Abstract

More and more media students complete their studies with professional placements every year. At the same time, each year more universities include such experience as an integral part of their curricula. This is in recognition of the fact that a learning process takes place during placements. Therefore, universities offering such training placements have to accept some responsibility for their success. Universities need to be aware of what students do during these periods of training in order to face the challenge posed by this responsibility. By doing this, universities will know which things need to be improved. This paper aims to generate debate on the following topic: the first work experience of media students should be fully educational and should transfer knowledge, skills and social engagement.

Abstract

This article questions the relationships between literacy, media literacy and media education. In the process, we connect the findings from a range of our ethnographic research and use these to propose new forms of practice for critical media literacy. By ‘after the media’, we do not posit a temporal shift (that ‘the media’ has ceased to be). Instead, we conceive of this as akin to the postmodern – a way of thinking (and teaching) that resists recourse to the idea of ‘the media’ as external to media literate agents in social practice. The preservation of an unhelpful set of precepts for media education hinder the project of media literacy in the same way as the idea of ‘literature’ imposes alienating reading practices in school. Just as the formal teaching of English has obstructed the development of critical, powerful readers by imposing an alienating and exclusive model of what it means to be a reader, so has Media Studies obscured media literacy. Despite ourselves, we have undermined the legitimation of studying popular culture as an area by starting out from the wrong place. This incomplete project requires the removal of ‘the media’ from its gaze. The outcomes of our research thus lead us to propose a ‘pedagogy of the inexpert’ as a strategy for critical media literacy.

Abstract

Based on theoretical and methodological orientations from authors’ previous research on media and generations, this article presents a research and learning process involving supervised field work conducted by graduate students from a Master Seminar on Media Studies at FCSH, New University of Lisbon. Acting as facilitators of focus groups composed of older participants, exploring intergenerational and intragenerational differences and similarities that emerge from different age cohorts, and critically reflecting on this experience on their individual essays, students were able to build a contextual knowledge of media uses among their grandparents’ and parents’ generation in Portugal. The choice of focus groups as a tool for research and the topic of generations to be investigated within Media Studies proved to be very productive. The article argues on the potentialities of this intergenerational relation between facilitator and focus groups’ respondents as a way of activating the interactions inside the groups, leading –for instance– the participants to assume an «explaining» attitude in selfaccounting. Final notes are presented about the educational gains of this methodology for Media Education and for different branches of Media Studies, such as media and social history, journalism and the news or political participation.

Abstract

Over the past few years, two new audiovisual products have arrived to the Web: documentary web (webdoc) and interactive music video. The emergence of these new subgenres is due to three related conversion factors: the evolution of online audience participation, the arrival of new web standards and codes html5, and the interest of the media and authors in the innovation of online narratives. From the study of the technical qualities of two case studies –the interactive documentary One Million Tower  and the interactive music video The Wilderness Downtown - this article asserts a new typology for the study and analysis of these interactive audiovisual productions.

Abstract

The current positioning of research on Communication from a historiographic perspective and its legitimacy through the creation of symbolic capital are addressed. The research is divided into three parts: (1) the origins of the academic disciplines of Communication are inspected through the creation of the first faculties of Communication Sciences and the incorporation of their first professors; (2) the emergence of the areas of knowledge, which establish the current division within the disciplines of Communication Sciences, is observed; (3) the creation of symbolic capital related to the discipline is analyzed through the awarding of honorary doctorates (honoris causa) by the faculties of Communication Sciences in Spain.

Abstract

Infotainment comedy is the branch of infotainment that mixes current affairs content with comedy. “Infotainment” is a relatively new term, first cited by Krüger (1988); as a television trend, academics agree that it must have existed much earlier, with English-language examples such as Saturday Night Live (NBC, 1975) or That was the week that was (BBC, 1962). In Spain, the roots of infotainment lie in Caiga quien caiga (Telecinco, 1996), a precursor to satirical pseudojournalism (García-Avilés, 1999). Nowadays, there are programs that present current affairs with comedy, as in the case of El intermedio (La Sexta, 2006) or Todo es mentira (Cuatro, 2019). Owing to the continuous evolution of formats and their complex definition and classification by academics and professionals, it is worth considering whether audiences also interpret the different programs in different ways depending on their elements, given that they depend on an “intuitive understanding” (Reinemann et al., 2011; Otto et al., 2017) that stems from the habit of repeated consumption. This article presents the results of a reception study contrasting Spanish infotainment comedy professionals and their audiences to assess whether their impressions of these shows are similar or if, on the contrary, their hybrid nature is so changeable that they have come to interpret them in a very different way. The methodology involved ten discussion groups with a total of 87 viewers and 13 interviews with professionals from four programs: El intermedio, Todo es mentira, Ese programa del que usted me habla (La 2, 2019), and La resistencia (Movistar+, 2018). According to the statements collected, the results revealed that audiences and content creators show more points of divergence than concurrences, which means that the messages are interpreted differently from how they were intended.