Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: This paper maps the emerging practices in media professions like journalism, advertising, marketing communications, and public relations as they adapt themselves to a new media environment. Among creatives and brand managers in ad agencies ‘interactive advertising’ is at the center of the contemporary buzz. Marketers in the cultural industries brainstorm about the potential of upstream marketing, while in public relations the opportunities of two-way symmetrical communication are explored. Editors of news publications increasingly jump on the ‘citizen journalism’ bandwagon. Among business professionals understanding and managing consumer-generated media is considered critical to commercial survival. All these trends are part of the same phenomenon: the cultural convergence of media production and consumption. Where media, communication and journalism studies traditionally differentiate between audience and reception research or production and industry analyses, a third approach dissolves this distinction and treats making media and using media as essentially the same praxis. In this essay, these developments are discussed in terms of their potential impact on consensual assumptions about the nature of media work, seen through the lens of the combination of individual creativity and mass production, also known as creative industries.