New Book: “Europe And The Media”

• April 13th, 2010
• Posted by EUEditor

Welcome to this ONLINE BOOK LAUNCH for the new publication edited by Lee Duffield and Gary Ianziti, Europe and the Media …

It has eight authors, journalists and media academics from six countries, and looks at ways that mass media are contributing to the expanding European Union …

INTRODUCING …

The European Union Head of Delegation in Australia, H.E. Ambassador David Daly, has kindly agreed to introduce Europe and the Media.

Today’s statement from the Ambassador:

“It is a pleasure to assist with this online book launch for Europe and the Media.

“It is very appropriate for a group of Australian and European academics and journalists to have worked together on a book about the importance of media in European life.

“For one thing, we have not only the close association between Australia and the European Union in economic affairs, where the EU is customarily Australia’s largest partner, but also our obvious cultural affinity.

“As for the media, the importance of all communication media is burgeoning; there is a growing information and communication element in all aspects of political, economic and social life, and this needs to be well understood.

“Europe and the Media is a step towards understanding the importance of mass media in the European project – a project for building an even stronger and well-integrated European Union.

“The European project is a cultural process as well as any other, and the notion of a common idea of Europe, a Europe of values, is at the heart of this book.

“As both an academic and journalistic work, it provides serious scholarship and research, while also giving an insiders’ look at the large-scale media operations going on within the European Union.

“It might also encourage an Australian media organisation to open a bureau in Brussels.”

David Daly, European Union Ambassador and Head of the European Union Delegation to Australia: Ambassador Daly, posted to Canberra in January last year, has had a distinguished career in the diplomatic service of Ireland and then the European Union. He has extensive experience with the accession of new states to the Union, in particular in the Balkans, where he headed the European Commission unit negotiating with Croatia. He has also served in many other placements dealing with the Central and Eastern European countries during the 1990s as they transformed their political and economic systems and began taking up their EU membership.

ABOUT “EUROPE AND THE MEDIA”

•    Lee Duffield and Gary Ianziti (eds) (2010), Europe and the Media: Building a new kind of Europe; is mass media the key? Saarbrucken: VDM. ISSN 978-3-639-22407-8.

The book is a joint effort of eight academics and journalists, Europe specialists from six countries (Australia, Germany, Poland, Slovenia, the United Kingdom and the United States). They give sometimes divergent views on the future of the so-called “European Project”, for building a common European economy and society, but agree that cultural changes, especially changes experienced through mass media, are rapidly taking place. One of the main interests of the book is the operation of the large media centre located at the European Commission in Brussels – the world’s largest gallery of permanently accredited correspondents.

Points from chapters in the book:

… people in the street are making their own version of a common “European” culture, of shared experience – especially young people, and in fields like sport.

… journalists at Brussels believe the media is “keeping the EU straight”, harking back to a public scandal in the 1990s when the executive Commission was removed from office.

… a call for the Commission to improve its democratic credentials, by becoming an elected body.

… a proposal for European media to adopt the SBS model of multi-cultural broadcasting, from Australia.

… worries that in the end, the power of national languages will confound efforts at cultural sharing.

… citizens and journalists from the new member countries, in East and Central Europe, talk about highs and lows of adjusting to life in the “West”.

WHERE TO FIND “EUROPE AND THE MEDIA”:

It is available now, in leading libraries, and globally on the Web; see www.amazon.om, or www.lovereading.co.uk

JACKET NOTES FROM “EUROPE AND THE MEDIA”:

The Lisbon Treaty of December 2009 is the latest success of the European Union’s drive to restructure and expand; yet questions persist about how democratic this new Europe might be. Will Brussels’ promotion of the “European idea” produce a common European culture and society? The authors consider it might, as a culture of everyday shared experience, though old ways are cherished, citizens forever thinking twice about committing to an uncertain future. The book focuses on mass media, as a prime agent of change, sometimes used deliberately to promote a “European project”; sometimes acting more naturally as a medium for new agendas. It looks at proposed media models for Europe, ranging from not very successful pan-European television, to the potentials of media systems based on national markets, and new media based on digital formats. It also studies the Brussels media service, the centre operated by the European Commission, which is the world’s largest concentration of journalists; and ways that dominant national media may come to serve the interests of communities now extending across frontiers. Europe and the Media notes change especially as encountered by new EU member countries of central and eastern Europe.

THE AUTHORS:

Lee Duffield was a journalist for over 20 years with the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, serving as its European Correspondent at the fall of the Berlin Wall. His doctoral thesis (PhD, 2003) was on the collapse of the Eastern Bloc in Europe, and he published a 20th anniversary book on the topic, Berlin Wall in the News, in 2009. He has been teaching journalism since 1997, currently a Senior Lecturer at the Queensland University of Technology in Brisbane. He returned to journalistic practice for “industry immersion”, for one year during 2006-7, in Brussels, and during that time gathered material for the present book on Europe and the media. He has followed the operations of the EU media centre at Brussels as a focal point of change all over Europe.

Gary Ianziti is an Honorary Associate Professor at the Centre for the History of European Discourses, at the University of Queensland, Australia, with research interests in European history and renaissance studies. His publications include contributions to Il principe e la storia (Novarra, 2005); History Australia (2005) and I Tatti Studies, vol. 10 (2005). He has a Doctor of Philosophy degree from the North Carolina University and Dottorato di Ricerca from Pisa. Dr Ianziti is chair of the Australian Foundation for Studies in Italy; an executive member of the Australian Council for Italian Studies; and member of the American Medieval Academy, and Renaissance Society of America. He is a regular reviewer for periodicals including Renaissance Quarterly, The Journal of Modern History and the American Historical Review.

Gary is familiar with experiments in the unification and consolidation of Europe over the centuries, therefore running a sceptical eye over the drive for change in this Century. Among other concerns he rates the coexistence of many languages as a key stumbling-block for European unification.

Aneta Podkalicka, a specialist in translation issues, goes further with the debate on language, evaluating language policies of the EU as a factor in the movement for European integration – for better or for worse.  She also makes an argument that the translation methods of the Australian multi-cultural broadcasting service, SBS, make it a good model for national television chains in European countries, to make sense of other cultures.

Aneta Podkalicka is a Research Fellow in the Institute of Social Research, at Swinburne University of Technology, Australia. Her work is part of a youth media project called Youthworkx carried out in collaboration with a community radio station and the Salvation Army. Ethnographic research on this project focuses on young people’s experience of their involvement in media training, accompanying creative work and the development of evaluative methodologies for community-based media initiatives. Dr Podkalicka is a graduate of universities in Poland, Germany and Australia. Her PhD research (2007) involved an interdisciplinary study of translation in media-related environments, with case studies from Europe and Australia. Her publications on that topic include an article in the journal Convergence (2008), and forthcoming book chapters.

Miriam Klaussner and Geoff Meade are journalists whose chapters go together with the contribution of Lee Duffield, to provide a picture of the working of the Brussels media. Together these three writers offer an inside-view of one of the most important media hubs of our time; a source of news to 500-million Europeans – and many more beyond. These chapters look at the volume of news and how it is processed, the history of the media centre, and the way that some of the journalists from the new member countries in Eastern Europe have been adjusting to change.

Miriam Klaussner is a journalist with the German international radio and television service Deutsche Welle. She completed Masters studies at Johannes Guttenberg Universitat, Mainz, in Germany, with a study on media correspondents working in Brussels. Previously she conducted practice-led research, for an MA from the Queensland University of Technology, Australia, producing multi-lingual radio documentaries in South-east Asia.

Geoff Meade is Europe Editor with the Press Association, of the United Kingdom. He is among the longest-standing members of the Brussels media corps, having been accredited there for the first time in 1979, and in that capacity is often called on as a commentator for media outlets throughout Europe, North America and Australia. Hundreds of despatches from Geoff Meade have charted major developments and breaking stories, like the 1987 sinking of the ferry Herald of Free Enterprise at Zeebrugge, the 1997 death of Diana, Princess of Wales, in Paris, and successive, decisive gatherings of the heads of government of the European Union.

Karmen Erjavec, Franja Pizmoht and Zala Volcic, from Slovenika, provide further information and ideas from the perspective of the new member countries of the EU. Studying the movement towards European unification at a cultural level, they report on developments in education (Karmen Erjavec and Zala Volcic) and in the new media field (Franja Pizmoht’s chapter on young people and blogs). The EU founding father, Jean Monet, once said that if starting again on his European project, he would begin with culture; and in these chapters we see culture and media together: teachers giving classes on media and European democracy, feeling themselves not in touch with the new order they aspired to be part of; or bloggers working across borders, of Europe, and farther afield.

Karmen Erjavec is an Associate Professor at the University of Ljubljana, Slovenia, and holds a PhD in Communication Studies from Salzburg University in Austria. She has published widely in books and scholarly journals, including the Journalistic Quarterly (1999), and more recently with “Beyond Advertising and Journalism” in Discourse and Society (2004), “Hybrid Public Relations, New Discourse” in the European Journal of Communication (2005), and with Z. Volcic, “The Kosovo battle” in the Harvard International Journal of Press and Politics (2007).

Franja Pizmoht is a researcher and student in the computer science faculty of Maribor University in Slovenia. She has worked in the field of radio and television, and video and audio production, citizen journalism, convergent media and new media. Her awards for academic distinction include a University of Maribor Rector’s Award for 2008. Franja Pizmoht is active in publishing and writing for media outlets in Slovenia – in the newspaper Vecer, academic newspaper Kaytedra, and television station RTS – and is a member of the organising committee of the International Festival of Radical Communication, Memfest.

Zala Volcic is a post-doctoral Fellow at the Queensland University Centre for Critical and Cultural Studies, in Brisbane, Australia. She investigates cultural consequences of nationalism, capitalism and globalisation – emphasising international communication, media and cultural identities. Dr Volcic has published numerous books and articles including: “The Machine that Creates Slovenes”, on Slovene national identity, in the National Identities Journal (2005); “Blaming the Media: Serbian narratives of nationalist identity”, in Continuum: Journal of Media and Cultural Studies (2006), and “Yugo-nostalgia …”, in Critical Studies of Mass Communication (2007).

FOR MORE INFORMATION

For information about this new book, Europe and the Media:[email protected]; and see, http://eprints.qut.edu.au/view/person/Duffield,_Lee.html (12.4.10).

• View Similar Articles