialized in public debate.

The area of communication and computer networks has become a very active field of research by the control systems community in the last years. Tools from convex optimization and control theory are playing increasing roles in efficient network utilization, fair resource allocation, and communication delay accommodation and the field of Networked Control systems is fast becoming a mainstay of control systems research and applications. This carefully edited book brings together solicited contributions from experts in the various areas of communication/control networks referring to both networks under control (control in networks) as well as networked control systems (control over networks). The aim of this book is to reverse the trend of fragmentation and specialization in Communication Control Networks connecting various interdisciplinary research fields including control, communication, applied mathematics and computer science.

Alexis Papathanassis postulates that ICS ought to be treated as a complex and demanding management process and that it should be acknowledged as a key enabler of merger value realization. The application of his "Post-merger information and communication systems framework" (POMICS) on a real-life post-merger integration situation in a tourism company serves as a validation and as an illustration of the framework's potential value. It also gives valuable insights into some of the key questions facing the entire tourism sector today.

Journalismus soll mundige Burger informieren und doch sein Publikum unterhalten, soll schonungslos recherchieren und gleichzeitig Profite erwirtschaften. Journalismus soll die Auflage und die Einschaltquote steigern - und trotz vielfaltiger Abhangigkeiten und Zwange stets unabhangig sein, den Idealen der Aufklarung und dem Ethos der Wahrheit verpflichtet. Journalismus lebt von der Distanz - und von der Nahe, von der Zuspitzung und von der Einordnung, von der Schnelligkeit und der Genauigkeit, von der Kreativitat und der Routine. Es sind die Paradoxien, die unvermeidlichen Konflikte und die heimlichen Schizophrenien der Profession, die von fuhrenden Fachleuten aus dem In- und Ausland beschrieben werden. Entstanden ist eine theoretisch herausfordernde, empirisch fundierte und die Praxis reflektierende Analyse jener Widerspruche, die bestimmen, was Journalismus und Journalistik leisten sollen - und was sie tatsachlich leisten koennen.

"Digital technologies have given society an extraordinary cultural potential. If that potential is to be made real, we must reconcile it with the legitimate and important claims of copyright. In this beautifully written and careful work, Fisher, more completely than anyone else, maps the choices that we might make. He argues for a choice that would produce enormous social good. And while not everyone will agree with the conclusions he draws, no one who cares seriously about creators or culture can ignore the framework that he has set. There are choices that we as a society must make. And as Rawls did in political theory, or Milton Friedman did in economics, Fisher provides an understanding that will color policy analysis for the generations to come."--Lawrence Lessig, Stanford Law School
"The strength of this book is Fisher's willingness to step above the political fray to solve problems. He has produced one of the most important books in media studies and law in some years. It is refreshing, bold, and provocative. We need it badly." --Siva Vaidhyanathan, Director of Communication Studies, Department of Culture and Communication, New York University

Documentary Film Classics offers close readings on a number of major films, such as Nanook of the North, Land Without Bread, Night and Fog, Chronicle of a Summer and Don't Look Back. Spanning the history of the documentary film tradition, William Rothman analyzes the philosophical and historical issues and themes implicit in these works. Designed to guide film students through the "texts" of a wide range of documentaries, his readings also focus on the achievements of these works as films per se.

The book assesses the impact of core political and social institutions on regulatory structures and performance in the telecommunications industry in Jamaica, the United Kingdom, Chile, Argentina, and the Philippines. These core institutions are shown to influence strongly the credibility and effectiveness of regulation, and thus its ability to encourage private investment and support efficiency. Currently, privatization and regulatory reform are often viewed as the solution to the problem of poor performance by telecommunications and other public utilities. This volume argues that these high expectations may not always be met because of the way a country's political and social institutions - its executive, legislative and judicial systems, its informal norms of public behaviour - interact with regulatory processes and economic conditions. In some environments, regulatory solutions run counter to the prevailing wisdom: achieving credible commitment may require an inflexible regulatory regime, and sometimes public ownership of utilities may be the only feasible alternative.

Currently, privatization and regulatory reform are often viewed as the solution to the problem of poor performance by telecommunications and other public utilities. This volume argues that these high expectations may not always be met because of the way a country's institutions and systems interact.

The focus of this book is on the management of inbound call centers. Based on technical performance measures this book develops economic performance measures for different classes of telephone service numbers. Both the numbers of agents and the number of offered phones lines are decision variables in the operational personnel planning process. Since call arrivals as well as call-handling times are random in inbound call centers, this book concentrates on performance analysis and optimization using queueing models. These models may differ with respect to several features, for example, the number of customer classes, the number of differently trained agent groups, the limitation of the waiting room, or the customer's impatience. This book describes mathematical methods and algorithms to relate these decision variables to technical as well as economic performance measures.

This is the first scholarly history of Fox from its origins in 1904 to the present. It builds upon research and histories of individual periods to describe how one company responded to a century-long evolution of the audience, nationally and globally. In the beginning, William Fox grabbed a once-in-a-millennium opportunity to build a business based on a genuinely new art form. This study explores the enduring legacy of F.W. Murnau, Will Rogers, Shirley Temple, John Ford, Spyros Skouras, George Lucas, James Cameron, and many others, offering discussion of those behind and in front of the camera, delving deeply into the history and evolution of the studio. Key films covered include The Iron Horse, The Grapes of Wrath, How Green Was My Valley, Forever Amber, All About Eve, Cleopatra, The Sound of Music, Planet of the Apes, Star Wars, Titanic, and Fight Club, providing an extensive look at the successes and flops that shaped not only Twentieth Century Fox, but the entire Hollywood landscape. Through a chronological study, the book charts the studio's impact right up to the present day, providing a framework to allow us to look to the future of moviemaking and film consumption. Lively and fresh in its approach, this book is a comprehensive study of the studio for scholars, students, and enthusiasts of Hollywood cinema, film history, and media industries.

From the punch card calculating machine to the personal computer to the iPhone and more, this in-depth text offers a comprehensive introduction to digital media history for students and scholars across media and communication studies, providing an overview of the main turning points in digital media and highlighting the interactions between political, business, technical, social, and cultural elements throughout history. With a global scope and an intermedia focus, this book enables students and scholars alike to deepen their critical understanding of digital communication, adding an understudied historical layer to the examination of digital media and societies. Discussion questions, a timeline, and previously unpublished tables and maps are included to guide readers as they learn to contextualize and critically analyze the digital technologies we use every day.

The third edition of International Communication examines the profound changes that have taken place, and are continuing to take place at an astonishing speed, in international media and communication. Building on the success of previous editions, this book maps out the expansion of media and telecommunications corporations within the macro-economic context of liberalisation, deregulation and privitisation. It then goes on to explore the impact of such growth on audiences in different cultural contexts and from regional, national and international perspectives. Each chapter contains engaging case studies which exemplify the main concepts and arguments.

This book discusses the use of authorship discourses and author figures in the promotion and marketing of media content, dealing with the U.S. mainstream media, including franchise film, network television, and triple-A video games. The research takes a unique approach studying ideas of authorship in promotion, diverging from extant approaches looking at the text, production, or reception. Conceptualizing authorship within the logic of media branding, the book studies the construction of ideas around creativity and the creative person in marketing and publicity content where media industries communicate with audiences. A cross-media approach allows the book to take a broad look and make comparisons across the increasingly integrated media industries. The book will be of great relevance to academics in the fields of film, television, and media studies, including postgraduate students, conducting teaching and research around authorship, media industries, and media promotion.

This book includes 2 keynote presentations, 18 papers and 1 demonstration presented at this year's Eurographics multimedia workshop. A wide range of subjects were covered, from media production to content processing and delivery, with a special focus on issues related to interactive video environments. These included standards and approaches for interactive television, hypervideo, collaborative video, augmented reality, mobile multimedia, the integration of TV and the web, content analysis, processing and presentation. The papers are organized in six sessions: 3D in multimedia, multimedia architectures and authoring, video and coding, content based retrieval and security, interactive media and interactive TV.

Winner of the National Press Club Prize for Media Criticism.

"A compelling look at the power of the media from an award-winning journalist who fearlessly and passionately addresses critical issues confronting African-American journalists working for mainstream newspapers and magazines."
--"Essence"

"In her eloquent take on media Eurocentrism, Pamela Newkirk observes that anti-African exclusion very much characterizes the major media. . . . An hermeneutical tour-de-force."
--"New York Amsterdam News"

"Newkirk's account is well-grounded historically and anecdotally, and she mangaes to be both fair and accurate at a time when those values seem to have lost their luster in the profession""Kirkus"

Companion website: http: //www.nyupress.nyu.edu/authors/veil.html

Thirty years ago, the Kerner Commission Report made national headlines by exposing the consistently biased coverage afforded African Americans in the mainstream media. While the report acted as a much ballyhooed wake-up call, the problems it identified have stubbornly persisted, despite the infusion of black and other racial minority journalists into the newsroom.

In Within the Veil, Pamela Newkirk unmasks the ways in which race continues to influence reportage, both overtly and covertly. Newkirk charts a series of race-related conflicts at news organizations across the country, illustrating how African American journalists have influenced and been denied influence to the content, presentation, and very nature of news.

Through anecdotes culled from interviews with over 100 broadcast and print journalists, Newkirk exposes the trials and triumphs of African American journalists as they struggle in pursuitof more equitable coverage of racial minorities. She illuminates the agonizing dilemmas they face when writing stories critical of blacks, stories which force them to choose between journalistic integrity, their own advancement, and the almost certain enmity of the black community.

Within the Veil is a gripping front-line report on the continuing battle to integrate America's newsrooms and news coverage.

Just like the previous workshop at VLDB 1999 in Edinburgh, the purpose of this workshop is to promote telecom data management as one of the core research areas in database research and to establish a strong connection between the telecom and database research communities. As I wrote in the preface of those proceedings, data management in telecommuni- tions is an interesting area of research given the fact that both service management and service provisioning are very data intensive, and pose extreme requirements on data management technology. Given the feedback on the previous workshop we decided to keep the same program set-up for this workshop: an invited speaker, a collection of research papers, and a panel discussion. We received 18 good quality papers from which we selected 12 to construct a very interesting program. The program has been divided into four sections. The first section focuses on CDR data warehouse and data mining technology. Data warehousing and data mining around customer usage data remains an important area of interest for telecommunication operators. The growing competition, especially in the mobile market, means that operators have to put more effort into customer retention and satisfaction. The second section focuses on performance issues around databases in telecommunication. Since telecommunication databases are characterized by their extreme requirements, for example in terms of volumes of data to be processed or response times, high volume data management and embedded and real-time data management are key aspects of the telecommunication data management problems in today s operational environments."

In 1984 journalist Peregrine Hodson crossed the Pakistan border into Afghanistan with rebel mujahedin smuggling arms and ammunition, beginning a thousand-mile journey through the war-torn nation. Fluent in Farsi, he was able to observe the war with stunning intimacy and eloquently capture the essence of the Afghan people and their culture. As the travelers survived bombings by Soviet aircraft, an ambush by a rival faction, and becoming swept up in a major offensive, Hodson would come to gain a unique perspective on their hopes for peace and religious devotion. Bringing together travel writing, war reportage, and history, this is a richly rendered portrait of a complex people. "Gripping and moving ... [a] powerful account of a war that has often been described as 'forgotten.'" -- Gail Pool, The Christian Science Monitor "Will long remain the most vivid account of a strange and horrible wrong." -- Ahmed Rashid, The Independent (London) "Vivid and intriguing." -- Jonathan Kirsch, -- Los Angeles Times Book Review

This book explores the generation of technological knowledge and the introduction of technological change. Antonelli makes his mark in this new area of debate by arguing that increasing returns in the production of knowledge apply. By putting forward a general, interpretative framework, Antonelli enables understanding of the economic and institutional determinants of technological innovation.

Creation Techniques for Software Development and Deployment, Agent-Based Management, Virtual Home Environment, Integrated and Scalable Solutions for Telecommunications Management. This shows that the issues related to communications management, architectures, and service creation are still of great interest, while the virtual home environment is emerging as a new key topic in IS&N. In summary, this book reflects the state of the art in research on IS&N topics, with the focus mentioned above, not only from European Union co-funded projects (mainly in the ACTS programme), but also from research organisations around the globe. February 2000 Jaime Delgado George D. Stamoulis Alvin Mullery Didoe Prevedourou Keith Start Previous IS&N Conferences and Proceedings The first IS&N conference was organised in 1992 in Paris, France. Since then, the IS&N conferences have been held almost every year, with proceedings published as part of the Lecture Notes in Computer Science (LNCS) series of Springer-Verlag. These are as follows. "Towards a Pan-European Telecommunication Service Infrastructure - IS&N'94", Hans-Jiirgen Kugler, Al Mullery, Norbert Niebert (Eds.), Aachen, Germany, September 1994, LNCS 851, ISBN 3-540-58420-X. "Bringing Telecommunication Services to the People - IS&N'95", Anne Clarke, Mario Campolargo, Nikos Karatzas (Eds.), Heraklion, Greece, October 1995, LNCS 998, ISBN 3-540-60479-0. "Intelligence in Services and Networks: Technology for Cooperative Competition - IS&N'97\ Al Mullery, Michel Besson, Mario Campolargo, Roberta Gobbi, Rick Reed (Eds.), Cernobbio, Italy, May 1997, LNCS 1238, ISBN 3-540-63135-6.