Northern Lights: Film & Media Studies Yearbook - Volume 10, Issue 1, 2012

Understanding creative industries in general and media work in particular poses a fascinating paradox: as people worldwide engage with media in an increasingly immersive, always-on, almost instantaneous and interconnected way, the very people whose livelihoods and sense of professional identity depend on delivering content and experiences across such media seem to be at a loss on how to come up with survival strategies – in terms of business models, effective regulatory practices (e.g. copyrights and universal access provisions), and perhaps most significantly the organization of entrepreneurial working conditions that support and sustain the creative process needed to meet the demands of a global market saturated with media. This article proposes a model for professional identity in media work that engages with these questions, based on past, present and ongoing personal experiences of one of the authors as a self-employed media worker in multiple creative industries.

In the age of convergence, the American television industry is turning to the production of media content that can be accessed through a range of platforms. In this study, we research to which degree this is also true for the European case of Flanders, investigating the elements that are part of contemporary television texts on the one hand, and the production process of these expanded television texts on the other. Production analyses of four Flemish fiction series show that cross- and transmedia applications are rather limited, especially on commercial television. Most of the programme extensions are situated within traditional media and are purely commercial extensions. Based on analysis of in-depth interviews with producers of each case, the article concludes that transmedia extensions are not integrated in the production process because of budgetary restrictions and a widespread disbelief in the benefits of transmedia stories.

This article argues for a genre approach in the analysis of changing production cultures. It supports the fruitfulness of this approach using results from a study of satirical sketch comedy production in Danish public service television. The article outlines the paradigmatic changes to the production practices of satire in the period from 1999 to 2009, during which the competition in the Danish television system intensified. On the basis of these results, the article discusses an emerging production culture of ‘auteur-like’ entertainment suited to new media platforms used by the public service media, and driven by media-referential comedy. This production culture developed alongside a production culture of entertainment focused on versioning international television formats. This development indicates that multiple and relatively autonomous production cultures coexist within a larger television entertainment production system with very different consequences for the entertainment output at large.

This article proposes a framework for how to approach case studies of production processes in the field of film and media studies, drawing on theories from the field of creativity research, e.g. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s systems view of creativity and models of creative processes from the school of creative problem solving (CPS). The article suggests how to think of film production as an interplay between individuals, the domain and the field and how to understand production processes as different stages in a problem-finding and problem-solving effort. The aim is to encourage further discussions about the challenges of doing production studies, since the highly complex and contextual process of creating new film and media products raises a number of questions about how to conceive of creative work and how to study it.

The use of the script as a detailed blueprint for the production of a mainstream narrative film was established by the early 1910s for the purposes of saving costs and controlling quality, and this is no less the case today. This article discusses the expansion of ‘the blueprint’ as writers have encountered specific demands on their production planning and have embraced a wealth of ways to think about the narrative and emotional trajectories of movies. These newer demands include budgeting considerations such as product placement, fan satisfaction and the author-function; contemporary theories about storytelling; cultivation of franchises through sequels and serial storytelling; and multiple platforms for the narrative universe.

While recent studies have engaged critically with the publication of news on multiple platforms, and the competition to mainstream media from non-traditional online news platforms, scholars have devoted less attention to the changes brought about to the production of news by the host of online sources becoming available for journalism. This article investigates the way in which the availability and competition from digital sources place the production of news from war zones in transition. Theoretically, metacoverage is introduced as one prevailing strategy applied by mainstream news media, when following up on stories launched by non-traditional, online media actors. The empirical point of departure for this article is the coverage of WikiLeaks’ publication in 2010 of the gun camera video Collateral Murder in three US, three UK and three Danish newspapers, which focused on the changing conditions for news production.

News media are forming omnipresence strategies to become accessible anytime, anywhere and through any device. Mobile news services and mobile applications play an increasingly influential role in contemporary newspapers. This is an in-depth study of a newspaper organization contemplating the challenges coupled with mobile media. It shows how heterogeneous sensemaking processes emerge among media workers from editorial, business and IT departments. Most importantly, it shows two polarized constellations within the newspaper organization when it comes to the shaping of its mobile application. Several arguments were used in their respective rhetoric, and at the loci of their attention was the negotiation of a producer- versus a participation-centric design. An alliance of media workers from the editorial and IT departments won ground for their producer-centric proposal, enacting an iPhone application primarily based on auto-directed flows of traditional news reporting. They produced a self-fulfilling prophecy, creating cues for other newspapers in a newspaper industry characterized by isomorphism.

Drawing on an analysis of three entertainment formats with a participatory element provided by new technology, the article discusses to what degree contemporary TV production is in transition as a result of technological convergence. A point of departure is the host–audience ‘parasocial’ relationship and experienced intimacy at a distance, which was already identified in the early days of television. The article argues that, with the introduction of digital return channels and the increased production of multi-platform formats, the audience has become an external production unit. Its members are expected to provide feedback to the programme, and the producers are dependent on their text messages and votes to be included in the narrative and thus have a certain degree of influence on the production. The hosts thus encourage viewers to engage via digital return channels, and use techniques such as pedagogic instructions, sales strategies and semi-private intimacy. As a result, TV production is increasingly about producing a dialogue with the viewers, and about facilitating ‘social TV’ experiences via second platform interactivity.