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The right thing
No full textThe screening of the ABC’s ambitious courtroom drama, Crownies, coincides with a renewed debate about Australian content. Ben Goldsmith has been watching them both
Introduction: Culture, trade, services
No full textBen Goldsmith and Christina Spurgeon introduce the special 'Culture, trade, services' issue of Media International Australia
Australian international cinema
No full textThis article argues that contemporary debates around Australian cinema and audiovisual production here are too narrow. This prevents us from considering fully what that production entails for Australian cinema, what it means, who it speaks to, and how it could spark new conversations about the possibilities of filmmaking and storytelling in this country. Instead, Ben Goldsmith advocates for the reconceptualisation of Australian cinema as an international rather than a national cinema, in which Australian film (and by extension Australian cultural identity) is not understood as a fixed thing or possession, but rather as an evolving, changing, set of relations
The right thing
No full textThe screening of the ABC’s ambitious courtroom drama, Crownies, coincides with a renewed debate about Australian content. Ben Goldsmith has been watching them both
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FOR a few years in the mid 2000s, the ABC screened barely any new Australian drama. This record-breaking slump, which reached an all-time low of just three hours of programs in the year ending June 2005, spurred an industry-led campaign and a degree of public controversy that convinced the federal government to increase the corporation’s funding. An extra $70 million was provided for drama, with the majority earmarked for 2011–12. The new twenty-two-part courtroom drama series Crownies, made for the ABC by the independent production house Screentime, is the principal product…Read the full article in Inside StoryAbove: Ella Scott Lynch (Erin) in Crownies
Convergence Review heralds a dramatic shift in Australian media
No full textLight on detail and raising many more questions than it answers, yesterday’s Convergence Review interim report is still bold and far-reaching writes Ben Goldsmith, driven by a fundamentally optimistic view of the future for Australian culture, content and communication.
For the first time, new platforms and services – including those operating outside Australia – will be meeting the same regulatory requirements for Australian content as free-to-air and subscription television.
The broadcast services bands will be opened up, and a new market-based pricing system for spectrum will be instituted. Australian games companies, app developers and interactive content producers will have access to a tax offset previously only available to feature film and television drama producers.
The cross-media ownership rules, a focus of passionate debate in years gone by, will be scrapped, along with the limit on the reach of commercial free to air networks. A new public interest test will be introduced for media mergers and takeovers, to be administered by a new convergent regulator.
This last proposal for a new regulator, which was the draft report’s main headline, is also one of the most curious. While the other proposed changes will require substantial overhaul (and, the report claims, trimming down) of existing legislation, it is not immediately clear why the roles and responsibilities proposed for the new authority could not be performed by the Australian Communications Media Authority (ACMA).
The proposed changes to Australian content regulation are enterprising and oriented to an as-yet unclear future media environment. In line with the review’s consistent emphasis on “regulatory parity”, the report proposes that all “Content Service Enterprises” be required to commit a percentage of total production expenditure to specified Australian content, along the lines of that currently operating for select subscription television channels.
The category of Content Service Enterprises is a broad and as yet ill-defined class of entities providing programs and other content to Australian audiences on any delivery platform.
It appears likely to cover large and small Australian players such as the existing free to air and subscription television companies, Bigpond and FetchTV, as well as international services that supply content to Australians including, presumably, Facebook, YouTube, and BBC iPlayer.
Some commentators are already suggesting that the imposition of this requirement on international services will discourage them from operating in Australia and potentially lead some Australian services to relocate offshore. And there are many questions about how these enterprises will be identified and monitored. But in theory at least, this is a bold attempt to spread the responsibility for supporting Australian content production to all services operating here.
The report also prioritises the encouragement of innovation through proposals to reduce the administrative and regulatory burden in some areas (though it remains to be seen whether cost savings will flow through to research and development), and through the extension of the Producer Offset to games and interactive content producers. Changes to spectrum allocation and use could also conceivably promote the development of innovative content and services.
While the report contains scant detail about either the nuts and bolts of the proposals, or how particular recommendations were reached, the report represents a dramatic shift in thinking about the future of Australian media.
Presumably the fine points will be revealed in the final report to the government, due in March. Submissions are invited by February 10. In the meantime, we can look forward to robust debate on the merits of these proposals as the major players and vested interests digest what promises to be the most extensive and comprehensive set of changes to media policy and industry settings ever seen in this country.
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Ben Goldsmith is a researcher at Swinburne Institute for Social Research and the ARC Centre of Excellence for Creative Industries and Innovation (CCI)
This article was originally published at The Conversation. Read the original article.
 
Introduction: Australian cinema
No full textThis addition to Intellect's Directory of World Cinema series turns the spotlight on Australia and New Zealand. This ambitious volume offers an in-depth and exciting look at the cinema produced in these two countries since the turn of the twentieth century. Though the two nations share considerable cultural and economic connections, their film industries remain distinct, marked by differences of scale, level of government involvement and funding, and relations with other countries and national cinemas. Through essays about prominent genres and themes, profiles of directors, and comprehensive reviews of significant titles, this user-friendly guide explores the diversity and distinctiveness of films from Australia and New Zealand from Whale Rider to The Piano to Wolf Creek. [Book Synopsis
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Full text linkThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Variations on the Author
Full text link“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis
Full text linkWe provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.information science;Pearson correlation;cosine;similarity measure;author cocitation analysis
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