Editorial
Articles
Don't Publish and Be Damned: An
Advocacy Media Case Study
Advocacy journalism is practised by a wide range of mainstream media publishers and broadcasters and alternative media outlets. It is a genre of journalism that is fact-based but supports a specific viewpoint on an issue. It is generally in opposition to so-called objective journalism. Likewise, advocacy advertising is used to espouse a point of view about controversial public issues. It can be used to target consumer groups, government agencies, special groups or market competitors. Independent student journalism publishing also often challenges normative values. Advocacy advertising, or social issues marketing, was the brief for five shortlisted groups of Auckland University of Technology advertising creativity students on behalf of a New Zealand lobby and protest movement called Homeowners Against Line Trespassers (HALT) in September 2006. HALT was campaigning against a controversial proposal by the state-owned enterprise Transpower to build a 400kV transmission line across a 200km route from Otahuhu to Whakamaru in the Waikato as part of a new national pylons network. Three campaign advertisements were created by a pair of students for AUT's journalism training newspaper, Te Waha Nui, and a separate single advertisement was designed by a second pair of students for an Auckland metropolitan billboard and postcard campaign. This article examines advocacy media in the context of the HALT campaign that explored research links between power pylons and public health and the dynamic with student editors that led to non-publication of the professionally selected social issues message.
Argentine Workers' Documentaries as Counter-Information: Implications for Alternative Media
This article reviews a diverse series of documentary videos, films, and related internet sites about the Argentinean crisis of 2001 and its aftermath, made by producers in Argentina and abroad. It suggests that alternative media coverage has followed a three-stage process in interpreting worker movements since 2001, focusing on two examples of economic negotiations that have taken place between these movements and the state, in the ‘piquetero’ and recovered factory movements. Alternative media which advocate for workers by making the power relations between the state and workers movement transparent, has been described as “counter-information”. The article also describes a time-lag now evident in the production and circulation of audiovisual material in comparison with print and internet, and a location gap between material produced in Argentina and abroad. The article concludes by suggesting some implications of these lags and gaps for the interpretation of alternative media as counter-information.
Handsome Devils: Mobile Imaginings of Youth Culture
Mobile technologies are becoming central to contemporary media — yet there has been little critical examination of mobiles, or of their role in community, alternative, and citizens’ media. Accordingly, in this paper we examine the way that mass media representations of mobile media are bound up with individualistic interpretations of youth culture. Advertising campaigns herald a new era of youthful mobile media interactions, from glamorous 20-somethings silhouetted with their iPods to teenagers sending flirtatious text messages. At the other end of the spectrum, familiar youth panics are being translated into technological iterations, continuing “the unhappy marriage of youth and media theory” (Ishita, 1998). We argue such narratives form a larger picture of what we call ‘seductive and destructive’ mobile imaginaries. Youth culture is often a site upon which broader social concerns are projected, and the current mobile imaginaries reveal the affective patterns of anxiety and desire that mark popular representations of youth and technology. A critical understanding of such imaginaries helps locate the ‘our’ in mobile media, and so articulate sustainable media and cultural futures.
Today in America, tens of thousands of philanthropic foundations finance social change and, in the year 2000 alone, these foundations distributed $26.7 billion worth of grants. To date, while scholarly attention has been paid to the role of right-wing foundations in promoting a neoliberal media environment, few studies have critiqued the role of liberal foundations in funding similar media reforms. Thus with next to no critical inquiry from media researchers, the Ford Foundation - which is arguably one of the most influencial liberal foundations - supplied over $292 million to American public broadcasting between 1951 and 1977 and continues to fund progressive media groups like FreePress and Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting. This paper provides a much needed overview of the problematic nexus between liberal philanthropy and progressive media reform, and concludes by providing a number of recommendations for how media activists may begin to move away from their (arguably unsustainable) reliance on liberal philanthropy.
Commentary
Dr. Iskandar is one of the most authoritative academic voices on Arab media. He is the co-author with Mohammed El-Nawawy of AL-JAZEERA: How the Free Arab News Network Scooped the World and Changed the Middle East (Westview Press). Dr. Iskandar is a visiting scholar at the Centre for Contemporary Arab Studies, Georgetown University in Washington. He spoke to Global Media Journal book editor, Dr. Antonio Castillo.
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