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During election campaigns, candidates, parties, and media share their relevance on Twitter with a group of especially active users, aligned with a particular party. This paper introduces the profile of "party evangelists," and explores the activity and effects these users had on the general political conversation during the 2015 Spanish general election. On that occasion, the electoral expectations were uncertain for the two major parties (PP and PSOE) because of the rise of two emerging parties that were disrupting the political status quo (Podemos and Ciudadanos). This was an ideal situation to assess the differences between the evangelists of established and emerging parties. The paper evaluates two aspects of the political conversation based on a corpus of 8.9 million tweets: the retweeting effectiveness, and the sentiment analysis of the overall conversation. We found that one of the emerging party's evangelists dominated message dissemination to a much greater extent. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Examines the genres of visual communication in mass media during the American Civil War. Emergence of pictorial representation as a regular part of journalism; Portraiture in the illustrated press; Depictions of fighting and the importance of antietam.

This paper provides a historical perspective on the intersection of media, popular culture, and nationalism through a study of the broadcasting policies and programs of one of Mexico's earliest government radio stations. This study analyzes the musical programs that formed the centerpiece of government radio programming in order to evaluate the racial and class ideologies imbedded in the nationalist discourse of state broadcasters. By viewing these government programs through the lens of a broader literature on nationalism in the Third World and among diasporic communities, it is possible to identify a fundamental tension in Mexico's official nationalism between a search for the roots of an "authentic" ethnic identity, and a need to position Mexican culture within the constellation of Western "civilization." Finally, this paper investigates audience reactions to state broadcasts in order to explore the meaning of early broadcast nationalism for Mexico's radio listeners. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Journalism history took its initial shape from the memoirs of newspaper conductors who also subsidized its initial archives, which consisted primarily of the collected files of newspapers. It then helped form the core of professional education in journalism. This original journalism history tended to assume a hegemonic notion of journalism and to promote a Whiggish grand narrative of journalism. Recent generations of journalism historians have been trying to break out of familiar patterns. New developments, including digital archives and systemic changes in both media industries and journalism education, promise to change the architecture that has produced the dominant styles of journalism history and to encourage instead a more interesting and useful history of the news environment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the nature and extent of citizens' connection to public space through media consumption. It reports on a study of data from two qualitative sources: panel responses and individual in-depth interviews. The authors' findings are, first, that people's media consumption and forms of public connection may be significantly constrained by limitations on their time—not just objectively, but also subjectively (their sense of lacking time to use media or pursue information). Second, such is the complexity of how people think about their public connection that research methodologies must be sensitive to the details of people's reflexivity, while enabling effective typologies of the positions people take up in thought and practice. Third, such research may reveal not a consensus, but instead a range of incompatible framings of whether public connection matters and how it can be achieved. Research should aim, therefore, not at a redefinition of something as unified as ‘civic culture,’ but rather at tracking the hetereogeneity of the ‘dispersed citizen.’. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A distinctive dimension of political life, power as the capacity for people to act in concert, was a key in understanding one of the major transformations of the late twentieth century—the democratic aftermath of the collapse of the Soviet empire in central Europe. In this paper, the way this dimension—the politics of small things—provides alternatives in the United States is analyzed. A new media regime, with significant interactions between virtual and embodied social interactions, has opened up the opportunity for a new democratic politics. The antiwar movement and the Dean campaign are shown to have constituted alternative political possibilities for those critical of hegemonic discourses and practices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper follows the construction of a televisual public space in Brazil since the 1950s until the present, with special attention to television fiction and soap operas, known as novelas in Brazil. The role of novela writers as mass mediators responsible for weaving together a growing public is investigated, with emphasis on their political projects and their responsibilities when writing for millions. Although aided by an industrial process, their task of reaching the public is one full of misunderstandings, which I contend is an intrinsic part of the environment of mass communication. The acceptance of these unavoidable misunderstandings by all involved in mass communication is crucial for the continuation of a communicative game, as we see in the case of Brazilian television. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article looks at the news production practices surrounding letters to the editor as a case study in the difficulties of creating a civil public debate in multicultural societies. It examines how letters editors make decisions about publishing uncivil letters--letters that are sexist, racist, homophobic, or generally intolerant. If letters contribute to the public debate, editors are reluctant to reject them, even if they challenge norms of propriety. Editors reject only letters that fall into one of two categories: (1) personal attack letters that might result in libel suits and (2) letters that are openly racist, sexist, or homophobic and do not in any way contribute to the public debate. They justify their decisions in common sense theories sympathetic to deliberative democracy. Editors thus see a policy of limited editorial intervention as the only way to ensure an open and honest debate about the varied issues that face the citizens of a multicultural society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article looks at the ways of finding novelty in communication and audience research and questions the necessity to seek constant innovation in conquering new territories in audience research. Based on both personal experiences and those from the PhD students across Europe, the article maps five Basic elements where novelty in audience research is sought—new technologies, new countries, new audiences, interdisciplinarity and cross-media. The article argues that despite the constant pressure to innovate, there are important elements of value in traditional audience research that need to be kept, including methodological diversity and often repeated feel for the triangulation of audiences, producers and text. In this combination of keeping the old and seeking the new in audience research, the discipline can be seen growing richer and more diverse with every added contribution. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As its title implies, this article explores a number of unanswered questions and outstanding issues in contemporary audience research. These include: models of the “active audience”; questions of cultural power; global media and transnational audiences; methodologies in audience research; problems of essentialism in the conceptualization of categories of audience members; the strengths and limitations of the encoding/decoding model; models of intellectual progress in the field; the new media and technologies of “newness.” My title is derived from Bertolt Brecht’s “Anecdotes of Mr Keuner” in which he extols the virtue of thinking up questions to which we do not have answers (Brecht, 1966). Working from this principle, rather than trying to formulate solutions to the problems of our field, my contribution here is based on questions in media audience research to which I, at least, do not have the answers, as a way of taking stock of what exactly it is that we think we now know about the field. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the principles of freedom of speech. It is mentioned that biasness for the speech by the rich and dull approach of the mass media makes the freedom of speech expensive and affects its availability. It also stresses that new technologies specially the Internet usage would reduce the costs of speech distribution and would result into availability of speech by more speakers. The changes that Internet and other advancement in technologies would bring in the existing means of communication including music, books, newspapers, magazines and television are discussed elaborately. The social consequences and the implications of these technological changes has also been discussed

An independent, commercial mass-circulation newspaper industry boomed at the end of the tsarist era, one analogous in most respects to that which evolved in the West during the nineteenth century. The Russian press, however, differed significantly from the Western press in the manner in which it functioned politically. Russian journalism, too, helped to open a public sphere in the autocratic environment, in concert with a series of social and political reforms in the 1860s. However, when those reforms failed to create a political order guaranteed by a constitution, the press reconstituted that sphere in a way to actually thwart the evolution of Western liberalism. The pivotal event in this process proved to be the failure of the 1905 Revolution to secure the postreform decades of incremental gains. Like most of the rest of society, journalists became so disappointed by the limited concessions exacted from the government that they lost hope that the autocracy could be reformed. Newspapers sought new political symbols in Russia's past; they found an equally disillusioned intelligentsia, whom they historicized and manipulated so as to undermine whatever substantive part they could have played in using the press as a genuinely transformative institution central to the public sphere. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Academic interest in what has been termed "infotainment" has grown considerably since the term was coined in the 1980s. Today, the burgeoning field of infotainment research has become an important interdisciplinary field of study producing numerous political, cultural, and social insights. Nevertheless, infotainment remains highly contested, multifaceted, and incoherent, both as a term and a field of study. Preliminary attempts have been made to give greater conceptual clarity and standardization to the term, although their success has been limited, leaving difficulties in analyzing and comparing findings in a unified manner. In this review essay I outline the findings from a comprehensive literature review by delineating three mains trajectories of infotainment research: (1) research on soft news programming; (2) research on traditional news media; and (3) research on media systems and global infotainment. To conclude, I offer three suggestions for future infotainment research, arguing that scholars should attempt to achieve standardization and conceptual clarity within, rather than across research trajectories, that political theory should be more explicitly incorporated into the literature for the purposes of standardizing methods and clarifying normative debates, and that research should also focus on the synergies between contemporary trends in political campaign/communications strategies and trends in infotainment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article argues for the analysis of public engagement as an essentially mediated activity. Although recent studies note that academic knowledge is increasingly available for consumption by nonacademic audiences, they tell us little about how it gets recontextualized while passing through the hands of media professionals on its way toward such audiences. In Burawoy’s (2005) influential call for the rebirth of public sociology, as in the debates his work provoked, the media is treated solely as a means for the transportation of knowledge. But as this article demonstrates, the media does not simply transport knowledge; it also, and at the same time, translates that knowledge in various, rhetorically consequential ways. Focusing on the mediated trajectory of an attempt by a group of academics to connect with audiences beyond academia, their initial contribution is compared to its subsequent translation(s) across various British newspapers. A discursive analysis reveals the techniques via which a classic form of public sociology came to be recontextualized such that, remarkably, these authors were left appearing to voice nothing but their own petty prejudices. The article concludes by noting that where public engagement involves mediation, public sociology should pay more attention to the recontextualizing affordances of media discourse. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Qualitatively analyzing 35 responses from a letter-writing homework in a media literacy education program, this study examines sixth graders’ understandings of producers’ responsibility in creating media content. Responses suggest their understandings about producers’ responsibility are bounded within the context of their media use as consumers, rather than as citizens. Findings focus on the importance of introducing contextual factors of media production as well as the challenges that researchers and educators might face. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Societies involved in intractable conflicts develop cultures of conflict because of experiences that have lasting effects on every aspect of collective life. One product of these cultures is conflict-supporting narratives that provide illumination, justification, and explanation of the conflict reality. These narratives are selective, biased, and distortive, but play an important role in satisfying the basic sociopsychological needs of the society members involved. In these societies, journalists often serve as agents in the formulation and dissemination of these conflict-supporting narratives. The present study analyzes the presentations of narratives of the culture of conflict among Jewish Israeli journalists during Israeli wars in Lebanon. It elucidates the dominant themes of the narratives by content analysis of the news published in newspapers and broadcast on television. In addition, in order to reveal the practices used by journalists in obtaining, selecting, and publishing the news, in-depth interviews with journalists and politicians have been conducted. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on activism in feminist media studies and building community within and outside academia boundaries. According to the author, scholars are required to connect disparate identity categories across ethnicity, social classes, races, and religions in scholarship and more importantly, in ways reaching much beyond texts.

Using a qualitative research method of life stories, this article examines perceptions among families from Switzerland, Italy, and Israel regarding the media’s role in their process of coping with the murder of close relatives. The findings reveal a duality of attitudes regarding the media found in all three countries examined. The media logic predominant in the experience of victims’ families has a very similar effect, clearly leading to a mediatization of victimhood. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Diffusion of innovations research has altered the research trajectories of those in the field of communication. In this article, the authors briefly explore the evolution of diffusion research, in terms of theoretical influences and applied research advances, and then address how the evolution of diffusion of innovations provided the impetus for a communication discipline identity search. An explication of how diffusion of innovations can be viewed as mechanistically affecting media convergence is presented. This piece closes with a call to return to diffusion research, especially given the face of current communication vehicles and media convergence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, the author offers a contextualist approach to contemporary debates about new (and old) media in different historical times and geographical places. This approach, rather than starting with the internal essence of a technology and then attempting to deduce its effects from its technical specifications, begins with an analysis of the interactional and cultural systems in play in a particular context and then investigates how any particular technology is fitted into them. Building on his previous work in microanalyses of technology use in the home, and drawing on recent debates in technology studies and media anthropology, he further develops the implications of this approach, at a macro level, in terms of temporal and cultural contexts. The article concludes by reviewing the outstanding problems that still confront our field, in respect to its deeply ingrained presumptions concerning the universal relevance of what are, in fact, specifically Western (and thus contingent) relations between television, technology and national cultures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this study the author uses content analysis of newspaper articles to analyze the frames used in debates over constitutional amendments that legally prohibit same-sex marriage and other relationship recognition. The findings from this analysis contradict previous research on mediated public discussion of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender rights that find polarization by values of equal rights versus traditional morality. Instead, analysis shows that debates also invoke broader themes including support of children, competing claims of harm, and separation of government powers. In addition, the author finds that elites and nonelites use themes of morality, marriage, and children at different rates and thus cautions against models that assume too high an influence of elites on nonelite public debate. This research adds to the literature on the role of newspapers in mediating public discussion and has broader implications for the culture wars hypothesis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The rapid growth in usage of social networking sites begs a reconsideration of the meaning of mediated political participation in society. Castells (2009) contended that social networking sites offer a form of mass communication of the self wherein individuals can acquire a new creative autonomy. Stiegler (2009) and the Ars Industrialis collective believe that the processes of individuation, and of speaking out, hold the key to empowerment, agency, and resistance. In this article the authors offer a critical reflection on the logic of mediated participation promoted by social media through a consideration of the differences between individual and collective forms of mediated political participation. Drawing on ethnographic research on alternative media within the Trade Union Movement in Britain and recent research on the political culture of social networking sites, the authors argue that far from being empowering, the logic of self-centered participation promoted by social media can represent a threat for political groups rather than an opportunity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In mapping out the structures of representation surrounding a popular talent show in China, this study supports the idea that aesthetic evaluations and discussions more often than not extend into areas of broader concerns. By discussing a popular entertainment program, cultural critics have helped nurture public spheres in which civic issues can be enthusiastically and creatively talked about. The aesthetic public sphere essentially provides an extension of the formal Habermasian public sphere, thus suggesting a more significant civic role for entertainment programs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As audience reception scholars commute from audiences to literacies, both of which share the concept of interpretation, this article sets out to draw together themes around the changing nature of interpretive work, from 6 texts that have reflected recently, in different ways, on interpretation in new media environments. In reviewing a multithreaded conversation across 4 books from literacy studies, media and communications, and user studies, I select 2 essays, written at a crucial moment for reception studies, to provide her a narrative. Speaking from diverse fields, these works suggest a widespread agreement that there is a need to rethink terminologies and concepts from mass-mediated communication in the age of interactive media, not because they no longer prove useful, but because they provide constructive intellectual challenges in thinking through the changing natures of texts and readers, genres and interpretation, literacies, and legibilities, as we await new modes every day, for all of these, but also perhaps, new modes of interpretative engagement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article applies a network metaphor to an examination of the mediated public sphere. The analysis focuses on the deliberative spaces afforded by traditional and alternative media technologies, concluding that participatory digital technologies best support interactive and adaptable networks for deliberation. These networks sustain enclave and shared nodes where multiple publics can engage in deliberation within and across public boundaries. This argument informs decisions regarding broadband policy by focusing attention on values of openness, access, and freedom. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Scholars have repeatedly debated whether the Web serves as an alternative to traditional media consolidation. To explore this issue further, the author examines Web site ownership trends over a 10-year period, finding evidence of ownership consolidation among popular Web properties. In addition, the author finds that traditional media corporations have consolidated their influence over the Web. In the end, the author suggests that the Web does not serve as an alternative to media consolidation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The author hopes to address what counts as an historical record, especially in the area of media history, and to lay out how one creates one's own archive that might capture the media zeitgeist of the past, and might even reveal, however incompletely, how past audiences might have made sense of the media environments surrounding them. Using her own research, she focuses on 3 archives: one for a standard academic monograph that relies on existing and self-constructed archives, a second that is almost completely homemade on the representations of women in the media, and a third for an overview history of radio in the United States. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this essay the author argues for the necessity of self-conscious interpretation in historical scholarship. Historical documents are traces, to use Jacques Derrida's term. They point to absences, events that once were but now are not. Building on Derrida's concepts (without accepting his entire theory of language), alongside historiographic theory and ideas about method from the critical sociology tradition, the author argues that the work of classification and transversal thought offers an alternative to realist historiographies, one that allows for attention to the process of interpretation while affirming the need to continue writing history that makes claims on truth. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, we follow a lead in Roger Silverstone's work by engaging critically with the writings of human geographers who have drawn on phenomenology in their attempts to understand environmental perception and senses of place. A distinctive feature of the approach that these geographers developed was its focus on the ordinary doings and feelings involved in place-making. We highlight a series of concepts that are found in their writings and we apply those key concepts in a discussion of some qualitative empirical research on trans-European migration. Our project has been concerned with the practices and experiences of contemporary migrants, including their routine uses of communication technologies in everyday living. With reference to data from lengthy conversational interviews, we pay particular attention to matters of dwelling or habitation, and to these migrants' knowing how to get around—as well as their being out of place—in physical and media environments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent research there has been a tendency to discuss communicative spaces on the internet but also of other media as marked by “flows” or “virtuality,” abstracting from the materiality of the local. Based on empirical research on the communicative spaces of different diasporas, this article introduces a different perspective: We can neither understand communicative spaces by focusing solely on any single media, or by not relating them to the living localities. Rather, communicative spaces are based on mass-mediated and personal communicative networks and flows that are translocal, which means rooted in the locality of everyday life. Such an approach calls for investigation of the localities of everyday media appropriation as material aspects of translocal-mediated networking. When doing this for Moroccan, Turkish, and Russian migrants three types of localities are distinguished: the “domestic world,” the localities of “elsewhere” and the localities of “somewhere”. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Audience research, after a promising period during which some crucial advances were made, seems to be in decline in several ways, yet its tasks remain as important as ever. This article, originally a presentation at the 2003 Versailles Conference on the Future of Audience Research, makes the case for expanding our vision of the field’s possibilities. To do this, it revisits some of the forgotten achievements of the Uses and Gratifications tradition, offers a critique of the dominant “Hall model” for conceiving media/audience relations, and outlines the key concept of an alternative approach: the concept of a “viewing strategy,” which has been at the heart of the 2003–2004 international project on the reception of The Lord of the Rings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The 2002 hostage drama John Q. triggered a discussion among journalists, the public, and the policy community about the proper relationship between politics and entertainment. In this debate the criteria for good journalism and good political discourse were frequently invoked to evaluate this Hollywood film. This discussion, which spilled out of the film criticism pages into news and commentary pages, shows how public-sphere models of political discourse are privileged even though they may not be a good fit for fictional media. John Q.’s success in triggering public discussion and awareness about health policy issues seems to illustrate DeLuca & Peeples’s (2002) claim that the “public screen” is a more useful metaphor for thinking about politics than the public sphere (Habermas, 1989). John Q. seemed to particularly raise the ire of critics because of its unambiguous critique of domestic policy and its implicit suggestion that collective solutions are needed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although there has been a great deal of research on the impact of new media on the ways in which presidents present themselves, less attention has been given to the ways in which these media shape the social construction of the president. This study focuses on how one public, those who write letters to presidents, expresses their sense of the role of the president in different media environments. Letters written to Lincoln, Wilson, Franklin Roosevelt, and London Johnson were examined for clues as to how changes in media environments were linked to changes in the letter-writers’ constructions of presidents. The results of this research suggest that changes in the media environment do indeed have an impact on the social construction of the president. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article discusses the implementation of a media literacy program in a college classroom in the form of an extended critique and analysis of Disney's The Little Mermaid. Students' decoding of Disney's messages and their resistance to critique of the film are analyzed using four areas of research: audience research, media literacy, critical pedagogy, and psychology's cognitive dissonance theory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Within both academic and policy discourses, the concept of media literacy is being extended from its traditional focus on print and audiovisual media to encompass the internet and other new media. The present article addresses three central questions currently facing the public, policy-makers and academy: What is media literacy? How is it changing? And what are the uses of literacy? The article begins with a definition: media literacy is the ability to access, analyse, evaluate and create messages across a variety of contexts. This four-component model is then examined for its applicability to the internet. Having advocated this skills-based approach to media literacy in relation to the internet, the article identifies some outstanding issues for new media literacy crucial to any policy of promoting media literacy among the population. The outcome is to extend our understanding of media literacy so as to encompass the historically and culturally conditioned relationship among three processes: (i) the symbolic and material representation of knowledge, culture and values; (ii) the diffusion of interpretative skills and abilities across a (stratified) population; and (iii) the institutional, especially, the state management of the power that access to and skilled use of knowledge brings to those who are 'literate'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Analyzes data collected from 15 Generation-Xers about how they remember and understand the roles played by family and news media in the development of their politics. Emergence of news media as discrete agents of influence that affect the political socialization of Generation-Xers; Tension between the cultural studies theorization of subjectivity and agency and the media ecology theorization of media.

Examines the media reception patterns of a sample of 45 gay men from Israel. Preference for disengaging themselves from a discourse that symbolically annihilates them or negatively constructs their representations; Effects of absence from the mediated reality and social invisibility on gay men.

Describes the differences in press coverage of sexual harassments in the U.S. and France. Focus on domestic sexual harassment scandals involving political individuals or institutions; Legal definitions of sexual harassment; Three components of coverage.

Offers a cultural theory of mass-mediated moral revivalism in public communication by the People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA). Role of news and entertainment media in public debates; Relation between broad-distribution and narrowcast media; Details on the history of PETA.

Discusses the views of the people on the political policies of United States President Bill Clinton. Assumption on Clinton as more of liberal; Emphasis on the ways people learn information and misinformation form media systems; Incompatibility between media frameworks and political realities.

Examines the relationship between the mass media, war, and citizenship, through the integration of information theory in sociology. Total war culture and deferential journalism; Changes in the media-security relations; Impact of technological changes on new professional orientations.

Focuses on the effects of mass media commercialization on journalism and politics in Greece. Characterization of the Greek mass media; Changes in the demand for news resulting from deregulation and commercialization of the Greek mass media; Political communication in the age of television.

This essay relies on descriptive-historical and qualitative methods to develop an analysis of the social significance of Rush Limbaugh's nationally syndicated talk-radio program. After a political-economic analysis of the more general rise of the talk-radio format, the authors emphasize how Limbaugh in particular works to propagate a class-based understanding of social and political reality. Some of the difficulties of sustaining such a portrayal in an era of unprecedented job insecurity among middle managers and professional employees are stressed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article theorizes non-Western media reception, based on a reception study of a Hindu epic, "The Ramayan," screened on the state-owned Indian television system, Doordarshan, in 78 episodes beginning in January 1987. Based on interviews with viewers from a variety of social backgrounds and on analysis of press response to the epic, it argues that the epic represented, for many viewers, a narrative of community opposed to bourgeois modernity, and superior to it. For Doordarshan, as a broadcaster in a non-western/incompletely modern society, the epic represented a way of mediating between a secular bourgeois public, and a "communitarian public sphere" which, it is argued, characterizes Indian popular culture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During the past 20 years, primarily Latinos and Asians have immigranted to these shores and settled in urban areas. Media sources assert that this influx created particularly problematic relations between blacks and Asian Americans. Using Frame theory and textual analysis, we explored the images newsmagazines produced of this relationship. We found that one frame predominated: the nature of group relations had to do with each group's "essential" qualities. Within this frame there also appeared four media packages: 1) the nature of the urban space, 2) the role of culture in the quality of relationships, 3) the essential qualities of urban residents and 4) the preeminence of class over race. Analysis of black-Asian American relationships, while not strictly hegemonic, rarely deviated from accepted critiques. The nature of the coverage constrained understanding to personal shortcomings, while poverty and racial strife were rarely associated with historical and structural factors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the effect of the use of digital information storage and transmission on the media industry and the theory of the First Amendment to the U.S. constitution. As stated according to Eugene Volokh's conception of the First Amendment depicts that media specific regulations would not be beneficial and are not required. Discussing the government intervention on communications, the effect of new technologies on the content produced and social practices related to the content are mentioned. Values placed by people on the media content, affect on content creation and accessibility to speakers and audiences has been discussed.

The article focuses on the use of electronic media in the availability of information, and its effect on the mass media markets. According to Eugene Volokh, law commentator and professor, new information technologies might reduce the cost of distribution of information by musicians and authors and would result into disappearance of physical embodiments of information like newspapers and magazines. Boutique and mass media markets have been discussed elaborately. It specifies that electronic technologies, such as computer networks and cable TV would expand the boutique market segment on the expense of the mass markets. Economies of scope and scale and their usage of computer systems have been discussed.

This article explores journalistic quoting practices as an interface between written and oral modes of communication, or between text and talk. Examining both the prescriptive and performative dimensions of journalistic quoting across media, the article demonstrates that when quoting, journalists do not adopt modes of communication relative to the medium being employed but instead creatively mix and meld text and talk, regardless of the medium. The article suggests that this invocation of both modes of communication renders a distinction between text and talk invalid in contemporary news discourse. It further suggests that the cogency of news presentation might depend on the interchangeability of both modalities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]