This comprehensive edited collection provides key contributions in the field, mapping out fundamental topics and analysing current trends through an international lens. Offering a collection of invited contributions from scholars across the world, the volume is structured in seven parts, each exploring an aspect of local media and journalism. It brings together and consolidates the latest research and theorisations from the field, and provides fresh understandings of local media from a comparative perspective and within a global context. This volume reaches across national, cultural, technological and socio-economic boundaries to bring new understandings to the dominant foci of research in the field and highlights interconnection and thematic links. Addressing the significant changes local media and journalism have undergone in the last decade, the collection explores the history, politics, ethics and contents of local media, as well as delving deeper into the business and practices that affect not only the journalists and media-makers involved, but consumers and communities as well. For students and researchers in the fields of journalism studies, journalism education, cultural studies, and media and communications programmes, this is the comprehensive guide to local media and journalism.

The book provides a comparative analysis of thechanges in the print mediasectors of the Czech Republic, Hungary and Polandduring the 1990s. Itanalyses the processes and features of thepost-communist transformation froma political economy point of view. The analysisfocuses on three main print mediasectors: newspaper, magazine and book publishing. The study identifies four main processes ofpost-communist system change andexamines the differences and similarities between thethree countries andbetween various print media sectors. The features ofthe communist and thepost-communist systems of the print media arecompared in terms ofthe changing roles of the print media and of the main actors such as the state, audiences and media organisations.

Coverage of the Clinton-Lewinsky saga followed in a long trail of media exposures of the more personal details of the lives of public figures. Many commentators have seen stories like this, and TV shows like Jerry Springer's, as evidence of a decline in the standards of the mass media. This increasing interest in private lives and the falling off of coverage of serious news is often described as Otabloidization.O The essays in this book are the first serious scholarly studies of what is going on and what its implications are. Reality, it turns out, is much more complex than some of the laments suggest. As the contributors show, this is not just a U.S. problem but is repeated in country after country, and it is not certain that the media anywhere are getting more tabloid. What is more, there is no consensus about whether tabloidization is just Odumbing downO or whether it is a necessary tactic for the mass media to engage with new audiences who do not have the news habit. Tabloid Tales will be of interest to students and scholars in journalism, mass communication, political science, and cultural and media studies.