Category Archives: Media Studies

Amanda Lotz quoted in NYTimes

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Amanda D. Lotz, author of The Television Will Be Revolutionized (NYU Press, 2007), snags a mention and a quote in a New York Times article today on the cult hit “Arrested Development.” The Emmy-winning show makes a long-awaited return on Sunday, starting a new life as a Netflix original series.

Check out the excerpt below.

For Netflix, “Arrested Development” is a way to make its 36 million subscribers happy and a way to sign up even more. In April, when the company released its first quarter earnings (revenues and profits were up by double digits), its chief executive, Reed Hastings, predicted that “Arrested” would be an “absolutely spectacular phenomenon.”

Amanda Lotz, a University of Michigan professor of communications studies, predicted an outcome like this in a 2007 book, “The Television Will Be Revolutionized.” By then, “Arrested” was off Fox. Ms. Lotz wondered if video-on-demand viewers in the future would buy a subscription for the show, given its cult hit status. The key, she said in an e-mail message this month, was “the emergence of alternatives to advertiser support.”

→ Read the full article: “Bananas, Anyone? The Bluths Are Back”

Notes from Betsy…on Spring books

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Greetings from NYU Press Publicity! My Instagram account is flooded with images of cherry blossoms, dogs rolling in grass, and ballpark festivities. SPRING HAS SPRUNG! To celebrate the spring season, I thought it would be fun to catch up on a few of the big media hits so far. Some of the tantalizing bits of knowledge you will take away include: can jury duty really be enjoyable?; how does media spread?; why this country needs two presidents; what if the United Nations was based in Detroit?; living in New York City through one reporter’s eyes; is the United States really post-racial?; and exciting titles to look out for.

WHY JURY DUTY MATTERS

Author Andrew Guthrie Ferguson is on a quest to convince us that jury duty is fun, and at the very least, our most important civic duty apart from voting. Listen to his convincing interviews on WAMU’s “The Kojo Nmadi Show”; KPCC’s “Airtalk” and WYPR’s “Mid-Day.” The Baltimore Sun makes mention—and Greta Van Susteren knows a good thing when she sees one. Also, May is Juror Appreciation Month! See Andrew’s piece on The Atlantic’s website.

SPREADABLE MEDIA

The name Henry Jenkins will stop any media junkie, cos-play boy or girl, and Comi-con regular in their tracks. Find out what all the hype is about: Jenkins and co-author, Sam Ford, on KBOO-FM; Sam Ford’s article on WSJ.com’s “Speakeasy;” an interview with the authors on New Books in Journalism; and a shout-out on Mediabistro’s journalism & tech blog, 10,000 Words. Jenkins and his co-authors also made an appearance at SXSW!


TWO PRESIDENTS ARE BETTER THAN ONE

Two heads are better than one; good things come in pairs; and according to our author, two presidents would be better than one. Need some convincing? No problem! See author David Orentlicher’s interview with the Chicago Tribune; his appearance on C-SPAN’s “Book TV”; and his radio interviews with KPCC’s “Airtalk” and Wisconsin Public Radio’s “Joy Cardin Show.”


CAPITAL OF THE WORLD

Probably the coolest coverage so far for Capital of the World was the essay Foreign Policy commissioned from author Charlene Mires—they asked her to imagine if Detroit had won the bid to become the home of the United Nations, and how that would have affected the future of the city. Other coverage included a review in the Wall Street Journal; an interview on C-SPAN’s “Book TV”; a feature in PRI’s “The World” ; a spot in the New York Times‘ Bookshelf; and an hour with KERA’s “Think.”

HABITATS

New Yorkers are obsessed with where other New Yorkers live. In Habitats, New York Times writer, Constance Rosenblum gives readers that fly-on-the-wall experience in some of the most fabulous, wild, and unbelievable homes across the 5 boroughs. The New Republic reviewed the book and our sadistic history of real estate voyeurism, while NY1 raved about the collection here. And if you’re in Manhattan next Tuesday, 5/14, stop by the 92Y Tribeca at noon to hear Connie read from some of her favorite sections!

GHOSTS OF JIM CROW

Electing an African American president had many declaring that the United States had finally moved beyond race. F. Michael Higginbotham argues we still have a long way to go in his new book, Ghosts of Jim Crow. You can hear more of what he has to say in interviews with Oregon Public Radio; Dallas Public Radio; and Balitmore Public Radio.

Look out for the next round-up coming soon!  We have some exciting titles pubbing in the next few months including We Will Shoot Back, A Death at Crooked Creek, and Rebels at the Bar, so more fantastic coverage is surely on the way.

Digital journalism and the end of church and state

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—Michael Serazio

For generations of journalists, the separation of “church and state” referred not just to First Amendment protections for secular Americans. It was also the metaphorical way of phrasing an enduring ideal: that the business side of a news outlet would not encroach on the autonomy of the editorial side.

For advertisers, however, this was always an uneasy bargain. Audiences, they’ve long known, fundamentally mistrust advertising. For this reason, as I show in my new book, Your Ad Here, advertising often gets created to blend in, “guerrilla-style,” with contexts that don’t look like advertising.

In the case of newspapers, this explained those full-page “articles” written by a brand or marketer that affected the appearance of editorial content without the pretense of objectivity about the subject. Given the choice, the marketer surely wouldn’t have opted for “Advertisement” to run in small letters atop the piece, as it usually did – the newspaper’s equivalent of handling such content with Hazmat gloves.

Alas, newspapers have been in steady decline for the better part of a decade, as audiences consume more and more content through online sources. And, as the New York Times reported this week, a new set of norms for handling that sponsored material may well be taking shape.

It turns out that press venues both new and old – including The Washington Post, The Atlantic, Huffington Post, and Buzzfeed – have increasingly been accommodating brand-backed articles or, as I call it, “advertainment.” Because advertisers are discovering online – as they long knew of their print-based output – that banner ads are often annoying, irrelevant, and ineffective, alternatives must be considered.

“It is, in fact, content,” defended one representative at Forbes Media, which has experimented with these partnerships. “It’s not advertising.” One of the hallmarks of guerrilla marketing is precisely that self-effacement of the sales component in favor of something more desirable: here, journalistic reportage.

But for either the advertiser or the press representative to pretend that being “indistinguishable” is not their goal here – well, I’ve got a nice bridge connecting Brooklyn and Manhattan that they might be interested in buying.  Perhaps their reporters could do a “sponsored story” helping me make the sale.

Michael Serazio is Assistant Professor of Communication at Fairfield University and the author of Your Ad Here: The Cool Sell of Guerrilla Marketing (NYU Press, 2013). You can follow him on Twitter @michaelserazio.

Defining the “cool sell”

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Newsflash, Internet friends and media lovers!
Your Ad Here, a new addition to our stellar Postmillenial Pop series, publishes this Friday, April 5.

The book explores the rise of guerrilla marketing (think: covert, even creepy, commercial persuasion)—and what author Michael Serazio calls the “cool sell” approach, defined for us below.

cool sell [kool-sel]
noun, verb, pranks, stunts

  1. A way to cut through the clutter of competing information.  
  2. By definition, an allusion to McLuhan. 
  3. A financial model that could save/destroy the media industries. 
  4. The reason Heineken paid $45 million to get in the hands of James Bond. 
  5. As Kalle Lasn suggested, the opiate of our time. 
  6. How Pabst Blue Ribbon hooked the hipsterati. 
  7. Corporate street art and branded flash mobs. 
  8. Why your buzz agent friends might sell you out for a free sample. 
  9. Manufacturing authenticity; AstroTurfing the grassroots. 
  10. Scheming memes for your tweets and status updates. 
  11. The pretense of populism that comes with “going viral.” 
  12. How Blair Witch became the most profitable movie ever. 
  13. Rethinking the medium itself used for advertising. 
  14. A new book from NYU Press available April 5.

New-model publishing at MLA

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—Monica McCormick

In January, I went to the annual meeting of the Modern Language Association (MLA) for the first time. It was an illuminating and energizing few days. In my job as head of NYU’s digital publishing office, a joint effort of NYU Libraries and NYU Press, I help to develop and implement strategies for engaging with scholars who produce new-model publications. For the Press, these strategies are central to our shift, now well underway, from being solely a print-book publisher to becoming a publisher of scholarship in a variety of forms and media.

So I have paid attention to the growing emphasis at MLA (as well as at academic conferences across the disciplines) in the digital humanities (DH). Notoriously tricky to define in brief, DH is a wide-ranging field that includes scholars who employ computational methods to study traditional evidence like literary texts, historical data, and cultural artifacts, and those who use humanistic methods to understand digital media and culture. This work results not only in print and digital books or journals, but also in databases, digital archives, online maps, complex visualizations, and more.

via @robincamille

Some of the highest-profile events at MLA were focused on DH, including a presidential forum, Avenues of Access: Digital Humanities and the Future of Scholarly Communication, immediately preceded by a panel on The Dark Side of Digital Humanities that engendered considerable debate on Twitter even as it occurred. These two could be read as the ends of the continuum of arguments about DH – its potential and its risks.

During my time at the DH and scholarly communication sessions, I focused on how publishers might find new ways of engaging with such work. The takeaways: We see not only tremendous variety in publishing modes and formats (text, audio, video, games, and combinations of those) but also shared concerns about how to assess, share, cite and preserve these new publication types for future scholars. Whatever we at NYU Press build and however we distribute it, we’ll have to grapple with these issues.

The panel I was on, “Beyond the PDF: Experiments in Open Access Scholarly Publishing,” presented five different publishing projects that rely on technology as diverse as listservs, blogging platforms, and purpose-built software to publish scholarship. I discussed MediaCommons, the NYU-supported digital scholarly network, and our focus not only on providing access to the content but also on tools for collaboration and engagement with it. Though each panelist’s projects had different emphases, we are all working on how to peer review new-model publications and how to demonstrate the quality and impact of this work so that it can be evaluated for tenure and promotion.

Another key theme was the relationship between work that appears online, then in print, and perhaps back to online, addressed in the panel Rewards and Challenges of Serial Scholarship. A generative example is Debates in Digital Humanities, edited by Matthew Gold of CUNY and published by Douglas Armato, director of the University of Minnesota Press. The two of them first met via Twitter, where they were part of the same loose network of folks discussing DH. At MLA 2011, they hatched the idea for this book, which assembles a series of essays, many of which originated as blog posts. The print book was published only a year later, in time for MLA 2012, following a peer-review process where the contributors read and commented on each other’s work and the Press solicited its usual reviews. Then, at this year’s MLA, they released an interactive open-access online edition. Readers’ engagement with the material online is expected to lead to a new print edition in due course. Everything about this project, from its genesis online, through its editorial development and review, to the mix of publication types, strikes me as helpful for thinking through what new-model publishing requires.

As NYU Press moves forward with new-model publishing, we will look for projects that help us to learn new skills and engage with scholars and their audiences in innovative ways, as we maintain our emphasis on quality, cutting-edge scholarship. What I saw at MLA underlines my conviction that the future of scholarly publishing will not force us into binary choices (print vs. digital, paid vs. free, “traditional” vs. “experimental”) but will, rather, require us to balance many possibilities.

Monica McCormick is the Program Officer for Digital Scholarly Publishing at New York University. Read an interview with Monica, from The Chronicle of Higher Education, here. You can also find her on Twitter @moncia.

Introduction to Spreadable Media

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At long last, Spreadable Media by Henry Jenkins, Sam Ford, and Joshua Green has published!

This week marked the book’s debut, along with the final roll out of web exclusive essays, all available in the enhanced online component to the book. Written by a range of contributors, from media scholars to game designers, the essays expand upon the core ideas outlined in Spreadable Media. Read them here.

To wrap up the week, we’re also featuring the full introduction to Spreadable Media: Creating Value and Meaning in a Networked Culture for free (in the name of spreadability). Read it below. And remember to spread!

Introduction to Spreadable Media

5 NYU Press books named Choice Outstanding Academic Titles for 2012

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We are *thrilled* to announce five (yep, count ‘em—FIVE) NYU Press books have been named Choice Outstanding Academic Titles for 2012.

Honoring “the best of the best” in scholarly publishing, Choice’s Outstanding Academic Titles list contains just over 9 percent of some 7,000 works reviewed in Choice during the past year (and less than 3 percent of more than 25,000 titles submitted during this same period). You can find the entire list in the January 2013 issue of Choice.

In celebration, NYU Press is offering 20 percent off each title. Enter promo code CHOICE13 at check out to save on all five award-winners, including The Tender Cut; Planned Obsolescence; Highway under the Hudson; A Troubled Marriage; and The Bully Society. Offer expires February 15, 2013.

Congratulations to our authors, editors, and to everyone who worked on these books!

Announcing our Spring 2013 Catalog…

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NYU Press Spring 2013 Catalog is now online, featuring an exciting range of new books in history, media studies, law, and more!

Highlights include:
TWO PRESIDENTS ARE BETTER THAN ONE: Making the case for a two-party, two-person presidency, this “pipe dream of a book” presents a “novel and provocative thesis worth hearing out” (Kirkus Reviews).

A DEATH AT CROOKED CREEK: Marion Wesson, author of best-selling and prize-winning legal novels including Render up the Body, combines drama and intrigue  with cutting-edge forensic investigation techniques and legal theory in this superbly imagined historical novel.

CAPITAL OF THE WORLD: Charlene Mires tells the dramatic, surprising, and at times comic story of hometown promoters in an extraordinary race to host the U.N. headquarters at a pivotal moment in history.

(You can also click here to access this catalog via our website, or find our catalogs available on Edelweiss.)

New Spreadable Media essays: Week 3

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We’re at week three since launching the online component of Spreadable Media: Creating Value and Meaning in a Networked Culture!

Here are this week’s round of web exclusive essays written by selected contributors who have shaped the argument put forth in Spreadable Media:

  • “The Value of Retrogames“—Bob Rehak, a film and media studies professor at Swarthmore College, examines how grassroots interest in residual media and culture may coalesce online, sparking new kinds of cultural practices and production.
  • Clothing has passed between different kinds of exchanges for centuries, acquiring different meanings and values in the process—and, in “A Global History of Secondhand Clothing,” filmmaker and MIT media historian Hanna Rose Shell traces and examines those shifting sartorial roles.
  • In “Retrobrands and Retromarketing,” York University professor Robert V. Kozinets discusses the strategies through which companies engage in “retrobranding,” reviving or relaunching brands from the past in ways that capitalize on existing fandoms and provide launching points for the creation of new markets.

Check ‘em out, and stay tuned at http://spreadablemedia.org/essays—where each week leading up to the book’s publication (in January 2013!), a new batch of exclusive essays will be released.

(And hey! Feel free to debate/critique/trash each piece in the comments section. Expand the conversation, transform the ideas. That’s how spreadable media works.)

New Spreadable Media essays: Week 2

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Last week we launched the online component of Spreadable Media: Creating Value and Meaning in a Networked Culture at http://spreadablemedia.org.

As promised, here is another round of web exclusive essays by selected contributors who have shaped the argument put forth in Spreadable Media:

Whitney Phillips—doctoral student in English at the University of Oregon—discusses the use of memes as tools for creativity and production in her essay, “In Defense of Memes.”

MIT media historian William Uricchio traces some key chapters of “The History of Spreadable Media“ in his essay.

University of California–Berkeley media studies professor Abigail De Kosnik examines the labor that fans often provide for media producers in “Interrogating “Free” Fan Labor.”

In “Co-creative Expertise in Gaming Cultures,” Queensland University of Technology researcher John Banks examines the organizational challenges introduced in the process of making and circulating media content.

North Carolina State University marketing professor Stacy Wood explores the value people place on recommendations from everyday people and their potential impact on brands in her essay, “The Value of Customer Recommendations.”

Check ‘em out, and stay tuned at http://spreadablemedia.org/essays—where each week leading up to the book’s publication, a new batch of exclusive essays will be released.

(And hey! Feel free to debate/critique/trash each piece in the comments section. Expand the conversation, transform the ideas. That’s how spreadable media works.)

Spreadable Media: Online

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Media scholars, communication professionals, and social media fans—rejoice! The online component of Spreadable Media: Creating Value and Meaning in a Networked Culture has launched!

http://spreadablemedia.org

This extension of the printed book (which publishes in early 2013) offers additional #spreadablemedia material you won’t find in the text, including web exclusive essays by a range of contributors who have shaped the argument put forth in Spreadable Media.

 

To kick things off, we’re featuring web exclusive essays from recent Futures of Entertainment conference speakers.

The one and only Henry Jenkins offers us two exclusive essays: “Twitter Revolutions?” and “Joss Whedon, the Browncoats, and Dr. Horrible.”

Electrified Games designer Alec Austin considers the emotional dimensions of a “moral contract” between producers and audiences in his essay, “The Implicit Contract.”

Ted Hovet, film studies director at Western Kentucky University, examines the way archival content is appraised for value by students and instructors alike in “YouTube and Archives in Educational Environments.”

Anthropologist Grant McCracken explores how companies describe the economic and cultural value generated by audience activities in “Consumers or Multipliers?” 

Sheila Murphy Seles, Director of Digital and Social Media for the Advertising Research Foundation, details the economic value of audience engagement in “Chuck v. Leno.”

Ana Domb, Director of Brand Innovation at Almabrands in Chile, describes complex forms of participation around a Brazilian popular music form in her case study, “Tecnobrega’s Productive Audiences.”

And finally, Xiaochang Li—doctoral student in the Department of Media, Culture, and Communications at NYU—explores the transnational movement of media in “Transnational Audiences and East Asian Television.”

Check ‘em out, and stay tuned at http://spreadablemedia.org/essays—where each week leading up to the book’s publication, a new batch of exclusive essays will be released.

(And hey! Feel free to debate/critique/trash each piece in the comments section. Expand the conversation, transform the ideas. That’s how spreadable media works.)

Before the polls close: Early lessons from the 2012 campaign

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—Michael Serazio

On this eve of the 2012 presidential election, the victor and final outcome remain, of course, unknown to us. Yet independent of tomorrow’s Electoral College tally, a number of campaign patterns and marketing trends already seem triumphant. Presidential contests offer the country, among many other things, a quadrennial opportunity to take stock of the state of media, technology, and culture. And irrespective of issues—looking purely at the playing of the game—the 2012 cycle will likely be enshrined in collective memory for its speed, fragmentation, and use of data.

The acceleration of news cycles is, by no means, a phenomenon unique to 2012—sound-bites that lasted, on average, an upwards of 50 seconds in the late 1960s had already shriveled to a mere ten by 1992. Yet in this campaign season, Twitter assumed a key role by further increasing velocity and abridging exposition. Moreover, as the “second screen” site for much social TV-watching during the conventions and debates, it offered an opinion-leader, focus group monitoring tool for campaign staff to gauge conventional wisdom as it took shape in real time. And that medium may, in fact, be handicapping the message and, in turn, the potential for thoughtful policy: As Herman Cain’s director of new media quipped, “Mitt Romney’s 59-point plan can’t fit in a tweet.” But “9-9-9” (pizza discount that it may sound like) needs just five characters to convey tax plans—nuance be damned.

The single most symbolic quote of the election was neither “47%” nor “You didn’t build that,” but arguably a Romney pollster’s intimation that, “We’re not going to let our campaign be dictated by fact-checkers.” And, lo, how both camps could! Even as the press redoubled its fact-checking brigades—including a heroic on-the-spot effort by CNN’s Candy Crowley in the second debate—the capacity of voters to nuzzle in their own fragmented information cocoons meant that campaigns rarely paid the price for playing fast and loose with truthiness. “We don’t collect news to inform us. We collect news to affirm us,” GOP operative Frank Luntz aptly articulated. And with a media whose bias is more toward conflict (be it stupid or substantive) than left or right, and an online space that prizes speed over accuracy, citizens had increasingly fewer arbiters of a common political reality. As an Obama 2008 staffer distressingly noted, “research from campaigns has essentially replaced investigative reporting.”

But perhaps the defining feature of marketing strategy in 2012 has been the sophisticated use of voter data and statistical modeling to persuade and mobilize the electorate. Between hypertargeting via browser cookies and extensive online tracking operations, there is a potential for the granular customization of politics: “Two people in the same house could get different messages… Not only will the message change, the type of content will change,” boasted Romney’s digital director. Moreover, many of those political messages may well deliberately filter in through social networks, both online and off, as campaigns strategize “if, say, a phone call from a distant cousin or new friend would be more likely prompt the urge to cast a ballot.”

As I argue in Your Ad Here, my forthcoming book from NYU Press, the commercial side of the marketing industry has been grappling with many of these patterns and initiatives for years: faster communication environments, fragmenting audience niches, and grassroots scheming through social media. Tomorrow’s winner may well have navigated these challenges successfully through the election season, but the game changes on November 7. You can campaign in poetry in less than 140 characters; governing in prose takes a wider medium.

Michael Serazio is Assistant Professor of Communication at Fairfield University and the author of Your Ad Here: The Cool Sell of Guerrilla Marketing (NYU Press, 2013).