Vicki Mayer

Last updated

Vicki Mayer is professor of communication and media. She currently works at Tulane University in New Orleans Louisiana, where she holds the Louise Riggio Chair for Social Entrepreneurship and Innovation. Mayer is an influential academic for her research on media production and consumption, specifically relating to economic and political transformations in creative industries. Her writings on production range from student publishing, community media, ethnic journalism and urban sign production, and have significantly contributed to the Communication School of Liberal Arts. Mayer's most downloaded article on the internet explores the origins and performance of ‘flashing’ in New Orleans.

Contents

Special topics

Creative Labor, Hollywood South, The Public Intellectual 2.0

Professional memberships

International Communication, Association National Communication, Association Society for Cinema and Media Studies, Latin American Studies Association

Education and academic career

Born in 1971, Mayer grew up in Kansas before pursuing an independent major at Brown College. She then studied at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD) and received a PhD for communication in the year 2000. Her research interests include, but are not limited to, media audiences, production studies and communication labor, citizenship and culture, Latin American and Latino media, and, alternative and community media. Mayer is fluent in English, Portuguese and Spanish and has written four books, her most popular being Below the Line: Producers and Production Studies in the New Television Economy. She now teaches an array of courses at Tulane University including Media Analysis, Technology Analysis, Alternative Journalism and Media Histories. In these classes, her students act as co-researchers of cultural labour and creative expression in various community-based settings. [1] Mayer's goal as an SE professor is to develop methods of bringing student and community voices into the public sphere through collaborative research, digital preservation, and open access. [2] For this reason, Mayer directs MediaNOLA, a project that provides public access to locally based research via internet database that annually stores the class projects generated by Tulane students.

Study of the Times Picayune

In response to an announcement that New Orleans Times-Picayune were cutting printed issues to three days a week and, shifting to a more digital model of free content, Vicki Mayer and her class of media analysis undergraduates conducted a content analysis to compare the quality of printed and digital platforms. In this study, a 2011 edition of Times-Picayune was compared with the 2013 newspaper and allied digital platforms, namely website and smartphone applications. [3] The content analysis involved the class studying a month of news coverage three days a week for four successive weeks in October 2011 and October 2013- approximately one year before and after the digital overhaul. The class catalogued staff-bylined articles and recorded screenshots of banner stories. This data was subsequently coded into two categories; news beats (e.g. courts, cops, politics, sports) and "hard" or "soft" news. The study demonstrated that the 2013 news operation produced a higher quantity of content than did its 2011 predecessor. Furthermore, it provided solid evidence that digital platforms produce softer, less-well-sourced, poorer quality news, even when published by the same news organisation.

Published work

Mayer's collaborative research is available on MediaNOLA and has been distributed through in international publications such as Jump Cut, The Columbia Journalism Review, and Public Culture. She also edits the International Journal of Television & New Media and she has both written and edited six books about media production and production studies.

Below The Line

Mayer's book Below the Line: Producers and Production Studies in the New Television Economy [4] (Duke University Press, 2011) reflects contemporary media production studies literature, which has displayed a resurgent interest towards the labour activities of media workers. The purpose of this book is to “deconstruct the monopolies of creativity and professionalism that have structured the producer as ontologically different from all the other people who serve the television industry’s symbolic and material economies” (p. 3). In doing so, Mayer acknowledges the shifting dynamics of labour by highlighting a new media economy of workers who identify themselves within the industry, despite their work remaining ‘undervalued’ or ‘invisible’. She illuminates the “hidden labour” of individuals such as ‘soft-core’ cameramen, reality-program casters, 'do-it-yourselfers' and public-access and cable commissioners, who not only create content necessitated by the television industry, but also produce themselves in the service of capital expansion.

Mayer hereby argues that the entry of nonprofessional creative participants fail to disturb the hierarchy in which the creative professional are the referent value. She explores this notion by tracing how the “TV producer” category became associated with creativity and professionalism through four ethnographical case studies on ‘largely invisible’ television productions: i) television set assemblers in Brazil, ii) softcore video cameramen in New Orleans, iii) reality TV casters, and iv) local cable television citizen regulators. The empirical detail of these studies demonstrate labour as professional and creative work that essentially unsettles the industry's mythological account of a businesses driven by auteurs, manned by the executive class, and created by a talented minority. For this reason, Mayer's book challenges conventional paradigms that ascribe creativity and professionalism to narrow tasks performed by an elite group, fulfilling her aim to “repoliticize the ordinary” (p. 186). She subsequently critiques the self-deluding “rhetoric of the creative economy” by revealing its “implicit material inequalities” (p. 176) relating to gender, ethnicity, class, location and place, in order to demonstrate the new television economy as a wide net that exploits those excluded from hierarchies.

These conclusions reveal the paradoxical nature of the new media economy: a system that provides a wider range of access to production, whilst simultaneously offers workers less security, safeguards and stable employment. The book is hence a useful lens to demonstrate the nature of modern labourers who, in an era where work invades almost every aspect of our social life, engage with complex exercises in attempts to make themselves as ‘marketable’ as possible.

Single-authored books

Edited or co-authored books

Other editorial work

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Media studies</span> Field of study that deals with media

Media studies is a discipline and field of study that deals with the content, history, and effects of various media; in particular, the mass media. Media Studies may draw on traditions from both the social sciences and the humanities, but mostly from its core disciplines of mass communication, communication, communication sciences, and communication studies.

Mass communication is the process of imparting and exchanging information through mass media to large population segments. It utilizes various forms of media as technology has made the dissemination of information more efficient. Primary examples of platforms utilized and examined include journalism and advertising. Mass communication, unlike interpersonal communication and organizational communication, focuses on particular resources transmitting information to numerous receivers. The study of mass communication is chiefly concerned with how the content and information that is being mass communicated persuades or affects the behavior, attitude, opinion, or emotion of people receiving the information.

Social peer-to-peer processes are interactions with a peer-to-peer dynamic. These peers can be humans or computers. Peer-to-peer (P2P) is a term that originated from the popular concept of the P2P distributed computer application architecture which partitions tasks or workloads between peers. This application structure was popularized by file sharing systems like Napster, the first of its kind in the late 1990s.

<i>The Times-Picayune/The New Orleans Advocate</i> American newspaper published in New Orleans, Louisiana

The Times-Picayune/The New Orleans Advocate is an American newspaper published in New Orleans, Louisiana. Ancestral publications of other names date back to January 25, 1837. The current publication is the result of the 2019 acquisition of The Times-Picayune, which was the result of the 1914 union of The Picayune with the Times-Democrat, by the New Orleans edition of The Advocate in Baton Rouge, Louisiana.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Citizen media</span> Journalistic content produced by private citizens who are not professional journalists

Citizen media is content produced by private citizens who are not professional journalists. Citizen journalism, participatory media and democratic media are related principles.

Walter James Amoss III is former editor of The Times-Picayune. Under his leadership and that of the publisher, Ashton Phelps Jr., the paper won two Pulitzer Prizes in 1997 for public service and editorial cartooning, and in 2006 won two more Pulitzer Prizes for its coverage of Hurricane Katrina.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Digital journalism</span> Editorial content published via the Internet

Digital journalism, also known as netizen journalism or online journalism, is a contemporary form of journalism where editorial content is distributed via the Internet, as opposed to publishing via print or broadcast. What constitutes digital journalism is debated by scholars; however, the primary product of journalism, which is news and features on current affairs, is presented solely or in combination as text, audio, video, or some interactive forms like storytelling stories or newsgames, and disseminated through digital media technology.

Terry Flew is an Australian media and communications scholar, and Professor of Digital Communication and Culture in the Department of Media and Communication at the University of Sydney, Australia. He was formerly the Professor and Assistant Dean (Research) in the Creative Industries Faculty at the Queensland University of Technology. He has produced award-winning research in creative industries, media and communications, and online journalism. He is primarily known for his publication, New Media: An Introduction, which is currently in its fourth edition. His research interests include digital media, global media, media policy, creative industries, media economics, and the future of journalism.

The study of global communication is an interdisciplinary field focusing on global communication, or the ways that people connect, share, relate and mobilize across geographic, political, economic, social and cultural divides. Global communication implies a transfer of knowledge and ideas from centers of power to peripheries and the imposition of a new intercultural hegemony by means of the "soft power" of global news and entertainment.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">University of Texas at Austin Department of Radio–Television–Film</span>

The Department of Radio–Television–Film at the University of Texas at Austin located in Austin, Texas, is one of the five departments comprising the Moody College of Communication. The department was founded in 1965 and has become one of the nation's premiere film schools, consistently ranking in the top 5 for graduate programs and the top 10 for undergraduate studies. The department has a very selective admissions policy, accepting fewer than 25% of applicants in its undergraduate program, and fewer than 15% of applicants in its graduate programs.

The ARC Centre of Excellence for Creative Industries and Innovation (CCI) was an Australian research centre that undertook research in media studies, cultural studies, communication studies, law, education, economics, business technology, and information technology, related to the creative economy, between 2005 and 2013.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Dodge College of Film and Media Arts</span> College in Orange, California, U.S.

Dodge College of Film and Media Arts is one of 10 schools constituting Chapman University, located in Orange, California, 40 miles (64 km) south of Los Angeles. The school offers undergraduate and graduate degrees, with programs in film production, screenwriting, creative producing, news, documentary, public relations, advertising, digital arts, film studies, television writing, producing, and screen acting.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Axel Bruns (scholar)</span> German-Australian media scholar

Axel Bruns is a German-Australian media scholar. He is a Professor of Communication and Media Studies at QUT Digital Media Research Centre, Queensland University of Technology in Brisbane, Australia, and a Chief Investigator in the ARC Centre of Excellence for Automated Decision-Making and Society.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Rosalind Gill</span>

Rosalind Clair Gill is a British sociologist and feminist cultural theorist. She is currently Professor of Social and Cultural Analysis at City, University of London. Gill is author or editor of ten books, and numerous articles and chapters, and her work has been translated into Chinese, German, Portuguese, Spanish and Turkish.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">University of Western Ontario Faculty of Information & Media Studies</span>

The Faculty of Information and Media Studies (FIMS) is a faculty at University of Western Ontario, located in London, Ontario, Canada. The faculty offers programs at the undergraduate and graduate levels focusing on the advancement of knowledge in media, communications, and information technologies.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Janice Torre</span> American musical artist

Janice Renée Torre was a songwriter and lyricist best known for the song "Paper Roses", which she wrote with composer Fred Spielman.

The Political Economy of Communications is a particular branch in Communication studies or media studies which studies the power relations that shape the communication of information from the mass media to its public. PEC analyzes the power relations between the mass media system, information and communications technologies (ICTs) and the wider socioeconomic structure in which these operate, with a focus on understanding the historical and current state of technological developments. PEC has proliferated in the 2000s with the modernization of technology. The advancement of media has created conversation about the effects of colonialism and PEC.

Monica Balya Chibita is a Ugandan media professional, academic and academic administrator. She is a professor in the Faculty of Journalism, Media and Communication at Uganda Christian University.

David Hesmondhalgh is a British sociologist. He is currently Professor of Media, Music and Culture at the University of Leeds. His research focusses on the media and cultural industries, critical approaches to media in the digital age, and the sociology of music.

Mary Angela Bock is a journalist and professor of journalism. She is an associate professor of journalism at University of Texas at Austin in the School of Media and Journalism with an expertise in visual communication, citizen journalism and representation.

References

  1. ↑ "VICKI MAYER, PH.D. Professor, Communication School of Liberal Arts". Taylor tTulane. Tulane University. Retrieved 3 June 2016.
  2. ↑ "VICKI MAYER, PH.D. Professor, Communication School of Liberal Arts". Taylor tTulane. Tulane University. Retrieved 3 June 2016.
  3. ↑ Starkman, Dean. "Tracking digital-era news quality declines. Columbia Journalism Review". Columbia Journalism Review. Columbia Journalism Review. Retrieved 3 June 2016.
  4. ↑ Mayer, Vicki (2011). Below the Line: Producers and Production Studies in the New Television Economy. Duke University Press.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.