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This article examines how media production is shaped under media conglomeration through a close analysis of Space Ghost: Coast to Coast (1994–2008), arguing that animation evinces the corporate strategy of archive reuse through its esthetics. It compares how the limited animation of Hanna-Barbera Productions transformed in the shift to cable and greater media conglomeration under Turner Broadcasting System. Using a thick description of the production process, the chapter illustrates how Cartoon Network programmers remixed the corporate archive to create Space Ghost: Coast to Coast. Through this remixed production process, channel programmers used limited animation esthetics to disclose on their own labor as programmers and producers within Turner's media empire. It ends by examining how Space Ghost: Coast to Coast 's unique production techniques and esthetics shaped Cartoon Network's adult programing block, [adult swim]. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Media convergence, the dominant perspective to understanding the recent intertwining development of media and digital technologies, has been criticized for not reflecting the phenomenon of the current media landscape. The convergence-deconvergence-coexistence triad is proposed as the better framework to understand such phenomenon. Therefore, this article implements this triadic interaction to analyze the evolution of Liputan6.com, one of the most prominent online news media in Indonesia. This study employs in-depth interviews, observation, and document/archive analysis. This study identifies three periods of development of Liputan6.com since its establishment in 2000, and each period has different relation dynamics of the three aspects within the triad framework. By applying the convergence-deconvergence-coexistence triadic perspective, this article offers a multifaceted and multilayer analysis of the evolution of online news media such as Liputan6.com.

Tracing global shifts in ownership and conglomeration in the media and technology sectors, this introduction analyzes the emergence of the 'megacorp' and 'super app' as distinct forms and sites of media power. With a focus on Asia, we argue that the pairing of megacorps and super apps is driving the emergence of powerful digital companies that shape social, cultural, and political dynamics worldwide. Through analyses of companies including Reliance, SoftBank, Tencent, Alibaba, and Transsion, this special issue calls for a renewed engagement with theories of monopoly capital via the megacorp, and accounts of consumer and citizen experiences of this monopoly via a quotidian touch point, the super app. In conversation with scholarship on conglomerates, monopolies, and platforms as key institutional forms of media power, we show that media power in this digital conjuncture operates as much through national and regional differences as through the imperative to achieve a global scale. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article discusses the recent development of Xinhuanet.com, a news website launched by Xinhua News Agency, one of China’s key central state-owned news organisations. Xinhuanet Co. Ltd, the business entity running the website, went public in October 2016 in Shanghai. This marked the first step in the state news agency’s financialisation. Two main questions are addressed. First, what were the main driving forces behind Xinhuanet’s transformation from a governmental cultural organisation to a publicly traded enterprise, the majority shareholder of which remains Xinhua? Second, how should the nature of this transformation be understood, in relation to Xinhua’s wider marketisation process and that of the Chinese media sector as a whole? The article argues that Xinhua’s financialisation via Xinhuanet is best understood as part of a state-administrated initiative in accord with Xinhua’s own business ambitions. The financialisation of news by state players such as Xinhuanet does not alter the underlying ownership structure of Chinese news media, which remain ultimately state-controlled. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Indonesia's plan for digital TV migration was officially launched in 2011 by the enactment of several Ministerial Regulations. At the beginning of 2015, however, the project had not commenced. This article argues that the policies about multi-plexing arrangements have been one of the major obstacles to the transition. Private broadcasting incumbents have been given considerable opportunity to win the 'beauty contests' to become multiplex operators. These private multiplex operators have delayed the leasing of their digital TV channels and set excessive rental prices for them as part of their strategies to tackle competition in the era of digital broadcasting. TVR1, the only non-private multiplex operator, faces political and bureaucratic problems and is not yet ready to provide multiplexing services. This study analyses Indonesia's digital TV policies using data from semi-structured interviews and a review of relevant literature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

VICE Media has risen from a local Canadian counterculture magazine to an international corporate giant. Bloomberg Business has valued the company at over $1 bill ion, while other reputable outlets have placed VICE's worth at many times that. Remarkably, through its ascension to mainstream relevancy and despite getting into bed with some of the world's richest and most denounced corporations, VICE has managed to maintain its reputation as a counterculture brand. This qualitative analysis on the evolution of VICE Media presents past interviews and market decisions by VICE owners to exhibit how the company has expediently captured and preserved the attention of millennials through its strategic commodification of 21st century hipsterism. This analysis also relies on the work of prevalent academics and journalists to provide an understanding of VICE, hipsterism and their inherent connection to consumerism. This is an accessible study that demonstrates how VICE identified and harnessed the socio-cultural/ socioeconomic phenomenon of hipsterism to amplify its potential as a commercial media institution. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Information technology has tremendously facilitated the communication phenomenon and mass media have emerged as pervasive and encompassing tools of politics. New media has initiated the process of democratization of information and has empowered the audience to be producers and consumers of information at the same time. Peters (2009, p.18) describes new media 'as emerging communication and information technologies undergoing a historical process of contestation, negotiation and institutionalization.' The Arab spring uprising initiated by the new media has grabbed the attention of scholars and researchers worldwide. Literature review suggests a positive relationship between usage of new media and political mobilization in the developed world. However, there is a need to conduct studies about the diffusion patterns, usage and impact of new media in the developing countries. This study aims to explore the usage patterns of new media by political parties of Pakistan and its impact on the dynamics of Pakistan politics. The study partially focuses to explain the political content usage patterns of the University students on the basis of rural and urban population by selecting equal students from hostels and day scholars. The study suggests a quick adoption of facebook by rural respondents residing in hostels. The data indicates that facebook is the most popular social networking site among youth for the dispersion of political information as compared to other tools of new media including twitter, my space, blogs, and email etc. The respondents indicate the use of cell phones for political mobilization by Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI). The study establishes a positive correlation between political mobilization and new media usage among educated youth. Keeping in view the overall literacy rate, internet penetration, recurrent load-shedding, and other peculiar socio-economic factors, the study suggests that the impact of new media in the political domain is limited as compared to the general perceptions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines children's television in the context of the debate on media globalization by positioning Viacom-owned Nickelodeon, currently beamed into more than 400 million households, as a quintessential type of transnational television that is critical to understanding the contemporary landscape of media industries and cultures worldwide. The author argues that the majority of globally branded children's television networks, in comparison to other types of transnational television often associated with multidirectional media flow, tend to be merely clones of the original US versions. However, this argument is intended to move beyond traditional references to either cultural or American imperialism. By counterposing two locales, the article uses Nickelodeon's operations in New Zealand and Australia as a case study to critically examine the corporate practice of localization employed by a US transnational children's multimedia brand in different media markets. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In seeking to explain why Shanghai, China's economic capital, has a more timid media system than its sibling cities, we examine the political economy of the Shanghai media from the perspective of clientelism in the post-Communist and cultural milieus of what we call “party-market corporatism.” Through field work we analyze four aspects of clientelism, including media conglomeration, elite circulation, resource allocation, and (lack of) media professionalism.We conclude that Shanghai is at once a “big city” and yet a “small place:” a resource-rich city governed by one layer of power authority, hence the distance from the epicenter of power to various media organizations is so short and direct as to make media control through clientelism very effective and powerful. Clientelism represents one of the three major patterns of party-market corporatism in China's media sector. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In seeking to explain why Shanghai, China's economic capital, has a more timid media system than its sibling cities, we examine the political economy of the Shanghai media from the perspective of clientelism in the post-Communist and cultural milieus of what we call "party-market corporatism." Through field work we analyze four aspects of clientelism, including media conglomeration, elite circulation, resource allocation, and (lack of) media professionalism. We conclude that Shanghai is at once a "big city" and yet a "small place:" a resource-rich city governed by one layer of power authority, hence the distance from the epicenter of power to various media organizations is so short and direct as to make media control through clientelism very effective and powerful. Clientelism represents one of the three major patterns of party-market corporatism in China's media sector. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Chinese press, instead of acting purely as a state propaganda instrument, now functions as ‘Party Publicity Inc.’ — that is, a quasi-business that seeks to make huge profits on the one hand and to legitimate the Party mandate by promoting its image on the other. The accelerated pace of media conglomeration following China's accession to the World Trade Organization has sharpened this trend. This study examines the impact of press ecology in Shenzhen, a national trend-setter for ‘Party Publicity Inc.’, before and after conglomeration. We observe that press conglomeration has (a) engendered a more centralized management structure and operation; (b) replaced duopolistic competition with market monopoly and greater price-fixing abilities; (c) continued to rely on state office subscription; (d) dampened journalists' enthusiasm for political reform in favor of economic interest; (e) developed a two-tier Publicity Inc. to serve both the Party and the market; and (f) provided an opportunity for overseas expansion. Marketization does not trigger political reform, but pre-empts pressure for political change. The Party Publicity Inc. in its conglomerate form represents a complicitous accommodation between power and money engineered by a post-Communist bureaucratic-authoritarian regime. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the integral, reflexive, and critical functions that industrial texts play in contemporary corporate repurposing, cross-collateralization, and branding. More than simply practitioner discourses, the article takes as its object what it terms the "low theoretical" tendencies found in "deep" industrial texts to better understand the critical-theoretical competencies and marketing imperatives behind the textual practices of the new media conglomerates. The article reconsiders the tripartite model offered by Fiske and Gripsrud, by showing how secondary and tertiary television texts persistently migrate toward primary textual status in the current American multichannel flow. A close examination of industrial textual practice (programming events, network branding [the NBC-2000 campaign], station IDs, making-ofs, video press kits, promo tapes, TV-web synergies, and ancillary marketing) shows how the industry theorizes its presence in moving image form, even as it teaches the audience at home by publicly circulating (sanctioned) "insider" knowledge about the televisual apparatus. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyzes the institutional and textual features of a Lifetime Television series called Weddings of a Lifetime, It argues that the synergistic melding of Disney, ABC, and Lifetime in Weddings of a Lifetime not only typifies media industry strategies in an age of conglomeration but also evidences the complex textual meanings produced through such institutional practices. In this case, Disney's cross-promotional efforts at once bolster and challenge the company's vested interests in the ideologies of heterosexual romance and marriage. While the linkages between Disney properties maximize the program's selling power, those same linkages, along with the series' blurred generic boundaries and pretensions to "reality," fracture the idealized fairy tale that its stories of romance and marriage ostensibly relate. The article seeks to extend the discussion of media conglomeration into a specific case study to examine the effects of this institutional development on a media product. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]