Robert Gutsche Jr

Drawing Lines in the Journalistic Sand Jon Stewart, Edward R. Murrow, and Memory of News Gone By

In mid-December 2010, The Daily Show host Jon Stewart asked Congress to address the health care needs of 9/11 rescue workers—which it did. Shortly after, the New York Times published an analysis piece comparing Stewart to the legendary broadcaster Edward R. Murrow. This article explores how collective memory of Murrow was used by both mainstream media and the blogosphere to negotiate membership boundaries of journalism itself, with analysis conducted through textual analysis of online mainstream news texts and blog postings.

The digital animation of literary journalism

Since The New York Times published Snow Fall in 2012, media organizations have produced a growing body of similar work characterized by the purposeful integration of multimedia into long-form journalism. In this article, we argue that just as the literary journalists of the 1960s attempted to write the nonfiction equivalent of the great American novel, journalists of the 2010s are using digital tools to animate literary journalism techniques. To evaluate whether this emerging genre represents a new era of literary journalism and to what extent it incorporates new techniques of journalistic storytelling, we analyze 50 long-form multimedia journalism packages published online from August 2012 to December 2013. We argue that this new wave of literary journalism is characterized by executing literary techniques through multiple media and represents a gateway to linear storytelling in the hypertextual environment of the Web.

Who lost what? An analysis of myth, loss, and proximity in news coverage of the Steubenville rape

This article extends previous research on the application of mythical news narratives in times of great community loss, death, or destruction by taking into account the role of perceived dominant news audiences. This article analyzes 6 months of coverage surrounding the 2012 rape of a 16-year-old girl by two teenage boys in Steubenville, Ohio. The article argues audience proximity to news events contributes to the mythical archetypes used to explain everyday life.

‘It’s better than blaming a dead young man’: Creating mythical archetypes in local coverage of the Mississippi River drownings

This study provides a glimpse at myth within newswork created at the local level during a time of death. Through an analysis of news coverage of the drownings of 10 young men in Wisconsin over 13 years, we examine how myth and narrative are used not just for larger, national or global moments, but within the local newspaper, in news stories that may be influenced by the needs of the local community.

News place-making: applying ‘mental mapping’ to explore the journalistic interpretive community

Scholarship in visual communications, media, and geography explore how news media assign meanings to environment through narratives of and about place. In this study, however, the author aims to move scholarship from evaluating journalistic place representations to exploring the cultural and ideological processes of how these place representations come to be. Understanding how journalists construct place adds depth to knowledge about news as a social and cultural construction, and contributes to previous research on news place-characterizations. This study enacts a methodology called ‘mental mapping’ and serves as a call for communication scholars to consider such participatory methods. Data for this study come from interviews with 30 participants, including reporters from three newspapers, public officials, and residents of Iowa City, USA. In the end, this study identifies a visual methodology for exploring the role and influence of how journalists work and represent place in the news, a process the author calls news place-making.

‘NO OUTLET’: a critical visual analysis of neoliberal narratives in mediated geographies

This article turns to Miami, Florida’s (USA) Upper Eastside – an eclectic stretch of about 20 city blocks in one of the nation’s ‘global cities’ – for a critical visual analysis that uses mapping and photography to explore how neoliberalism is communicated. With an approach that considers geography as a visual ‘vernacular landscape’, this research further supports the role of visual communication as a means to reveal deeper meanings of geography, particularly in terms of identifying ideological qualities of the neoliberal project that are often hidden in plain view. The authors’ photographs and maps supply data for this article, which are then read through the process of ‘geosemiotics’.

Behold the monster: Mythical explanations of deviance and evil in news of the Amish school shooting

In October 2006, Charles Carl Roberts IV walked into a one-room Amish schoolhouse in West Nickel Mines, PA, USA, brandished a handgun, and killed five female students who were all under the age of 13. Through an analysis of 215 news articles published in 10 local, regional, and national newspapers in 2006 and 2007, this article examines news characterizations of Roberts that cast him as a ‘Monster’. We explore interdisciplinary notions of pure evil to expand current literature of news myth to include a form of explanation that appears in news when no other current mythical archetype will suffice. This study complicates current perspectives on news myth by expanding the ideological tools to examine the nature of evil in loss through the example of the Amish shootings.

“Nobody really wants to be called bossy or domineering” : Feminist critique of media “industry speak”

This article examines talks given by 12 female media professionals at a Southern US university’s center on women in communication between 2013 and 2015 to identify the influence of hegemonic masculinity in industry speak about women and professionalism in the fields of journalism, advertising, and public relations. This paper applies a feminist critique of discussions about “work–life balance,” “leaning in,” “emotion,” and language about the role of technology and innovation in women’s careers, to argue that inherent in these discussions about media professionalism are traits that perpetuate binary notions of feminine–masculine traits of the workplace. As a whole, these messages fail to account for notions of intersectionality and perpetuate inequality and masculine power for future professionals.

Book Review: On Media Memory: Collective Memory in a New Media Age

Flusser’s essayistic, even paradoxical, way of asking questions by making bold proclamations is in itself a means of establishing a dialogue with the reader, inviting debate, critical reflection, seeing the structure of the production and distribution of information as central to the way we live and understand the world. In his final chapter, “Chamber Music”—the only title not an infinitive, but a noun—Flusser proposes a scenario:

Book Review: Elizabeth Abel Signs of the Times: The Visual Politics of Jim Crow. Berkeley, LA: University of California Press, 2010. Press, 2010. 391 pp. ISBN 978-0-520-26183-9 (paperback). pp. ISBN 978-0-520-26183-9 (paperback)

Overall, the entire book attempted to prove that no matter how resistant to change film and television production companies might be, media and cultural agents have to negotiate new terrain and cultural policies to meet global market demands that “are shifting focus to creative labor of audiences and interactive media users” (p. 155). This creative labor is going to play a huge role in the future shape of global media economies and ecologies and the people that produce for them. There is a large amount of information packed into 236 pages that cover a huge range of issues. At times, the reader can become lost on a tangent, albeit one related to the subject at hand, but it can be distracting. One also could argue that while the examples presented are very convincing and well analyzed, a broader look at programs coproduced by other countries, ones perhaps less developed but still prolific in production, might strengthen the overall argument. Baltruschat does discuss this and does reference other countries, but it seems there are places here and there where this can be expanded upon to help more clearly illustrate the global nature of media production and coproduction process and the cultural relevance. A strength of this book is that it is written to appeal to a wide range of readers. The industry faction can glean much knowledge about what these productions do, and must do, and find many interesting venues for thought and discussion. Broadcasters and producers can learn what sells and what is involved in the production process; marketers and promoters can see specifically how the “event mentality” is used and is working in one of the most popular reality television programs out there; and the average person who simply wants to understand more about the programming content he or she receives on a television or movie screen will find some relevant answers. In addition, the many who worry that today’s media programs are failing to deliver culturally relevant material, no matter in what continent or by whom that content is produced, might find some potential solutions or at least spark some relevant and timely discussions. Global Media Ecologies is a book deserving of a place in the realm of global media studies. Its appeal lies in that it does what it sets out to—create a compelling, intricate, yet well-researched and presented argument that the global media economy is changing and producers in every country must change with it.