1-Advertising in the global age
Transnational campaigns and pan-European television channels
Jean K. Chalaby
City University, UK, j.chalaby@city.ac.uk
Global Media and Communication
August 2008, Volume 4, No. 2
http://gmc.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/4/2/139

The first pan-regional satellite TV stations in Europe ran into financial difficulties because too few companies had the interest and ability to run international advertising campaigns. Their financial shape improved with the upturn of the pan-European advertising market in the 1990s. The pool of international advertisers expanded as multinationals adjusted their marketing strategy to the challenges and opportunities of globalization. The advertising industry restructured, this article argues, creating media buying agencies with specialist knowledge of pan-European television and the network to run transnational advertising campaigns that mix local and global objectives. Pan-European TV stations began, the article notes, to offer flexible local advertising windows and integrated communication solutions involving cross-format and cross-platform opportunities for advertisers.
Key Words: European marketing • global branding • globalization • international advertising • pan-European television (PETV) • transnational television

2- The 2007 General Election in Kenya and Its Aftermath: The Role of Local Language Media
Jamal Abdi Ismail
BBC World Service Trust in Somalia and Kenya
James Deane
BBC World Service Trust, James.Deane@bbc.co.uk
The International Journal of Press/Politics

July 2008, Volume 13, No. 3

 http://hij.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/13/3/319

Political parties in Kenya reached a fragile but potentially historic agreement in March 2008 paving the way for an end to the violence that has wracked the country. The Kenyan government and international observers accused some media organizations, particularly local language radio stations, of fanning the violence. Based on a series of 20 semi structured interviews with senior media figures in Kenya, this article analyzes the role of the media in the lead up to and during the recent crisis.
Key Words: East Africa • violence • elections • ethnicity • radio

3- Interfacing the Nation
Remediating Public Service Broadcasting in the Digital Television Age
James Bennett
London Metropolitan University, UK, j.bennett@londonmet.ac.uk
Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies
August 2008, Volume 14, No. 3
http://con.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/14/3/277

This article engages with prominent arguments about the role of public service broadcasting in the digital age and suggests that the BBC's role as a national universalist provider is one that can be accommodated within an age of identity and media pluralism. Taking the BBC's 2004 coverage of commemoration events that marked the end of the Second World War as a case study, this article combines industrial and textual analysis to investigate how the BBC utilized event programming and interactive television as a `portal' to drive viewers to online spaces. In so doing, it examines how such programming strategies worked to reassert traditional public service concerns with the national whilst simultaneously exploiting its brand value across new media platforms to cater for a fragmenting audience. The forms of interactive television discussed here are characterized by a desire to bring viewers together into one space to `engage' and `participate' under the familiar terms of the national, but crucially within the new media spaces opened to them by the BBC as `trusted guide'. The conclusion outlines how this case study might help us understand a `remediation' of public service broadcasting's role in the digital age, suggesting that the BBC's 2004 commemorative programming was particularly successful in articulating this role.
Key Words: BBC • Britishness • commemorative programming • history • iTV • UK • universalist remit

4- Public Service Broadcasting as an Infrastructure of Translation in the Age of Cultural Diversity
Lessons for Europe from SBS Australia
Aneta Podkalicka
Queensland University of Technology, Australia, apodkalicka@swin.edu.au
Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies
August 2008, Volume 14, No. 3
http://con.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/14/3/323

This article investigates a redefined socio-cultural role of European public service broadcasting as an infrastructure of translation in times of globalization, migration and the proliferation of new media providers. Drawing upon research into multilingual broadcasting in Europe and Australia, and in particular a case study of Special Broadcasting Service Australia (SBS), it argues for an ongoing relevance of European public service broadcasting (PSB), albeit within wider conceptions of translingual, transnational or European citizenship. It is proposed that of the two versions of translation, institutional in the EU and mediated in Australia respectively, the mediated version has achieved higher success in communicating diversity across hybrid communities. The main point raised here is the importance of `connections' and, within the framework of `cultural diversity' and `multilingualism' in Europe, arguably at the expense of `Europeanness'. The concept of translation allows thought beyond a single language but also beyond diversity and towards interlingual communication and `mutual intelligibility'. As such it is useful to inform a community-building media policy for Europe as a necessary alternative to the historically dominant top-down EU language policy.
Key Words: cultural citizenship • cultural diversity • languages • policy • public service broadcasting • translation • TV programming
5- Dreaming in Technicolor
The Future of PSB in a World Beyond Broadcasting
Marc Raboy
McGill University, Canada, marc.raboy@mcgill.ca
Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies
August 2008, Volume 14, No. 3
http://con.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/14/3/361

In the new media environment, the public broadcaster's primary purpose should be to operate at the cutting edge; it must make itself indispensable to anyone who wants to be informed, educated and entertained. And as we move towards a post-broadcasting environment, it must think of itself as a full-service public communicator.
Key Words: BBC • CBC • digital television • PSB • UNESCO

6-Queerness, the Quality Audience, and Comedy Central's Reno 911!
Hollis Griffin
Northwestern University
Television & New Media
September 2008, Volume 9, No. 5
http://tvn.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/9/5/355
 
Comedy Central currently attracts the same kind of quality audience that broadcast television networks courted in the 1990s, one that resulted in the sharp increase in gaythemed content on the networks at that time. Yet the parodic mode of address that so permeates the cable network's content makes the different levels of gay cultural competency a heterogeneous viewership brings to a program like Reno 911! an issue of considerable import. A parodic situation-comedy based on reality crime programming, Reno 911! narrativizes an ambiguously gay police detective who, in turn, provides different viewing pleasures for differently situated viewers. As such, the character foregrounds questions about the political consequences of television's use of queer cultural signifiers and the pleasures that viewers take in a parodic representation of queerness on television.
Key Words: gay • queer • masculinity • television • quality audience • Comedy Central • Reno 911!

7-The Mediation of Suffering and the Vision of a Cosmopolitan Public
Lilie Chouliaraki
London School of Economics
Television & New Media
September 2008, Volume 9, No. 5

http://tvn.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/9/5/371

In this article, the author argues that if researchers wish to move toward a "global village" with cosmopolitan values, then they need to examine critically the discourses and practices by which global information flows invite the individual spectator to be a public actor in the contexts of her or his everyday life. In the light of empirical analysis, the author presents a hierarchical typology of news stories on distant suffering that consists of adventure, emergency, and ecstatic news, and she examines the two broad ethical norms that inform these types of news: communitarianism and cosmopolitanism. The possibility for cosmopolitanism, the author concludes, lies importantly (but not exclusively) in the ways in which television tells the stories of suffering, inviting audiences to care for and act on conditions of human existence that go beyond their own communities of belonging.
Key Words: mediation • ethics • news broadcasts • suffering