M Freeman

Branding consumerism: Cross-media characters and story-worlds at the turn of the 20th century

This article will serve to provide a historicised intervention on the configuration of what have come to be known as cross-media characters, fictional story-worlds, and indeed media branding at the turn of 20th-century America. The study will examine a number of innovative cross-media practices that emerged during the first decade of the 20th century, practices encouraged by the slippage of commercial logos, fictional characters, and brands across platforms, which altogether occurred through the broader rise of modern advertising and the industrialisation of consumer culture. I offer two examples of what can be termed respectively as cross-textual self-promotion and cross-media branding during this historical period, grounded in such cultural factors as turn-of-the-century immigration, new forms of mass media – such as, most notably, newspapers, comic strips and magazines – and consumerism and related textual activities.

Historicising Transmedia Storytelling : Early Twentieth-Century Transmedia Story Worlds

Tracing the industrial emergence of transmedia storytelling—typically branded a product of the contemporary digital media landscape—this book provides a historicised intervention into understandings of how fictional stories flow across multiple media forms. Through studies of the storyworlds constructed for The Wizard of Oz, Tarzan, and Superman, the book reveals how new developments in advertising, licensing, and governmental policy across the twentieth century enabled historical systems of transmedia storytelling to emerge, thereby providing a valuable contribution to the growing field of transmedia studies as well as to understandings of media convergence, popular culture, and historical media industries.

Funding and Management in the Media Convergence Era: Introduction

ABSTRACT Media convergence has been mapped from a variety of perspectives, with scholars tracing the impact of digital convergence, for example, on everything from texts to consumption. Yet, few have examined how the rise of a convergent media landscape is impacting funding in and across contemporary media industries. It is important to examine such a relationship, and to assess ways in which convergent characteristics of connectivity, hybridity and networked society have informed approaches to funding across media sectors. This introductory article to this special issue “Funding and Management in the Media Convergence Era” briefly outlines the approaches of the five authors. Individually, each article examines innovations in funding across a variety of different media sectors and platforms, looking across contemporary children’s television, public service broadcasting, crowdfunded news and journalism, film production in Greece, and Japanese animation. Altogether, the articles in this special issue explore the broader implications of a contemporary media culture that is more sharable, hybridized, and connected on traditional funding models.

Up, Up and Across: Superman, the Second World War and the Historical Development of Transmedia Storytelling

Re-contextualising the industrial evolution of transmedia storytelling—itself typically branded a product of contemporary media convergence—this article examines the industrial role of transmedia storytelling during a period of Classical Hollywood. Exploring the roles of licensing, corporate authorship and cross-industrial relations amidst the cultural context of the Second World War, the article draws on Superman and the expansions of the character’s storyworld across multiple media during the 1940s and 1950s to assess how the media of comics, radio, cinema and television can be recognised during this period as convergent industry platforms where transmedia narratives unfolded.

Global convergence cultures: transmedia earth

Today’s convergent media industries readily produce stories that span multiple media, telling the tales of superheroes across comics, film and television, inviting audiences to participate in the popular universes across cinema, novels, the Web, and more. This transmedia phenomenon may be a common strategy in Hollywood’s blockbuster fiction factory, tied up with digital marketing and fictional world-building, but transmediality is so much more than global movie franchises. Different cultures around the world are now making new and often far less commercial uses of transmediality, applying this phenomenon to the needs and structures of a nation and re-thinking it in the form of cultural, political and heritage projects. This book offers an exploration of these national and cultural systems of transmediality around the world, showing how national cultures – including politics, people, heritage, traditions, leisure and so on – are informing transmediality in different countries. The book spans four continents and twelve countries, looking across the UK, Spain, Portugal, France, Estonia, USA, Canada, Colombia, Brazil, Japan, India, and Russia.

The Routledge companion to transmedia studies

Around the globe, people now engage with media content across multiple platforms, following stories, characters, worlds, brands and other information across a spectrum of media channels. This transmedia phenomenon has led to the burgeoning of transmedia studies in media, cultural studies and communication departments across the academy. The Routledge Companion to Transmedia Studies is the definitive volume for scholars and students interested in comprehending all the various aspects of transmediality. This collection, which gathers together original articles by a global roster of contributors from a variety of disciplines, sets out to contextualize, problematize and scrutinize the current status and future directions of transmediality, exploring the industries, arts, practices, cultures, and methodologies of studying convergent media across multiple platforms.

Introduction: practice and/as media industry research

Media industry studies – an umbrella label that, according to Paul McDonald (2014), is given to ‘the whole body of research and of teaching that is principally concerned with wanting to critically examine the histories, processes, procedures, structures, policies, mechanisms, and professional ideologies that relate to the workings of the media industries’ – is now a focal point at many Universities. And it is not difficult to understand why: the principle ethos of media industry studies or media industry research is that, at its best, it promises the potential for rich dialogues between academia and industry, and between theory and practice. Media, communications and cultural studies (including the likes of film, television, publishing, radio, music and social media channels) are central to the pursuits of media industry research, with academics seeking to investigate and to theorise the industrial workings of these media. This might include their macro social, economic and political influences, their micro production cultures, distribution practices and professional ideologies, or any number of practice-related questions arising from the conditions of production under which media is informed (see, for example, Caldwell 2008; McDonald 2013; Freeman 2016). But while the study of media industries itself indicates a bridging between theory and practice – between the study of media forms and the pragmatics of media making – far less attention has been paid to what the study of media industries looks like as practice-based or practice-led research, or even how collaboration between academia and the media industries actively shapes practice. This themed Special Issue attempts to redress this particular gap, pushing forward the sub-field of media industry research via a more pronounced and emphatic emphasis on practice itself. It presents a selection of contributions from the ‘Practice and/as Media Industry Research’ symposium held at Bath Spa University in June 2017. The symposium intended to provide the opportunity for scholars and practitioners to focus on questions of practice and/as media industry research and aimed to showcase research that considered the complex relationships between the theoretical study of media industries and creative forms of media practice and practice-based media research. The overarching theme to emerge from the symposium was that there is a distinct academic community – whose research spans screen practices, collaborative practice, digital art practices, documentary practices and so on – which encompasses a vibrant body of what can be broadly termed media industry research. While the symposium was particularly interested in showcasing research that had benefitted from collaboration between academics and the media industries, more specifically

Up All Night: The Shifting Roles of Home Media Formats as Transmedia Storytelling

In this age of convergence, where media platforms and industries are becoming increasingly connected and intertwined, ‘transmedia’ has become a buzzword that scholars and industry alike have come to perceive as the media production strategy of the future. When scholars theorise transmedia storytelling, they typically prioritise film, TV, videogames and websites. DVDs and Blu-Rays—physical formats that occupy a vital role in extending and repurposing media content across new terrains—are often overlooked. This chapter will question what specific roles they play in extending stories across media platforms. This chapter explores the specific case studies of Doctor Who and the Marvel Cinematic Universe.

Small Change – Big Difference: Tracking the Transmediality of Red Nose Day

This article analyses transmedia as a non-fictional social phenomenon, discussing the significance of participation, documentary, and community media. Specifically, the article conceptualises transmedia through the lens of charity politics. To do so, I use the Comic Relief charity campaign in the UK to trace how the socials traditions, ways of life and sensibilities associated with Red Nose Day have evolved into emerging digital technologies to shape this charity campaign across the borders of multiple media platforms. Embracing how social specificity informs non-fictional transmedia, I position ‘infotainment’ as a key conceptual basis of non-fictional transmedia, showing how audiences follow the ‘ethos’ of Red Nose Day across multiple media.

Media Industries as Structure: Objectivism and the Societal Context

What are the broader social, economic and political factors at work in shaping the media industries? This chapter focuses on answering this question by considering how the study of such deep political and economic forces in society remain key to considering the larger workings of media industries as outcomes of larger societal forces. I explore how political economy remains a key tool for understanding this societal context of media industries, both in historical and contemporary settings. To demonstrate this approach, Petros Iosifidis examines the political economy of television sports rights.