Gaëtan Tremblay

Creative statistics to support creative economy politics

For ten years, the Labour Party of Tony Blair popularized the notion of ‘creative industries’, a notion that several analysts and commentators have readily used to substitute for the concept of ‘cultural industries’. Gradually, promoters of an economic strategy based on the development of these creative industry sectors have come to generalize this notion, now speaking of the ‘creative economy’. Taken up by technocrats from various countries, and even by those in the United Nations (UN), this approach has enjoyed success. Recently, in April 2008, the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) made public a document written by experts whose explicit objective was to measure the degree of development of the creative economy in all regions of the world, Creative Economy Report 2008. The Challenge of Assessing the Creative Economy: Towards Informed Policy Making (UNCTAD, 2008). The origin of the idea is mainly political, as Nicholas Garnham (2005) and Philip Schlesinger (2007) have clearly shown. It indicates a willingness to economically reposition the United Kingdom (UK) in a world that is more and more globalized, and an attempt to identify the sectors which would make the British economy more competitive on the international scene. Since its initial formulation at the end of the 1990s, the approach, in terms of creative economies, comes from a strategy of distinction. ‘The pursuit of a creativity policy became a national project – “branding” the UK as at the global cutting edge’ (Schlesinger, 2007: 379). The notion rapidly expanded into technocratic and academic circles. Numerous symposiums and reports contributed to its spread at national and international levels. And this strategy of distinction was largely shared since, as UNCTAD has vigorously maintained, creativity is a characteristic of all human beings as well as of all societies. In this globalized world, where the pressure towards uniformity is felt strongly, the economy of creativity would lead in some ways to a new international division of labour based upon the cultural particularities of each country and indeed of each region. The economic policy of creativity would fit nicely with the cultural policy of diversity. This generalization of the notion inevitably challenges researchers who are interested in cultural industries since the creative industries, despite their imprecise definition, seem to integrate and assimilate them. What

iPublish or perish: challenges facing the Québec press in the digital age

Once more in their history, newspapers are facing the challenge of new technologies threatening their very existence. They have had to adapt previously to radio broadcasting and television networks. More recently, the newspaper press has been threatened by the development of the commuter free press. Now, newspapers must find a way to survive the Internet’s competition in the digital era. The challenge is technological and economic, but there is more involved. Behind these technological innovations and along with the financial problems lie deep cultural and political transformations. Reading habits and the way people obtain information are changing. Most Twitter addicts are not prone to reading long and complex articles. This is a tendency that was initiated with the success of the daily tabloids, reinforced by radio and television newscasts and, more recently, with free newspapers distributed on mass public transportation sites like the subway. The aim of this kind of media seems to be always to find shorter and faster ways of communication. With the Internet, people do not have to wait for the morning paper to be informed, nor even the next hour for the radio or television headlines. They can get a summary of the latest news on a lot of websites, on their smartphone, their tablet or their laptop. If they want more, they can find it through a quick search on a browser. Countless blogs and wikis have opened access to ever-increasing sources of information. Do citizens wish to participate in a debate on a given question? They can do it through the social media that have considerably enlarged the space of opinion circulation. All these cultural changes have an impact on the news industry and on political life as well. What is the future of newspapers in the digital era? Do they have a role to play or