Punditry as a reward system: audience construction and the logics of the punditry sphere

The article explores the relationship between the punditry sphere and democracy by analyzing how pundits and media organizations think about their audience. It also examines the role of punditry in the political environment in which the media organizations operate. Using Portugal as an example, the study draws on data gathered from interviews with pundits, journalists and news editors. Findings suggest that pundits and media organizations construct a punditry sphere that revolves around the circles of power. The article argues that this conception of the punditry sphere reflects the reward system under which pundits and media organizations work. Punditry seems to be a field primarily oriented to pundits themselves and to managing their stakes in the public arena while operating as a sphere where media organizations rework their relations with and within established powers, where politicians hold a special place. This construction reflects the co-dependence between media organizations and circles of power in Portugal and offers organizational-structural understanding of the logics of the punditry sphere and the role pundits play in public communication.     

“Doubt is in the Air.” Modeling the Comparison Between Traditional and Web Casting Radio on the Greek Case

Considering radio as a social system for the production of culture and communication, and based on an overview of the Greek case, this article suggests a model for studying the potential of the Web casting radio compared with the traditional radio in various media environments. The model suggested includes eight dimensions: institutional framework, market structures and business models, content diversity, audience profile, interactivity, sociability, relations with the recording industry, and relations with major news media and organizations. The analysis shows that a complex approach is needed to explore the chances for the potential of the Web casting radio to be realized.     

Managing for Serendipity: Exploring the Organizational Prerequisites for Emergent Creativity

In this article we explore the conditions for creative work in media organizations from the viewpoint of serendipity and the management of serendipity. Our study contributes to the field of media management research by theorizing change and creativity within the framework of organizational serendipity. Based on an analysis of empirical data collected with the diary method in a media organization, the article also discusses the rationale of managing for serendipity in creative media organizations from strategic, structural, and cultural viewpoints. We argue that the management of organizational serendipity should be aimed at managing for serendipity, not managing serendipity as such. In practice, this means that serendipity management should be understood as creating suitable conditions for serendipitous creative processes and facilitating creative work, motivation, and collaboration in the organization.     

Social Structure,Media System,and Audiences in China: Testing the Uses and Dependency Model

Much has been written about the structure and processes of China's mass media changes before and after the late Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping initiated the economic reform and open-door policies in the late 1970s. Many of them focused on the commercialization, depoliticalization, and internationalization of Chinese media as a result of the market economy and external openness. Little known, however, is how the audiences get caught up in the interplay between the fast changing social structure and the evolving media system in China. Using the uses and dependency model as a framework, this study seeks to determine the effects of the media transformation on the audiences and their media use in the new environment. In this article we argue that the uses and dependency perspective best helps explain why Chinese readers prefer a particular kind of news and why the Party organs are losing ground to other more market-oriented media.     

Media Management Tools: UK Broadcast Media Executives’ Perspective

The UK broadcast media landscape provides an interesting context to understand and explore the competitive dynamics of media organizations. As an industry characterized by uncertainty and turbulence, this article considers the process by which broadcast media organizations develop their strategies and the type of analytical tools that they use to underpin this process. This article presents the findings of a survey of UK broadcast media executives and their views on the outlook for the UK media industry; the influence that the competitive environment has on developing media strategy; and the management tools that they use and their levels of satisfaction with these tools. It concludes that UK broadcast media is a competitive and turbulent environment, and that media strategy is developed using a number of media management tools that have varying degrees of success in terms of helping broadcast media executives to manage their media organizations in uncertain and complex conditions.     

Urban Catastrophe and Sheltered Salvation

The Swedish civil defence organizations have a long tradition of balancing their messages to the public through diverse media use. Over the course of the early Cold War, however, the political and technical circumstances of the civil defence organizations changed, rendering old methods from the 1930s obsolete. To keep their relevance, the narratives of the civil defence organizations had to be carefully remodelled in accordance with the current situation, obscuring some facts while stressing others more clearly. By operationalizing the concept of media system, this article examines how the Swedish civil defence organizations used the media, broadly defined, to deal with the two main narratives that their practical work was based upon: urban destruction as war unfolds, and the safety of air-raid shelters. The article shows how these narratives were constructed and connected between various media, but also their changing and dynamic character over time. Over the course of the 1940s and 1950s, the narrative of urban destruction changed from a concrete to an abstract mediation, while the narrative of sheltered salvation took an opposite direction.     

Assessing social media use in Dutch municipalities: Political,institutional, and socio-economic determinants

Social media enables public sector organizations to connect with citizens. Next to this, it can help organizations provide more detailed and useful information. But to what extent is social media used by local governments for interaction purposes, and what factors influence this? In this article, we study how Dutch local governments use Twitter for interaction, linking this to political, institutional, and socio-economic determinants. We find that politically fragmented municipalities use Twitter more for interaction, suggesting that political multiplicity forms a stimulus for more online engagement. Moreover, municipalities that have a Twitter account for a longer time make more advanced use of its functions, implying that municipalities with longer experience are better acquainted with a platform's strengths and weaknesses. Finally, municipalities with a higher presence of people in the age group 20–65 as well as municipalities with more higher-educated people use their social media more for interaction. The same counts for municipalities with more ICT workers.     

Managing Social Media Use: Whither Social Media Guidelines in News Organizations?

Fears exist that social media use by news media and journalists may affect basic journalistic tenets such as objectivity, gatekeeping, and transparency. As a result, more and more news media organizations are issuing guidelines to manage employee use of social media. In this article we discuss the complex relationship of a selection of market-leading news media organizations with prescribed use of social media. Applying content analysis to 12 existing social media guidelines, we elaborate on the various types of rules linked with the basic principles of journalism. A key intention of this research is to provide insights for media management and journalism scholars to better understand the use of social media by journalists and the implementation of guidelines by media organizations. More practically, this article can aid media organizations who are shaping their own set of rules regarding use of social media by their staff.     

Uses of the Past in Refugee Documentaries in Sweden and Germany

Migration not only entangles people, cultures and societies but also histories and memories of diverse groups across national and cultural boundaries. The article focuses on mediated memory cultures of migration both theoretically and empirically. The first part discusses how cultural memories of migration in cross-medial flows of remediation can entangle ‘mnemonic imaginations’ of diverse groups within societies across time, cultures and media. In response to the conceptual framework of ‘entangled media histories’ this theoretical part explores entangled media histories of migration from the angle of memory studies. The second part of the article gives selected case studies. They reveal how media have historically mediated migratory memories and how they make use of this media history in contemporary productions. The examples are two Swedish documentary films of 2011 and 2015 and two German television documentaries of 2015 and 2016. With this theoretical and empirical approach the article shows how media actively contribute to debates about contemporary migration movements by the help of time-travelling migratory memory and media history.     

Revisiting social media institutionalization in government. An empirical analysis of barriers

Social media have become a common organizational resource of governments and public administrations in different contexts. Previous authors have stated that social media institutionalization encompasses a process including stages from experimentation to complete command of the innovation. However, an understanding of barriers to social media institutionalization in public administration needs to be developed. In this article we focus on exploring what factors operate as barriers of the social media institutionalization process. Methodologically, we use a mixed-methods strategy combining different sources of data for triangulation purposes, including a survey on social media conducted to Spanish largest local governments. Based on this data, and following the literature on social media institutionalization, we construct a Social Media Institutionalization Index (SMI). Our SMI is founded on a set of variables measuring to what extent social media have been embedded in public sector organizations. Also, we conducted a case study in a city council based on semi-structured interviews. Our results suggest that social media institutionalization has not been fully developed in our sample of local governments. In addition, different variables (including security, lack of resources for maintenance, control and evaluation, organizational culture, or absence of governance framework) are perceived by public managers as institutionalization barriers, whereas the governance scheme of social media seems to be the critical variable. At the same time, we emphasize that some inhibitors might be overvalued by public employees. This article encourages future avenues of comparative research and practical recommendations to public managers leading social media in the public sector.     

职业问责框架下的传媒自律

自律是传媒职业问责框架下的决定性因素.职业问责框架下的传媒自律以媒介专业主义为基本原则,包括传媒从业者个体、传媒组织和传媒行业三个层面的自律,其固有的缺陷近年来在欧美引发了尴尬的遭遇与尝试性突破.建立一个新型的职业问责框架下的传媒自律机制,应是当前重构我国传媒自律机制的一个可行方向.     

The Strategic Challenge of Continuous Change in Multi-Platform Media Organizations—A Strategy-as-Practice Perspective

This article focuses on the complexities of managing multi-platform strategies in the complex and highly dynamic environments of contemporary media markets. Based on a comparative case study of two Nordic media organizations, the article identifies and articulates two sets of practices through which strategy is managed in the continuously changing print and online environments. While the practices that guide strategy development of print publishing tend to be content driven, brand constrained, commercially steered, and top-down monitored, strategizing for online platforms tends to be more technology driven, brand inspired, interactive, and entrepreneurial. For multi-platform media organizations this type of situation is challenging because the incremental and radical innovations that they pursue are platform specific, instead of aiming at exploitation and exploration on both platforms. To succeed in the market, the article argues, multi-platform media organizations need to develop strategies and organizational practices that allow them to be truly ambidextrous—to pursue both incremental and radical change—on all platforms.     

多元诉求共生:传媒组织绩效评价维度分析

传媒组织绩效评价以组织价值最大化为价值取向。本文基于传媒组织本质属性、组织战略目标,运用共生理论与方法,考量传媒组织利益相关者对组织的需求与期待,从影响力、责任力、财务力三个方面构建传媒组织三维绩效评价框架,以更客观真实地反映传媒组织绩效评价的有效性。     

面向劣构问题求解的知识管理系统及其构建

首先介绍组织中大量存在的劣构问题的求解现状和存在的问题;其次,在分析面向特定领域劣构问题求解的知识管理系统研究和应用情况的基础上,研究劣构问题的特点及其求解过程,建立一般性劣构问题求解的过程模型,讨论劣构问题求解过程中的知识结构和信息结构,并提出其知识管理系统的设计和实现方式;最后给出系统应用实例。     

发展之困与“突围”之道——2008年我国传媒经济学研究概述

本文主要通过对2008年新闻传播类相关期刊文献的回顾分析,从学科本身、传媒产品、传媒组织行为、媒体市场结构、传媒产业结构、政策与规制等六个方面综述了2008年国内传媒经济研究的进展,并指出了不足和今后的研究建议。     

Theoretical Approaches to the Management of the Public Service Media Firm

This article argues the need for a theory of the media firm. Universal theories of management and context-dependent contingency theories of management control are identified. Other theoretical approaches to media organizations are reviewed: media management, theories of not-for-profit organizations, and theories of political management. The contribution to the theory of the media firm by 2 French scientists is analyzed-Bourdieu and Debray. This article concludes that a theory of the public service media firm needs to use several building blocks, some with relatively well-known sources, some with more recent origins. Avenues for further research are indicated, which may add angles to the development of a theory of managment in the public service media firm.     

BRITISH COMPANY MAGAZINES, 1878–1939: THE ORIGINS AND FUNCTIONS OF HOUSE JOURNALS IN LARGE-SCALE ORGANISATIONS

In the 1880s company magazines began to appear in large-scale British organizations. By the 1930s almost every corporation had one. Based on business archives and using a combination of business and media history, this article attempts to map the rise and spread of the company magazine. At the same time, it examines the organizational roles and functions of this media. Company magazines came to perform a number of important roles within large-scale business such as the construction of corporate identity, the creation of organizational culture, the validation and negation of managerial power and the evolution of industrial welfare. It is the multi-faceted nature of the company magazine that suggests the rise in its importance, and also its centrality to those interested in the relationship between business and media history.     

Knowledge spaces in the Internet and Semantic Web (Part 2)

This paper is the second part of the article with the same title. In the first part, the general aspects of a new field known as the Semantic Web and the history of the issue, the basic challenges for the establishment of knowledge spaces in the Internet, and problems in the extraction of knowledge from texts in natural languages (NLs) that arise in this context were discussed; as well, a review of designs and systems developed by foreign teams and organizations was presented. The aim of this article is to make a science metric analysis of publications on the subject in the proceedings of key Russian conferences. Based on this analysis, which was conducted with the use of special means for extraction of information from texts, research groups and lines of investigation in the field of interest in Russia and the member countries of the Commonwealth of Independent States are discovered; it is inteded to complete their consideration in the third part of this study.     

Audience Engagement,Reciprocity, and the Pursuit of Community Connectedness in Public Media Journalism

In light of the media industry’s growing focus on audience engagement, this article explores how online and offline forms of engagement unfold within journalism, based on a comparative case study of two American public media newsrooms. This study addresses gaps in the literature by (1) examining what engagement means for public media and (2) applying the concept of reciprocal journalism to evaluate the nature of reciprocity (direct, indirect, or sustained) in the give-and-take between journalists and their communities. Drawing on direct observation and in-depth interviews, this article shows how this emerging focus on engagement is driven by public media journalists’ desire to make their relationship with the public more enduring and mutually beneficial. We find that such journalists privilege offline modes of engagement (e.g., listening sessions and partnerships with local organizations) in hopes of building trust and strengthening ties with their community, more so than digital modes of engagement (e.g., social media) that are more directly tied to news publishing. Moreover, this case study reveals that public media organizations, in and through their engagement efforts, are distinguishing between the communities they cover in their reporting and the audiences they reach with their reporting.     

Paradoxes of Strategic Renewal in Traditional Print-Oriented Media Firms

This article continues and extends the emerging scholarship of strategic media management by examining the day-to-day challenges that media managers face when managing strategic renewal in traditional print-oriented media firms. The aim, in particular, is to shed light on the tensions and paradoxical situations that middle managers need to deal with in contexts where taken-for-granted industry recipes and well-established business practices have become problematized as a result of industry-wide technological and cultural change. Based on an empirical case study, the article identifies and elaborates on three interconnected paradoxes, rooted in the history of the company and past decisions of its top-management: (1) balancing employees’ needs for stability with organizational needs for change; (2) bridging employees’ needs for security and tradition and the organizational need for learning and taking risks; as well as (3) reconciling employees’ needs to “focus on themselves” with organizational needs to collaborate for collective success. Theoretically, the article contributes to the literature by working toward a new paradox perspective on managing strategic renewal in media organizations. This theoretical perspective is offered as an interpretive framework for empirically exploring and critically examining the dynamics and complexities of strategic media management in the continuously changing business environments of the industry.