Rural and regional journalism in Australia might soon be a lot poorer if suggestions in The Australian of a rout at Fairfax come to pass. The Murdoch daily says Fairfax is considering closure of between 30 and 65 regional and rural papers, including at least six in the Illawarra-South Coast. They include: Illawarra Mercury Wollongong […]
Scene: Boardman Rd, Bowral, NSW, Australia. A quiet residential street. Enter: Holden, with location sourcing company Sach Australia, production company Exit Films, Wingecarribee Shire Council and Cato Traffic & Logistics.
In 2003, Rhodes University in Grahamstown, South Africa bought a local newspaper, Grocott’s Mail. The Uni set it up as an experiential training centre for students and plough any profits back into student bursaries. It reports your average local news stories; on the website front page today are two articles about the local council, Makana Muncipality.
I have settled on a case-study approach to my PhD research. It will focus on five local governments in the greater Illawarra region of New South Wales, considering how they form and react to public issues via participatory media. The five local governments, Wingecarribee Shire, Wollondilly Shire and Wollongong City, Shellharbour City, and Kiama Municipality, have been […]
From the same page of an excellent book called YouTube ((Burgess, J. & Green, J., 2009. YouTube, Malden, MA: Polity Press, p.12.)), two competing academic definitions of popular culture: “popular culture is most commonly thought of – often pejoratively – as mass, consumer culture – reality TV, shopping malls, celebrity gossip, the Top 40, and […]
An episode that once deeply offended me is now one of my favourites in a long line of classics from The Simpsons. Here are my comments on Bart vs Australia from my honours thesis. Page 13: it is worth noting that there are occasions where audiences, broadcasters and governments in countries like Australia, Brazil and […]
I briefly tackled irony in The Lord of the Rings in my last post, focussing on a quintessential speech by Bilbo Baggins at his birthday to make my point. The use of irony in popular texts is a rich vein, one that I first seriously delved into while researching and writing about The Simpsons in […]
Most of his guests were drunk to the point of “filling up the corners” after a large feast to celebrate his birthday, so Bilbo Baggins thought it time to make a speech. After greeting everyone, he said: Today is my one hundred and eleventh birthday: I am eleventy-one today! I hope you’re enjoying yourselves as […]
I’ve noticed what might be called a ‘long-tail‘ of search referrals from people looking for information on content analysis. As a result, I’ve decided to write up my experiences with content analysis in some detail in this post. For a brief primer on what content analysis actually is, please see this Wikipedia page. My introduction […]
One of the key aspects of my PhD research is the practice and theory of participatory media, which I originally took to be more self-explanatory than it apparently is. For me, the term participatory media has always encompassed and been greater than the term Web 2.0, which I find reflects old paradigms of thinking about […]