This eighth edition of Joseph Turow’s pathbreaking media textbook uses convergence as a lens that puts students at the center of the profound changes in the 21st century media world. It teaches students to think critically about the role of media, and what these changes mean for their lives.

The book’s media systems approach helps students to look carefully at how media content is created, distributed, and exhibited in the new world that the digital revolution has created. From news media to video games and social networking to mobile platforms, it provides students with the tools they need to understand and critique the media they encounter and consume. The first part examines the media world as a whole, while the second delves deep into key media industries, such as the movie, television, and video game industries. This new edition includes critical expanded coverage of social media, new forms of both audio and audiovisual media and international case studies, as well as updated figures, tables, and pedagogy, including key terms and further activities.

Media Today is an excellent introduction to the world of media in the digital age, perfect for students seeking a solid grounding in media studies. Extensive pedagogical materials also make this a highly teachable book, well suited to the classroom.

The accompanying website has also been updated with new student and instructor resources, including chapter recaps, recommended readings, and instructor’s manual.

For more information on the changes in this latest edition, please click here.

Table of Contents

Part I: The Nature and Business of Media; 1. Understanding Mass Media, Convergence, and the Importance of Media Literacy; 2. Making Sense of Research on Media Effects and Media Culture; 3. The Business of Media; 4. Financing and Shaping the Media: Advertising, Public Relations, and Marketing Communications; 5. Controls on Media Content: Government Regulation, Self-Regulation, and Ethics; Part II: The Media Industries; 6. The Internet Industry; 7. The Book Industry; 8. The News Industry; 9. The Magazine Industry; 10. The Recording Industry; 11. The Audio Industry; 12. The Movie Industry; 13. The Television and Video Streaming Industry; 14. The Video Game Industry.

- Consistently examines the business of media through the paradigm of production-distribution-exhibition in a way that no other book does, giving students a more thorough understanding of how media industries work and the vocabulary they need to talk about them. - Engagingly written with examples that are familiar to students, helping them better connect to the content and understand their role as media consumers and producers. - Coverage of convergence and its impact is incorporated into every chapter. - A range of pedagogical materials in the print book and online help students become savvy media consumers and producers, including historical timelines of each media industry; media literacy questions that develop students' critical thinking skills; case studies that bring theory to life; and study aids including flashcards and practice quizzes.

Commercial breaks, radio spots, product placements, billboards, pop-up ads-we sometimes take for granted how much advertising surrounds us in our daily lives. We may find ads funny, odd, or even disturbing, but we rarely stop to consider their deeper meaning or function within society.

What, exactly, does advertising do? How and why do ads influence us? How does the advertising industry influence our media? These are just a few of the many important questions addressed in The Advertising and Consumer Culture Reader-an incisive, provocative collection that assembles twenty-seven of the most important scholarly writings on advertising and consumer culture to date.

The classic and contemporary essays gathered here explore the past, present, and future of advertising-from the early days of print to the World Wide Web and beyond. These selections offer historical, sociological, critical, cultural, and political-economic lenses to explore a wide range of topics-from consumer activism to globalization to the role of ads in the political process. Together, these key readings chart the past, present, and future of advertising, while also examining the effects of advertising and consumer culture upon individuals, society, cultures, and the world at large.

Designed for use in courses, the collection begins with a general introduction that orients students to thinking critically about advertising and consumer culture. Section and chapter introductions offer valuable historical and critical context, while review questions after each reading will spark classroom debates and challenge students' understanding of key concepts.

Key Readings in Media Today provides both historical and contemporary analyses of each of the major media industries: book, newspaper, magazine, sound recording/radio, motion picture, television, new media, advertising, and public relations. The volume places an emphasis on convergence, looking at the ways boundaries between these media industries are blurring in surprising new ways. Section introductions and headnotes for each article offer valuable critical and historical context, while review questions after each reading test students' understanding of key concepts. Additional resources on the Companion Website (www.routledge.com/textbooks/9780415876087) are designed to spark classroom discussion and connect the readings to the latest contemporary media issues and controversies. By combining classic studies of mass communication with contemporary research on media, technology, and culture, Key Readings in Media Today will help students to make sense of the rapidly changing media environment.

"Joe Turow's "Playing Doctor" disquiets and challenges the reader's intellect with cogent analysis of the forces that have shaped television's portrayal of doctors and the medical world. For that alone, it is a fantastic read. But Dr. Turow also pleases the mind with well written and amusing stories, interviews, and behind the scenes anecdotes that bring to life, in an eminently readable style, the fascinating world of TV medicine."
---David Foster, M.D., supervising producer, writer, and medical consultant for "House"

"Joseph Turow takes us behind the scenes of such hit television series as "ER, Grey's Anatomy," and "House" to reveal the complex relationship viewers have with their beloved fictional caregivers. Turow carefully probes the history of TV medical series and presents a compelling argument for telling more truthful medical stories in the future to reflect---and address---the precarious state of our health-care system today."
---Neal Baer, M.D., executive producer of "Law & Order: Special Victims Unit"

"The great contribution of Turow's book, in addition to providing a highly readable and smart overview of medical shows over the years, is to examine the consequences of the gap between the reality of medical care and the often romanticized, heroic depictions on television. This would be a very good book for professors to use in teaching a range of courses in communications studies, from introductory courses to more specialized classes on health and the media."
---Susan Douglas, Catherine Neafie Kellogg Professor, Arthur F. Thurnau Professor, Communications Studies Department Chair, University of Michigan

"Playing Doctor" is an engaging and highly perceptive history of the medical TV series from its inception to the present day. Turow offers an inside look at the creation of iconic doctor shows as well as a detailed history of the programs, an analysis of changing public perceptions of doctors and medicine, and an insightful commentary on how medical dramas have both exploited and shaped these perceptions.

Drawing on extensive interviews with creators, directors, and producers, "Playing Doctor" is a classic in the field of communications studies. This expanded edition includes a new introduction placing the book in the contemporary context of the health care crisis, as well as new chapters covering the intervening twenty years of television programming. Turow uses recent research and interviews with principals in contemporary television doctor shows such as "ER, Grey's Anatomy, House," and "Scrubs" to illuminate the extraordinary ongoing cultural influence of medical shows. "Playing Doctor" situates the television vision of medicine as a limitless high-tech resource against the realities underlying the health care debate, both yesterday and today.

Joseph Turow is Robert Lewis Shayon Professor at the Annenberg School for Communication, University of Pennsylvania. He was named a Distinguished Scholar by the National Communication Association and a Fellow of the International Communication Association in 2010. He has authored eight books, edited five, and written more than 100 articles on mass media industries. He has also produced a DVD titled "Prime Time Doctors: Why Should You Care?" that has been distributed to all first-year medical students with the support of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.

Praise for the first edition of "Playing Doctor: "

"With "Playing Doctor, " Joseph Turow has established himself as one of the foremost analytic historians of the interplay between television, its audiences, and other American institutions."
---George Comstock, S.I. Newhouse Professor at the Newhouse School of Public Communications, Syracuse University, in "Health Affairs"

Cover image: Eric Dane, Kate Walsh, Sara Ramirez, and crew members on the set of "Grey's Anatomy" (c) American Broadcasting Company, Inc.

Key Readings in Media Today provides both historical and contemporary analyses of each of the major media industries: book, newspaper, magazine, sound recording/radio, motion picture, television, new media, advertising, and public relations. The volume places an emphasis on convergence, looking at the ways boundaries between these media industries are blurring in surprising new ways. Section introductions and headnotes for each article offer valuable critical and historical context, while review questions after each reading test students' understanding of key concepts. Additional resources on the Companion Website (www.routledge.com/textbooks/9780415876087) are designed to spark classroom discussion and connect the readings to the latest contemporary media issues and controversies. By combining classic studies of mass communication with contemporary research on media, technology, and culture, Key Readings in Media Today will help students to make sense of the rapidly changing media environment.

Table of Contents

Introduction

Part I: Understanding the Nature of Mass Media

1: Mass Communication, Popular Taste and Organized Social Action, P.F. Lazarsfeld and Robert King Merton

2: The Definition of Media Literacy, W. James Potter

3: Common Media for an Uncommon Nation, Ben H. Bagdikian

4: Political Problem, Political Solutions, Robert McChesney

5: Not Toasters: The Special Nature of Media Products, C. Edwin Baker

6: Four puzzles from Cyberspace, Lawrence Lessig

Part II: The Print Media

7: Making news: Time and Typifications, Gaye Tuchman

8: Convergence: News Production in a Digital Age, Eric Klinenberg

9: Pushing Time Ahead: Digital Challenges Facing Print Media, Brooke Erin Duffy

10: Sex, Lies, and Advertising, Gloria Steinem

11: Is There a Text in This Advertising Campaign?: Literature, Marketing, and Harry Potter, Philip Nel

12: Newspapers Rocken Espanol, Mark Fitzgerald

Part III: The Electronic Media

13: What Is News?, Neil Postman and Steve Powers

14: Queens for a Day: Queer Eye for the Straight Guy and the Neoliberal Project, Katherine Sender

15: Deconstructing the Diversity Principle, Philip M. Napoli

16: Radio in Modernity: Time, Place and ‘Communicative Capacity,’ David Hendy

17: Fallout: A Follow Up to the Internet Debacle, Janis Ian

18: Promoting and Protecting the Industry, Janet Wasko

19: Art House Meets Graphic Novel, or Blockbuster Meets Superhero Comic?: The Contradictory Relationship between Film and Comic Art, Matthew P. McAllister, Ian Gordon and Mark Jancovich.

Part IV: The Digital Media

20: The Long Tail, Chris Anderson

21: Peer Production and Sharing, Yochai Benkler

22: Your Brain on Video Games: Could They Actually Be Good for You?, Steven Johnson

23: Sports Online: The Newest Player in Mediasport, Michael Real

24: Quentin Tarantino’s Star Wars?: Digital Cinema, Media Convergence and Participatory Culture, Henry Jenkins

25: Download This: YouTube Phenom Has a Big Secret, Ethan Smith and Peter Lattman

Part V: Advertising and Public Relations

26: The Work of Adcult, James B. Twitchell

27: ‘Chaos Scenario': A Look at the Marketing Industry's Coming Disaster, Bob Garfield

28: Rethinking Television in the Digital Age, Joseph Turow

29: Philanthropy as Public Relations: A Critical Perspective on Cause Marketing, Inger L. Stole

30: Media, War, and Propaganda: Strategies of Information Management during the 2003 Iraq War, Deepa Kumar

31: The Public and its Problems: Some Notes for the New Millennium, Stuart Ewen

Commercial breaks, radio spots, product placements, billboards, pop-up ads-we sometimes take for granted how much advertising surrounds us in our daily lives. We may find ads funny, odd, or even disturbing, but we rarely stop to consider their deeper meaning or function within society. What, exactly, does advertising do? How and why do ads influence us? How does the advertising industry influence our media? These are just a few of the many important questions addressed in The Advertising and Consumer Culture Reader-an incisive, provocative collection that assembles twenty-seven of the most important scholarly writings on advertising and consumer culture to date. The classic and contemporary essays gathered here explore the past, present, and future of advertising-from the early days of print to the World Wide Web and beyond. These selections offer historical, sociological, critical, cultural, and political-economic lenses to explore a wide range of topics-from consumer activism to globalization to the role of ads in the political process. Together, these key readings chart the past, present, and future of advertising, while also examining the effects of advertising and consumer culture upon individuals, society, cultures, and the world at large. Designed for use in courses, the collection begins with a general introduction that orients students to thinking critically about advertising and consumer culture. Section and chapter introductions offer valuable historical and critical context, while review questions after each reading will spark classroom debates and challenge students' understanding of key concepts.

A revealing and surprising look at the ways that aggressive consumer advertising and tracking, already pervasive online, are coming to a retail store near you By one expert's prediction, within twenty years half of Americans will have body implants that tell retailers how they feel about specific products as they browse their local stores. The notion may be outlandish, but it reflects executives' drive to understand shoppers in the aisles with the same obsessive detail that they track us online. In fact, a hidden surveillance revolution is already taking place inside brick-and-mortar stores, where Americans still do most of their buying. Drawing on his interviews with retail executives, analysis of trade publications, and experiences at insider industry meetings, advertising and digital studies expert Joseph Turow pulls back the curtain on these trends, showing how a new hyper-competitive generation of merchants-including Macy's, Target, and Walmart-is already using data mining, in-store tracking, and predictive analytics to change the way we buy, undermine our privacy, and define our reputations. Eye-opening and timely, Turow's book is essential reading to understand the future of shopping.

Your voice provides biometric data. How are marketers using it to manipulate you? "[Dr. Turow ] is encouraging policymakers and the public to do something I wish we did more often: Be careful and considerate about how we use a powerful technology before it might be used for consequential decisions."-Shira Ovide, New York Times Only three decades ago, it was inconceivable that virtually entire populations would be carrying around wireless phones wherever they went, or that peoples' exact locations could be tracked by those devices. We now take both for granted. Even just a decade ago the idea that individuals' voices could be used to identify and draw inferences about them as they shopped or interacted with retailers seemed like something out of a science fiction novel. Yet a new business sector is emerging to do exactly that. The first in-depth examination of the voice intelligence industry, The Voice Catchers exposes how artificial intelligence is enabling personalized marketing and discrimination through voice analysis. Amazon and Google have numerous patents pertaining to voice profiling, and even now their smart speakers are extracting and using voiceprints for identification and more. Customer service centers are already approaching every caller based on what they conclude a caller's voice reveals about that person's emotions, sentiments, and personality, often in real time. In fact, many scientists believe that a person's weight, height, age, and race, not to mention any illnesses they may have, can also be identified from the sound of that individual's voice. Ultimately, not just marketers, but also politicians and governments, may use voice profiling to infer personal characteristics for selfish interests and not for the benefit of a citizen or society as a whole. Leading communications scholar Joseph Turow places the voice intelligence industry in historical perspective, explores its contemporary developments, and offers a clarion call for regulating this rising surveillance regime.

This book is about the way the advertising industry has been fragmenting America and what that may mean for the media and society. The advertiser's aim has been to package individuals, or groups of people, in ways that make them useful targets. But the ad industry's vision of America is one of a fractured population of self-indulgent, suspicious individuals who reach out only to people like themselves, and the ads it creates both reflect and promote this view. Combining shrewd analysis of contemporary practices with a historical perspective, Turow traces the momentous shift that began in the mid-1970s when advertisers rejected mass marketing in favor of ever more aggressive target marketing. It is a strategy that includes all marketing vehicles, from cable TV to catalogs, direct mail to radio, newspapers to supermarket promotions. Turow shows how advertisers exploit differences between consumers based on income, age, gender, race, marital status, ethnicity, and lifestyles. With increased technology, advertising can easily enter individuals' private spaces - their homes, cars, and offices - with news, entertainment, and commercial messages aimed specifically at them. As the major support system of American media, the ad industry has encouraged market segmentation and the creation of customized media. Ultimately, Turow predicts this trend will cause an erosion of tolerance and cooperation within U.S. society.