Simone Elizabeth Murray

‘Celebrating the story the way it is’: cultural studies, corporate media and the contested utility of fandom

In August 1998 the entertainment industry press announced that New Zealandbased director Peter Jackson had signed an agreement with Time Warner (TW) subsidiary New Line Cinema to produce three live-action, feature-length film adaptations of J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings trilogy (Ascher-Walsh, 1998, p. 109). Within weeks of the official announcement, Jackson participated in the first of two online question-and-answer (Q&A) sessions with Harry Knowles’ influential film update and spoiler Website Ain’t it Cool News (AICN). Knowles offered to act as intermediary between the film project and the highly active global Tolkien fan base by compiling 20 questions to put to the director from amongst the hundreds submitted by fans curious regarding Jackson’s vision for the films, yet anxious that their emotional investment in Tolkien’s work was to be exploited then disregarded by a commercially driven Hollywood franchise. The incident is emblematic in that the world’s largest media conglomerate was seen publicly engaging with a gadfly low-budget spoiler site more commonly regarded within the industry as an irritant for its habit of flouting studio confidentiality agreements and posting damning reviews from pre-release test screenings. For Knowles, the studio-endorsed Q&A sessions confirm that Hollywood has overcome its distaste for AICN’s rogue tactics and has decided instead to pursue a policy of tactical engagement, seeking to incorporate AICN’s global online community into its pre-release publicity strategies. Jackson’s comment that ‘using Harry’s site was the only way I could imagine reaching all of you [the Tolkien fan

Brand loyalties: rethinking content within global corporate media

Translating content from one media platform to another, a process here dubbed content streaming, is the leitmotif of contemporary globalized media. Yet widely divergent interpretations of the phenomenon have emerged. Academic political economy interprets content streaming as powerfully inimical to cultural diversity, media competition and freedom of speech. Mainstream business reporting, working from an opposing media economics schema, pillories ‘synergy’-based content strategies as oversold in theory and unworkable in practice. Challenging this established trend for the disciplines to develop in parallel, the article harnesses mainstream critique of content streaming to political economy’s traditionally circumspect view of corporate media. Examining first the commercial rationales for pursuing content streaming, before turning to the financial and managerial constraints on realizing these goals, the article positions content streaming as less all-pervasive than political economists have feared, but more commercially entrenched than the financial press currently allows.

Mixed media : feminist presses and publishing politics

Acknowledgements Introduction 1 Books With Bite: Virago Press and the Politics of Feminist Conversion 2 Books of Integrity: Dilemmas of Race and Authenticity in Feminist Publishing 3 Opening Pandoras Box: The Rise of Academic Feminist Publishing 4 Collective Unconscious: The Demise of Radical Feminist Publishing 5 This Book Could Change Your Life: Feminist Bestsellers and the Power of Mainstream Publishing Afterword: Feminist Publishing Beyond the Millennium: Inscribing Womens Print Heritage in a Digital Future Notes Bibliography Index

Servicing ‘self-scheduling consumers’ Public broadcasters and audio podcasting

Podcasting has moved rapidly from the underground and pirate radio fringe to the heart of public-service media, with the BBC, NPR, CBC and Australia’s ABC all early adopters of the technology. The public-service broadcasting (PSBing) ethos appears both compatible with, and challenged by, the podcasting phenomenon. Podcasting’s appeal lies in its capacity for time-shifting, portable consumption and global distribution of audio content. Moreover, podcasting piggybacks on existing distribution infrastructure, and is particularly appealing to technologically savvy youth audiences whom public-service broadcasters (PSBers) traditionally have difficulty attracting. Yet podcasting simultaneously creates highly fragmented audiences with doubtful brand loyalty. Equally problematically, the medium’s relationship to commercial media has been close from its inception, as the term ‘podcasting’ itself suggests. It is precisely podcasting’s complex relationship with PSBing ideals — both complementary and potentially conflictual — which makes it such a rich case-study for examining the continued viability of PSBing in the digital media environment.

Media Convergence's Third Wave: Content Streaming

Movies, pieces of music, books, or newspapers can all be expressed in the same binary code. Discrete forms of analogue media are just different dialects of the language of computerese. Content is becoming a very liquid asset. To take Marshall McLuhans famed dictum a step further: The message is now independent of the medium. 1

'Live and local'?: The significance of digital media for writers' festivals

Literary festivals throughout the English-speaking world have been enthusiastic adopters of digital technology: uploading podcasts of author talks, posting videos of panel sessions to video-sharing sites such as YouTube, inviting guest bloggers to comment on proceedings and encouraging live-tweeting as a means of reinforcing audience members’ participatory agency. Such innovations serve to expand festivals’ reach to encompass dispersed audiences and, moreover, increase the longevity of previously transient events. They hence provide evidence to justify writers’ festivals’ claims on public funding as well as to delineate vibrant online and offline bookish communities of interest. However, wholesale uptake of digital technology destabilizes some previous givens of the literary festival as they have coalesced since the phenomenon’s 1980s efflorescence. The concept of authorship undergoes profound changes in a climate of online performativity, constant availability to readerships and digitally diminished ‘aura’. Equally, previously passive audiences are reconceptualized as amateur critics, co-publicists and even co-publishers in the case of crowdsourced subscription publishing. Festival programming may be sampled live or archived, and audiences are only partially tethered to a particular geographical location – a disarticulation taken to another level by emerging online-only writers’ festivals such as the #TwitterFiction Festival and the Digital Writers’ Festival. What are the implications of these shifts for our conceptualization of 21st-century literary community? This article seeks to address this question by proposing a theoretical framework for examining the digital/literary festival interface, analyzing a wide range of terrestrial and online-only festivals and underpinning this analysis with empirical audience interviewing conducted at multiple Australian and UK writers’ festivals and book towns. In bringing together these strands, the article presents a detailed picture of an important and currently underexplored dimension of the public encounter with literature at a moment of profound digital change.

‘Selling’ Literature: The cultivation of book buzz in the digital literary sphere

How have book marketing, publicity, and retailing changed with the dominance of the internet? Clearly, e-commerce has altered who the major players are: battles between market-dominating Amazon and its various retail and publishing adversaries are well documented. But, more pervasively, how has the rise of the digital literary sphere changed the whole manner in which books are ‘sold’ to potential readers, not only in the sense of a commercial transaction, but in the broader sense of ‘selling’ readers on the idea of bookishness? Examining innovations in digital book marketing such as book trailers and blog tours, this article explores how the digital literary sphere is transforming notions of contemporary book community. It probes whether existing theories and methods for studying the contemporary literary ecosystem are adequate to account for these new realities.

'Remix My Lit' Towards an Open Access Literary Culture

The publishing buzzword of the last few years has undoubtedly been ‘open access’. But typically this has referred to scientific journal publishing, only recently expanding to include humanities research. This article goes further in asking what might an open access literary culture look like? Developments around online publishing, electronic-books, print on demand and digital libraries see publishers facing challenges on every side. How might publishers’ traditional role as gatekeepers of literary culture be similarly usurped in an environment characterized by networked books, wiki-novels and fictional ‘rip and burn’ practices? Outlining three exciting recent experiments in open-access literature, this article considers what the digital future of literature might look like, and what its impact will be on writers, publishers and readers.