Conceptualizing Continuous Coverage: A Strategic Model for Wall-to-Wall Local Television Weather Broadcasts

The 2005 hurricane season provided unprecedented opportunities for local television stations to serve the public interest in live, often commercial-free, coverage of severe weather. In this examination of four local television stations’ coverage of four Atlantic hurricanes in two Southeastern markets, observed patterns of behavior culminated in the development of the Local Weather Continuous Coverage Model. The study showed that unlike their cable news counterparts, local television news continuous coverage prioritizes weather personnel over live, on-the-scene news reporting. Of all the weather tools used, radar was the most frequently used, followed by watch and warning graphics.     

试论影视艺术专业的传播学教学

近几年来影视艺术专业日渐火爆,传播学是该专业的专业基础课.传统的传播学教学方法已 不适合此类艺术专业的教学.对于影视艺术专业学生,只有因材施教,运用恰当的方法,才会取得理想的教学效果.     

多媒体教学平台的人机接口优化

本文对多媒体教学平台的发展历程作了简单的综述，重点探讨多媒体教学平台的技术发展及人机接口的设计优化的问题，着眼于解决实际应用的需求。     

北京奥运会电视转播权的SWOT分析

运用现代管理学的SWOT分析,剖析了北京奥运会电视转播的优势因素、劣势因素、机遇因素和威胁因素,提出了扩大优势,缩小劣势,把握机遇和化解威胁的若干策略.     

Public and Popular: British and Swedish Audience Trends in Factual and Reality Television

The research in this article examines audience responses to a range of factual and reality genres. It takes as a starting point that television audiences do not experience news or documentary or reality TV in isolation but as part of a range of factual and reality programmes. Factual and reality programming includes a broad understanding of non-fictional programming on broadcast television, satellite, cable and digital television. The breakdown of factual and reality programming into specific genres includes news, current affairs, documentary, and reality programmes, with further sub genres applied within each of these categories. This article critically examines genre evaluation. The quantitative research in this article is based on two national representative surveys conducted in Britain and Sweden. In both Britain and Sweden, programme makers have moved towards a reliance on popular factual genres. In Britain this is across all channels, and in Sweden this is mainly concentrated on commercial channels. Whilst there is still a commitment to news, there is an increasing use of hybrid genres in an attempt to popularise factual output. The impact of this changing generic environment on audiences is that in both countries viewers have reacted by drawing a line between traditional and contemporary factual genres. It is precisely because of the redrawing of the factual map that viewers rely on traditional ways of evaluating genres as public and informative, or popular and entertaining. The data provides evidence that contributes to existing debate on television genre, public service broadcasting, and media literacy skills. The central argument in this article is that genre evaluation is connected with wider socio-cultural discourses on public service broadcasting and popular culture, and that these are common social and cultural values that are shared by national audiences in two Northern European countries.     

“News with an Accent”: Hispanic Television and the Re-negotiation of US Latino Speech

Using Bourdieu's concept of “linguistic capital” as an analytical concept, I examine the value of language as both a means of comprehension and a product that has currency in the television marketplace. Focusing on Fusion, an upstart cable network designed to engage Latinos civically and in English, I examine the ways in which television networks employ language as a device through which to create audiences. I argue that Fusion and other networks are attempting to re-constitute the Latino audience in ways that more closely align with the dominant culture, leading to forms of erasure that challenge the legitimacy of Spanish altogether. I further argue that in the process of pursuing the acculturated Latino, the network pivots away from those most isolated from civic discourses.     

The Staging of Agency in Girls Gone Wild

This paper addresses the ambivalence produced by Girls Gone Wild (GGW) as both text and social practice by interrogating the ways in which it functions hegemonically by staging an effect of agency. I draw on Bakhtin's notion of the carnivalesque as a means to examine how contradictory spatio-temporal contexts of GGW function as spaces that offer the opportunity to momentarily transgress—yet simultaneously reify—white, bourgeois norms of femininity. The videos reinforce a neoliberalist mentality of personal responsibility through the inclusion of the consent—and dissent—processes on camera. After analyzing how postfeminist discourses emphasizing “individual choice” justify GGW as a mode of female empowerment, I turn to a complementary textual analysis of GGW's role-reversal counterpart, Guys Gone Wild (2004), in an effort to show the ways in which this “mirror image” text ultimately reinforces the structure of exploitation in the original.     

In Defense of Gaydar: Reality Television and the Politics of the Glance

The reality dating programs Boy Meets Boy and Playing It Straight purported to illustrate the elusiveness of performing sexual orientation in a culture that increasingly understands sexuality as fluid. By highlighting stereotypes typically associated with both gay and straight men, the shows exposed the difficulties of determining sexual orientation with “gaydar”. Both gay and straight participants were represented as equally incapacitated to identify sexual orientation. In doing so, the programs sought to advance liberal democratic conceptions of tolerance and equality. Employing Foucault's conception of the “glance,” I explore the problems inherent in relocating “gaydar” to the small screen.     

Soft-Core in TV Time: The Political Economy of a “Cultural Trend”

This essay deconstructs popular notions that “sex sells” in an increasingly sexualized U.S. popular culture by examining the specific political, social, and economic forces behind the creation and expansion of Girls Gone Wild, a home video series marketed through television infomercials. The crackdown on hard-core pornography, followed by the opening of television infomercial markets, paved the way for the series’ creator to bring together the structural organization of a new soft-core video industry with the marketing aims of a cable industry eager to sell young, male ratings.     

The Commodity Flow of U.S. Children's Television

This article argues that commodity flow is a defining characteristic of children's television programming, and that this flow of commodity and corporate-brand images builds into the genre a relatively coherent selling ethos. Three-hour blocks of programming, recorded on two different Saturday mornings for several broadcast and cable networks, were analyzed to highlight commodity flow within and between networks. This flow of commodities on children's television indicates a blurring of the distinction between content and promotional forms and illustrates the high level of commercialism targeted at this audience.