[ecrea] cfp - The Future of Media Content: Interventions and Industries in the Internet Era

*2017 Joint Workshop of the ECREA “Communication Law and Policy” and 
“Media Industries and Cultural Production” Sections*

The Future of Media Content: Interventions and Industries in the 
Internet Era


  Call for Papers

The “Communication Law and Policy” and “Media Industries and Cultural 
Production” Sections of the European Communications Research and 
Education Association (ECREA) invite abstracts for theoretical and 
empirical papers on the topic o/f The Future of Content: Interventions 
and Industries in the Internet Era/. The workshop will take place in 
Norwich, United Kingdom from *15-16 September 2017*. It is hosted and 
organized by the University of East Anglia’s School of Politics, 
Philosophy, Language and Communication Studies. With a keynote address 
from *Professor Eli Noam *co-sponsored by UEA’s Centre for Competition 
Policy, a planned panel with industry and regulatory stakeholders, and a 
special YECREA session for early career researchers, this will be a 
unique opportunity to bring together those investigating the processes 
of production and distribution with those studying the policy and 
regulation governing those processes.

Media and communications industries have changed dramatically over the 
past decade and both businesses and policy makers are struggling to 
adapt. Legacy media companies engaged in cultural and news production 
are trying to change their business models in a manner that will allow 
them to survive in the face of increased competition for advertising 
income and the constraints of having a new breed of intermediaries 
between them and their audiences. Policy makers are looking beyond the 
traditional investment in public service broadcasting and content quotas 
for new interventions and policy mechanisms that might encourage content 
production and distribution. One of the biggest challenges is defining 
the landscape of actors, markets and relationships in which content is 
created and disseminated – from the YouTube star making and reaching 
millions from a bedroom to the public service broadcaster (PSB) that is 
now managing big data for its online audience and negotiating with 
service providers for zero-rating carriage in order to reach its 
audiences with sufficient speed and stability. This joint workshop 
invites contributions from a broad range of disciplines, interested in 
the policy, production and business of content and its carriage. We 
welcome perspectives from political economy, news and cultural 
production practice, policy and governance studies, media and cultural 
production history, media and communication law, and other approaches 
and fields. We welcome theoretical, methodological and empirical 
submissions - case studies and comparative work, as well as innovative 
use of methods are encouraged.

The workshop organisers invite researchers interested in the following 
areas:

▪/The news and cultural production landscape:/How is content being 
produced and distributed? What does the new value chain look like for 
the cultural industries? What roles are legacy and new actors playing 
and what are the challenges they face? To what extent are concepts such 
as commercialisation, citizen/consumer, and public interest still useful 
as normative frameworks for considering the production and distribution 
of content? How do or should we define ‘culture’ and ‘journalism’, and 
where are the boundaries, if they persist, among different types of 
content? What is the future of highly resource dependent types of 
content such as quality news, investigative journalism, high quality 
drama, documentaries and feature films? How are public and private media 
organizations adapting strategically and in their everyday work? Where 
and how is innovation happening?

▪/Funding content into the future/: How is ‘value’ being conceived and 
exchanged among players, and how are relationships with audiences/users 
being defined? What are the ‘currencies’ of these relationships, and of 
those among the various commercial and public actors? What role does 
data play and what are the implications? How has the function of 
copyright and intellectual property rights changed? What are the 
particular challenges across different kinds of contexts and markets? 
How useful are concepts such as globalization, the citizen/consumer and 
‘the public’ as normative foundations for investigating issues around 
the funding of content? What new ones might be?  What roles are internet 
intermediaries and online platforms playing in the business of content?

▪/Governance and intervention:/To what extent are traditional mechanisms 
for supporting public interest or public service content, such as 
quotas, subsidies, PSB, must carry obligations and others still 
relevant? Who are the actors in the governance of content production and 
distribution and what are their interests? How do they try to influence 
policy-making? Where are the key points of policy intervention or 
regulation? What are the implications of multi-level governance (e.g. 
EU, WTO and ITU), of ongoing austerity, and of the rise of populist and 
even new authoritarian governments? How might research contribute to key 
debates around the EU’s Digital Single Market agenda, burgeoning free 
trade agreements and media plurality? What are the implications for 
content of the right to be forgotten, traffic management and zero-rating 
carriage, and media concentration?

Abstracts of *no more than 400 words* should be submitted for blind peer 
review in Word-format directly to the organizers of the conference *by 
March 31, 2017* (Sally Broughton Micova (s.broughton-micova /at/ uea.ac.uk)).

/Each abstract should address one of the above topics in a sound 
theoretical and methodological manner, include a title as well as the 
name(s), institutional affiliation(s) and e-mail address(es) of the 
author(s)./Colleagues will be notified of acceptance by May 15, 2017, 
and registration is required by July 15, 2017. Full papers are due no 
later than August 31, 2017. Reduced fee for ECREA recognized 
“soft-currency” countries and non-waged participants will be available. 
More information will be available in due time on the ECREA CLP website 
https://commlawpolicy.wordpress.com/

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