1,720,956 research outputs found

    Radio New Zealand International: Reporting the Pacific in tight times

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    New Zealand International (RNZI) broadcasts from New Zealand into the South Pacific and is relayed to South Pacific listeners by their various national news services. In 2006, American academic Andrew M. Clark characterised the role of RNZI as ‘providing a service for the people of the South Pacific’ that also provided ‘an important public diplomacy tool for the New Zealand government’ (Clark, 2006). A decade on, this article evaluates the ongoing use and utility of RNZI as a taxpayer-funded voice of and from New Zealand, as a service for the diverse peoples of the South Pacific and as a tool of New Zealand’s transnational diplomatic efforts.  RNZI is still a key source of local and regional information and connection for the distinct cultures and nations of the vast South Pacific area, whose peoples have strong links to New Zealand through historical ties and contemporary diasporas living in the country. But, RNZI now faces mounting financial pressure, a government swinging between indifferent and hostile to public broadcasting and questions of legitimacy and reach in the ‘digital age’. With RNZI under pressure in 2016, key questions arise about its present and future. What is RNZI doing well and not so well? What role should New Zealand’s domestic and international politics play in the organisation and its outputs? And how might its importance and impact be measured and understood in such a culturally and geographically diverse region as the South Pacific? Using a variety of sources, including documents released to the author under the New Zealand Official Information Act, this article explores the role of RNZI in the contemporary New Zealand and South Pacific media environments

    Powerful Music: Media, Culture and the 'Third-way' in New Zealand. A Grounded Theory Analysis of Kiwi FM

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    The New Zealand radio market is one of the most deregulated in the world. There are no limits on ownership, very few constraints on content and no quotas for local content. New Zealand’s radio environment reflects the strong neo-liberal principles that underpin the open, market-driven New Zealand economy. Political promises and public discussions about the creation of a nationwide commercial-free public radio service for young people had faltered against these principles in the early to mid-2000s with strong opposition from incumbent commercial radio interests decrying government interference in their commercial rights. It was in to this environment in 2005 that one half of the foreign-owned radio broadcasting duopoly introduced a radio network into the three main cities that played only New Zealand music – Kiwi FM. Within a year the network had failed to attract sufficient listeners and advertisers to stay on-air and was nearing closure. At this point the Labour government of the day stepped in to save the struggling network by giving it access to temporary free frequencies and funding to make programmes featuring New Zealand music. This was an extraordinary situation in that commercial radio in New Zealand is notable for its focus on producing only programming that will create significant profits for shareholders, rather than public service-type programming benefiting national arts and culture. It was also extraordinary in that the government had intervened to support a commercial company to ensure a failed radio network would survive. This dissertation explores why and how this happened through a grounded theory analysis of the significant amount of official documentation this situation generated, through interviews with key players and other contemporaneous material such as media interviews, blogs and newspaper articles about Kiwi FM. What emerges from this data is evidence of a ‘third-way’ agenda operating in this situation – New Zealand’s version of the then Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, Tony Blair’s ‘Cool Britannia’ appeal to voters in what amounted to public-private partnerships in the cultural sectors of the economy. This ‘third-way’ promise to revitalise a shared sense of nationhood while delivering economic growth through improving the creative industry’s capacity to output marketable culture was echoed in New Zealand. The story of how multinational media company CanWest (owners of Kiwi FM) came to be a partner with the Labour government in promoting New Zealand music demonstrates some of the key issues inherent in this approach. Importantly, these partnerships rely on personal connections and relationships as well as the growing interconnections and shifting power differentials created between governments and officials, businesses and the media. The Kiwi FM story shows that while partnering with businesses in order to achieve cultural-economic goals such as promoting and monetising a national music culture may seem logical and low-risk, business necessarily has a longer view beyond the election cycle, and will join into and construct these partnerships in order to gain commercial advantages first and foremost. This dissertation offers critical new insights into the policy making processes, the commercial decisions and the cultural arguments that were behind the experiment that was Kiwi FM. Ultimately, I argue that substantial deregulation of the media should be carefully considered, as belated attempts to influence the market to achieve government policy goals are unlikely to succeed in a highly commercial media environment driven by competitive pressures and empowered by significant potential influence over the electorate

    Powerful Music: Media, Culture and the 'Third-way' in New Zealand. A Grounded Theory Analysis of Kiwi FM

    No full text
    The New Zealand radio market is one of the most deregulated in the world. There are no limits on ownership, very few constraints on content and no quotas for local content. New Zealand’s radio environment reflects the strong neo-liberal principles that underpin the open, market-driven New Zealand economy. Political promises and public discussions about the creation of a nationwide commercial-free public radio service for young people had faltered against these principles in the early to mid-2000s with strong opposition from incumbent commercial radio interests decrying government interference in their commercial rights. It was in to this environment in 2005 that one half of the foreign-owned radio broadcasting duopoly introduced a radio network into the three main cities that played only New Zealand music – Kiwi FM. Within a year the network had failed to attract sufficient listeners and advertisers to stay on-air and was nearing closure. At this point the Labour government of the day stepped in to save the struggling network by giving it access to temporary free frequencies and funding to make programmes featuring New Zealand music. This was an extraordinary situation in that commercial radio in New Zealand is notable for its focus on producing only programming that will create significant profits for shareholders, rather than public service-type programming benefiting national arts and culture. It was also extraordinary in that the government had intervened to support a commercial company to ensure a failed radio network would survive. This dissertation explores why and how this happened through a grounded theory analysis of the significant amount of official documentation this situation generated, through interviews with key players and other contemporaneous material such as media interviews, blogs and newspaper articles about Kiwi FM. What emerges from this data is evidence of a ‘third-way’ agenda operating in this situation – New Zealand’s version of the then Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, Tony Blair’s ‘Cool Britannia’ appeal to voters in what amounted to public-private partnerships in the cultural sectors of the economy. This ‘third-way’ promise to revitalise a shared sense of nationhood while delivering economic growth through improving the creative industry’s capacity to output marketable culture was echoed in New Zealand. The story of how multinational media company CanWest (owners of Kiwi FM) came to be a partner with the Labour government in promoting New Zealand music demonstrates some of the key issues inherent in this approach. Importantly, these partnerships rely on personal connections and relationships as well as the growing interconnections and shifting power differentials created between governments and officials, businesses and the media. The Kiwi FM story shows that while partnering with businesses in order to achieve cultural-economic goals such as promoting and monetising a national music culture may seem logical and low-risk, business necessarily has a longer view beyond the election cycle, and will join into and construct these partnerships in order to gain commercial advantages first and foremost. This dissertation offers critical new insights into the policy making processes, the commercial decisions and the cultural arguments that were behind the experiment that was Kiwi FM. Ultimately, I argue that substantial deregulation of the media should be carefully considered, as belated attempts to influence the market to achieve government policy goals are unlikely to succeed in a highly commercial media environment driven by competitive pressures and empowered by significant potential influence over the electorate

    Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis

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    The 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

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    “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

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    We 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

    Dispelling the Myths Behind First-author Citation Counts

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    We conducted a full-scale evaluative citation analysis study of scholars in the XML research field to explore just how different from each other author rankings resulting from different citation counting methods actually are, and to demonstrate the capability of emerging data and tools on the Web in supporting more realistic citation counting methods. Our results contest some common arguments for the continued use of first-author citation counts in the evaluation of scholars, such as high correlations between author rankings by first-author citation counts and other citation counting methods, and high costs of using more realistic citation counting methods that are not well-supported by the ISI databases. It is argued that increasingly available digital full text research papers make it possible for citation analysis studies to go beyond what the ISI databases have directly supported and to employ more sophisticated methods

    Author Index

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