[ecrea] Disrupting media infrastructures - call for papers - Northern Lights 2019

Call for submissions

/Northern Lights/, Volume 17, 2019 - Theme issue on:

**

Disrupting media infrastructures

/Transforming media industries and public spheres/

Volume editors: Kirsten Frandsen and Stig Hjarvard

**

During the recent decades digitization has enabled a fundamental 
disruption of many parts of the existing communication infrastructure of 
both the media industries and the larger society. Technological and 
institutional structures that have hitherto served as the underlying 
framework for mainly nationally oriented media systems have been 
disrupted by the emergence of new digital production, distribution, and 
communication technologies and business models. Media act in a double 
role as both objects of transformation an as agents of the disruptive 
forces with consequences for individual media’s performance and for the 
overall media structure and its interfaces with the wider society. Older 
media organizations and professions are struggling not only to develop 
new business models but also to invent new forms of content and ways of 
reaching and engaging users. As a result, new forms of distribution, new 
strategic alliances, and new types of collaboration are emerging 
nationally and transnationally. Furthermore, the ability to steer 
developments through national public policies has diminished, leaving 
regulators and policy makers with still fewer options to influence the 
communicative infrastructure of society.

Disruption is often related to changing distribution models, including 
the general transition from push to pull modes of distribution. Public 
and private broadcasters’ live and flow based services are giving way to 
on-demand and streaming services. Legacy news media are losing control 
over their distribution platforms (newspapers and websites) when 
audiences increasingly find their news through social network media. The 
ubiquity of digital media has made data about audiences and users a key 
commodity and the automated and intelligent processing of information 
about users’ digital footprints allows for much more sophisticated forms 
of marketing, targeting individual users with customized advertising and 
content recommendations. Disruption has often been instigated by global 
agents such as Google, Facebook, and Amazon that in some regions of the 
world have acquired near-monopoly status within particular areas such as 
search-based advertising, social network media, and online shopping. 
These companies’ control over key networks and technologies raises a 
series of questions regarding the national media companies’ ability to 
successfully adapt to a digital infrastructure. Especially because the 
global companies are now using their distribution-based wealth to 
establish themselves as important media content producers in genres such 
as television drama series and news.

The consequences of disruption are manifold and appear within several 
domains. Within media industries the disruption of the value chain 
entails the break-up of existing models and circuits of production and 
distribution making existing professional skills and values (e.g. within 
journalism) obsolete and prompting industries to look for new types of 
competences (e.g. within computer technology) and new types of 
collaborative partnerships and sources of revenue. At the societal level 
the communicative infrastructure for governance is being altered, 
including the ways in which media systems are able to sustain a 
democratic public sphere. With the growing role of social network media 
and on-demand services, the existing rationalities for public service 
media are increasingly being tested. Disruption as a socio-economic 
phenomenon therefore raises questions that are not limited to the media 
industry: How is the global context and push towards neoliberal policies 
affecting national political governance of media systems both 
ideologically and in practice?

/Northern Light/calls for papers exploring how disruption of the media 
infrastructure relates to transformation both within media industries 
and in a wider societal context. Research topics may include but are not 
restricted to:

·Changes in media business models and challenges for legacy news media 
and public service media.

·Development of push and pull models of media content distribution

·Media content production for on-demand audiences and users

·Emerging strategic alliances and collaborations in distribution and/or 
content production

·Global tech companies and their influence on disruption of global and 
national media markets

·Datafication and the value of consumer intelligence; new forms of 
audience/user data gathering

·Transforming advertising: the demise of mass media models of 
advertising, search based advertising models, etc.

·The political economy of disruption: the interplay between 
globalization, neoliberal policies, and technology development

·Changes of the media infrastructure and the implication for the 
performance of the public sphere

Considering the overall theme of this volume, all submissions must 
analytically or theoretically be committed to engage with the processes 
and effects of ‘disruption’.

*Submissions*

Please send an extended abstract of 500-600 words to volume editors 
Associate Professor Kirsten Frandsen ((imvkf /at/ cc.au.dk) 
<mailto:(imvkf /at/ cc.au.dk)>) and Professor Stig Hjarvard ((stig /at/ hum.ku.dk) 
<mailto:(stig /at/ hum.ku.dk)>).

Deadline for abstract submission: 15 March, 2018

*Time Schedule*

Notification to authors about acceptance: 15 April 2018

Final article submission:  25 August, 2018

Publication: Spring 2019

*Peer review*

The journal is using anonymous peer review of the final submission, two 
for each article. Initial acceptance of abstract to submit a full 
article does not guarantee publication. Final acceptance of an article 
is dependent on both the outcome of peer reviews and the editors’ decision.

*About the journal*

/Northern Lights/is a peer reviewed international journal dedicated to 
studies of

media. The yearbook is a meeting place for Nordic, European and global 
perspectives on media. The editors stress the importance of 
interdisciplinary research and the journal focuses on the interplay 
between media and their cultural and social context. Media have emerged 
as important institutions of modern society at the same time as mobile 
and interactive media technologies become integrated into the fabric of 
the wider culture and society. The development of new social networks, 
changes in political communication and governance, and the changing 
relationship between art, culture, and commercial markets are important 
aspect of these new dynamics.

 From 2019 /Northern Lights/ is moving to an open access platform at 
Nordicom, the Nordic Information Centre for Media and Communication 
Research.

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