FM Stations’ Role in Rural Development: The Case of Northern Ghana

Over the past two decades, Ghana’s media landscape has undergone radical transformation, leading to the emergence of hundreds of frequency modulation (FM) stations across the country. These stations have become the country’s most powerful mediums of communication, carrying an array of programs aimed at diverse audiences. With northern Ghana as a case study, this research examines FM stations’ role in rural development, their mode of impact, and their attendant challenges. This is achieved via qualitative methodology; that is, in-depth interviews with station managers and local development stakeholders, supplemented by programming content analysis of ten FM stations. Findings indicate that FM stations in northern Ghana, irrespective of their classification, aid rural development by serving as an endogenous conduit for the transfer of information that promotes community development and empowerment. This is achieved through programming in local dialects, local musical and cultural programs, expert presentations, interactive phone-in sessions, and news presentations. Challenges include the lack of employee professionalism, financial constraints, poor audience research, technical challenges, excessively partisan political coverage, and lack of original programming.

Freedom Girls

Freedom Girls: Voicing Femininity in 1960s British Pop shows how the vocal performances of girl singers in 1960s Britain defined—and sometimes defied—ideas about what it meant to be a young woman in the 1960s British pop music scene. The singing and expressive voices of Sandie Shaw, Cilla Black, Millie Small, Dusty Springfield, Lulu, Marianne Faithfull, and P. P. Arnold reveal how vocal sound shapes access to social mobility and, consequently, access to power and musical authority. The book examines how Sandie Shaw and Cilla Black’s ordinary girl personas were tied to whiteness, and in Black’s case to her Liverpool origins. It shows how Dusty Springfield and Jamaican singer Millie Small engaged with the transatlantic sounds of soul and ska, respectively, transforming ideas about musical genre, race, and gender. It reveals how attitudes about sexuality and youth in rock culture shaped the vocal performances of Lulu and Marianne Faithfull, and how P. P. Arnold has re-narrated rock history to center Black women’s vocality. Freedom Girls draws on a broad array of archival sources, including music magazines, fashion and entertainment magazines produced for young women, biographies and interviews, audience research reports, and others to inform analysis of musical recordings (including such songs as “As Tears Go By,” “Son of a Preacher Man,” and others) and performances on television programs such as Ready Steady Go!, Shindig, and other 1960s music shows. These performances reveal the historical and contemporary connections between voice, social mobility, and musical authority and demonstrate how singers used voice to navigate the boundaries of race, class, and gender.

TAKING INTERDEPENDENCIES SERIOUSLY: THE CASE OF MOZILLA’S ENTANGLEMENTS WITH JOURNALISM

Despite the complex interdependencies in today’s digital news ecology, it is still common to study digital journalism primarily by looking at how ‘non-journalists’ are influencing journalists from ‘outside’ the field of professional journalism. When it comes to how digital journalism is shaping non-journalists, we mostly find audience research or research on the effects of journalistic reporting. We argue that understanding journalism’s role in society today requires us to more broadly ask how imaginaries about journalism influence all kinds of actors that make up our digital public. In this paper, we therefore discuss how imaginaries about journalism shape the practices and identity of Mozilla, an organization best known for the development of the Firefox web browser. Mozilla currently explores collaborations with, or support of journalism, and we argue that this exploration is shaped by imaginaries about journalism. Using a Mozilla project as an example that seeks to support alternatives to advertising as the dominant way to finance journalistic content online, we show how Mozilla is trying to support its own mission by supporting organizations whose practices and values are considered compatible with this mission. We argue that Mozilla is not aiming to support ‘journalism’ as such, but a particular and rather traditional idea of fact-oriented journalism that facilitates political deliberation. Our findings suggest that studying how particular imaginaries about digital journalism influence non-journalists can help illuminate journalism’s role in today's digital news ecology beyond its ‘democratic function’ and contribute to a more nuanced understanding of the digital transformation as a whole.

Documentary imaginary: Production and audience research of The Act of Killing and The Look of Silence

Oppenheimer describes The Act of Killing as a ‘documentary about the imagination. We are documenting the ways we imagine ourselves, the ways we know ourselves’. This research analyses the documentary films The Act of Killing (Director Oppenheimer, co-directors Christine Cynn and anonymous 2012) and The Look of Silence (director Oppenheimer 2014), and the documentary imaginary. The research combines normally separate sites of analysis in production and audience studies in order to understand the power of documentary and the spectrum of social stories we inhabit. The article asks: how do the films document and imagine fear and impunity in memories of the genocide, and how do audiences engage with this documentary imaginary? Particular focus is paid towards the endings of the two documentary films and how audiences in this study reflect on the absence of justice for the victims of the genocide. Through the empirical research, we take a journey with the director and his film making process, understanding the lengthy and complex filming for the two documentaries in Indonesia. The films signal Oppenheimer’s political and ethical commitment towards victim recognition, the possibility and impossibility of forgiveness, and the challenge of reconciliation between victims and perpetrators. The filmmaker’s journey is intertwined with the enactments of the genocide by the perpetrators in their own surreal ways of imagining themselves, and the experience of victims seeking recognition. Audiences become intertwined in these journeys, finding along the way a critically productive space for documentary and the imaginary.

Journalism Research That Matters

Despite the looming crisis in journalism, a research–practice gap plagues the news industry. This volume seeks to change the research–practice gap, with timely scholarly research on the most pressing problems facing the news industry today, translated for a non-specialist audience. Contributions from academics and journalists are brought together in order to push a conversation about how to do the kind of journalism research that matters, meaning research that changes journalism for the better for the public and helps make journalism more financially sustainable. The book covers important concerns such as the financial survival of quality news and information, how news audiences consume (or don’t consume) journalism, and how issues such as race, inequality, and diversity must be addressed by journalists and researchers alike. The book addresses needed interventions in policy research and provides a guide to understanding buzzwords like “news literacy,” “data literacy,” and “data scraping” that are more complicated than they might initially seem. Practitioners provide suggestions for working together with scholars—from focusing on product and human-centered design to understanding the different priorities that media professionals and scholars can have, even when approaching collaborative projects. This book provides valuable insights for media professionals and scholars about news business models, audience research, misinformation, diversity and inclusivity, and news philanthropy. It offers journalists a guide on what they need to know, and a call to action for what kind of research journalism scholars can do to best help the news industry reckon with disruption.

Harley Quinn and the carnivalesque transformation of comic book fandom

The antihero Harley Quinn was first introduced as the Joker's "henchwench" in Batman: The Animated Series (1992). The character soon developed a dedicated fan base, including enthusiasts who did not conform to traditional definitions of comic book fans. Recognizing Harley Quinn's popularity, DC Comics subsequently incorporated the character into comic book continuity. Today, Harley Quinn is a transmedia icon extended across multiple media platforms. In this article, audience research and creator interviews were performed to show how Harley Quinn has been used by both fans and industry stakeholders to transform long-standing (and often outdated) definitions of comic book fandom. Much of Harley Quinn's transformative potential comes from invoking a carnivalesque tradition that defies boundaries. Harley Quinn's popularity is not simply symptomatic of a widening comic book fandom but was active in that transformation.

‘Difference Is the One Thing That We Have in Common’

Television production is championing diversity in representation with record numbers compared to previous years. Netflix’s Sense8 is definitely amongst the highest scoring shows as concerns intersectional representation. Such remarkable representation was worth the 2016 GLAAD Outstanding Drama Series award, a prize granted to the most diverse television shows. However, this applause is geared solely to numerical representations while current academic discussion focuses more on the concept of fair representations. Not only is being represented of importance, but how one is represented. The present paper employs photovoice and photo elicitation to investigate how Sense8 fans articulate what constitutes a fair representation of queer gender identities within the show. The present research addresses two gaps in the literature. First, a methodological one: the employment of creative visual methodologies to transcend the limitations of the most common methods used for audience research —interviews and focus groups. Secondly, this study follows the contemporary conversation around fair representation by addressing what is now a gap in the existing literature on queer television: what is fair representation from an audience perspective? The results of this study show how audiences’ perspectives on fair representation differ from those formulated in public and academic debates.

The business of news: exploring the future of journalism as a commercially viable media product in multiplatform digital environments

In today’s digital information landscape, many threats challenge the economic model of professional journalism. The adoption of customer-value models by the news media industry, however, is relatively recent. This paper aims to direct news consumption research toward an understanding of the role of customer value creation and brand loyalty in gathering and maintaining newspaper customer markets in the digital era. Understanding what customers value in different contexts, and what value creation strategies are appropriate in these contexts is central to recognizing new market growth opportunities and business model innovation. In this paper, I discuss the application of a formal customer-value lens for newspaper audience research. The results of this research provide insight into the ways that news consumers and new customers differ from one another. The findings show that a news customer’s willingness to pay may be directly related to perceived utility of professional journalism and their brand connection to the newspaper. These implications call for a reexamination of the strategic approaches that inform current newspaper business models. A conceptual framework for segmenting newspaper customer markets based on the extent to which customers will pay for branded news media content is proposed.