The Fan Studies Network

CALL FOR PAPERS

Kick Starting Media: Cultures of Funding in Contemporary Media Industries

One-Day Conference: 9 June 2016

Media Futures Research Centre, Bath Spa University

Held at Bath Spa University, Newton Park Campus, Newton Park, Newton St Loe, Bath, BA2 9BN

Confirmed keynotes:
Professor Gillian Doyle, University of Glasgow
Dr James Cateridge, Oxford Brookes University

With recent threats of change to the BBC’s future public funding regime, not to mention news of the British broadcaster’s former Top Gear presenters signing to subscription-based streaming service Amazon Prime, the subject of new media funding models and their impact on how audiences can – or should – consume media has become a point of public discussion. Trends such as crowdfunding and co-creation – where producers and audiences share responsibility for financing and producing media – as well as subscription-based platforms like Netflix and video-on-demand services such as iTunes have all made media more sharable and personal, but all of these trends and services also raise further questions about the funding priorities, strategies and policies in the arts, media and culture sectors. It is thus timely to take stock of the cultures of funding in contemporary media industries, and this conference provides a platform for analysing the impact of these contemporary funding cultures, be it on texts, audiences, technologies or industries.

Recent public debates over funding in the media industries seem tied to the impact of digitalisation, which has provided a catalyst for change in terms of how media is now produced and consumed across multiple platforms. As such, basic business models for funding media are changing. While digitalisation is seen to have redefined ideas of ownership amidst shifts from a top-down corporate-driven model to a more bottom-up consumer-driven model (Jenkins 2006), how is such a shift continuing to shape the type of media now being financed? Moreover, how are digitised media interfaces – bringing greater individualised choice for media audiences (Tryon 2013) – impacting funding patterns and creative imperatives for such media? What is the impact of convergences and the need to spread content across multiple platforms on license fee funding? Equally, emerging digitalised funding models such as co-creativity raise questions about entrepreneurship in the media but also about unequal power structures as audiences may come to function as free labour (Scholz 2013; Smith 2015). In what ways, then, might such blurring of power structures redefine basic notions of media funding? And how do different media industries now orchestrate, manage and perceive the turn towards crowdfunded, video-on-demand or co-created content as business models of the future?

To address these questions, the conference organisers invite proposals for 20-minute papers from both researchers and media practitioners. As well as exploring the broader questions above, proposals can be on, but are not limited to, the following topics:
Contemporary film funding (e.g. Hollywood franchise-based models of financing, independently-financed productions, crowdfunding platforms such as Kickstarter, public/private sector film financing, etc)
Contemporary television funding (e.g. subscription-based streaming services such as Netflix and Amazon Prime, public service/license fee funding models, new sponsorship models, product placement, TV promo companies, video-on-demand services such as iPlayer, etc)
Contemporary videogame funding (e.g. co-creation, social media gaming production, etc)
Contemporary comics and book funding (e.g. digital/motion comics, online publishing trends, etc)
Contemporary music funding and new economic models (e.g. live-touring, streaming, downloading platforms such as iTunes, etc)
Contemporary advertising and transmedia funding (e.g. social media marketing, online apps, intermediary agency funds, branded entertainment, etc)
Impacts of contemporary funding practices on audiences (e.g. exploitability of co-creativity, crowdfunding as fandom, fan-fiction, binge watching, etc)
Impacts of contemporary funding practices on media texts (e.g. changing narrative formats, participatory content, etc)

A Special Issue devoted to the conference theme of ‘Funding in the Convergence Era’ will be published in The International Journal on Media Management in February 2017, co-edited by Matthew Freeman and journal editor Bozena Mierzejewska. Conference speakers will be invited to submit their papers to this Special Issue for consideration.

Please send proposals (300 words plus a 100 word bio) to Dr Matthew Freeman (m.freeman@bathspa.ac.uk) by no later than15 January 2016. Delegates will be informed of acceptance by mid-February 2016.

This event is part of the Media Futures Research Centre ‘Economic Futures’ 2015-16 programme of activities at Bath Spa University.  

A Conference organized by NoRMMA, CIMS and DICIS
Ghent University (Ghent, Belgium), 12 and 13 November 2015

Keynotes: Geneviève Sellier, University of Bordeaux; Eric Hoyt, University of Wisconsin-Madison

NoRMMA, the University of Kent’s Network of Research: Movies, Magazines and Audiences, and CIMS, the Ghent University’s Centre for Cinema and Media Studies, will be holding a conference on the impact of 
digitalization for the study of movie magazines and historical audiences. The conference is supported by the Digital Cinema Studies network DICIS. Proposals for papers are now invited.

The recent advances in research made by proponents of New Cinema History 
underline the importance of extending the field of scholarly focus beyond the film text to the wider movie-going experience. While material objects such as company records, theatre ledgers and fan letters have now gained a respectable place in this research, the movie magazine, whether fan or trade, still seems to be neglected or regarded with suspicion. This is perhaps due to the fan magazines’ reputation for purveying scandal and gossip, their frequent mingling of gushing tone and blatant falsehood. Since the trade papers were aimed at industry insiders, theatre owners and exhibitors, studio employees and agents, periodicals such as Variety, The Hollywood Reporter and Motion Picture Herald have also been overlooked as somehow biased towards business interests. However, by treating movie magazines as the objects of primary rather than secondary research, important findings can be generated.

As Anthony Slide has noted, in their heyday from 1920s to 1950s, there 
were around 20 major movie magazines on offer every month at American newsstands (2010: 3), with more offered in Europe and across Latin America; trade publications, though sold to and for different markets, were also produced in steady numbers within each country involved in film production and distribution. This resulting material gives investigators a huge potential resource for study, especially now that the digitalization of periodical collections is becoming more common. With the Media History Digital Library making multi-issues of both fans and trades available for download, one of the major problems with working on these publications – access – is partially solved, for researchers now and in the future when even fewer of these ephemeral 
artefacts may remain physically available.

Robert Scholes and Sean Latham, modernist magazine scholars, announced the birth of a new academic area of interest in 2006, periodical 
studies, and noted further that “The rapid expansion of new media technologies over the last two decades…has begun to transform the way we view, handle, and gain access to these objects. This immediacy, in turn, reveals these objects to us anew, so that we have begun to see them not 
as resources to be disaggregated into their individual components but as 
texts requiring new methodologies and new types of collaborative investigation.” (PMLA 121.2) The networks hosting this conference believe that the study of movie magazines can be just as revealing to film and cultural historians as the highbrow Modernist and Little 
Magazines, and that the fans and trades equally demand “new methodologies and new types of collaborative investigation.”

This conference therefore aims to bring together researchers whose work 
examines movie magazines intended for any audience and from any period 
or locale. We hope to attract colleagues from a wide range of disciplines who wish to pose questions about how to read these artifacts, how to interpret them, and how to assess the impact of 
digitalization on periodical research. We are seeking abstracts for individual papers and panels of three or four contributors on topics including, but not limited to:

* the advantages and potential disadvantages of digitalisation

* comparative studies of a topic in the trades and fan magazines

* imagining/recovering the audience of the fan magazines

* reading movie magazines as extensions of the cinema-going experience

* idiosyncrasies of national models of movie magazine – alternatives to the Hollywood template

* methodologies for working with the fans and trades

* issues of censorship and industry regulation

* cross-overs in methods and objects of research between the areas of magazine, and periodical, studies

* we are particularly keen to see proposals that cross the borders 
between academia and industry, and/or archives and libraries

Please send abstracts of 300 words and a 100-word biography to 
normma.network@gmail.com by 15 May 2015, and address any queries to the same email. After the conference, you may be invited to submit a revised 
version of your paper for consideration in a special issue or edited volume to be organized by the planners.

Conference committee: Tamar Jeffers McDonald & Lies Lanckman, University 
of Kent (UK) * www.normmanetwork.com /// Daniël Biltereyst & Lies Van de 
Vijver, Ghent University (Belgium) *www.cims.ugent.be * 
http://www.digitalcinemastudies.com

NoRMMA (Network of Research: Movies, Magazines, Audiences), University of Kent, UK

Friday 29th May, 2015

NoRMMA invites proposals for an interdisciplinary conference on non-traditional approaches to star studies research. The one-day event will be held at the University of Kent on May 29th, 2015.

Confirmed keynotes:

Dr Catherine Grant, University of Sussex
Dr Kieran Fenby-Hulse, Bath Spa University

The event will focus on ways to explore film studies research through non-traditional approaches. Examples include: performance, video essays, interpretative dance, creative fiction/non-fiction, poetry, music, and any kind of multimedia project. Through this symposium, we would like to explore the connections between scholarship and fandom, research and creativity, the benefits and disadvantages of exploring an (audio)visual art through (audio)visual means, and the development of the innovative and ever-emerging field of practice as research.

Potential topics include, but are not limited to:

– Star studies

– Film History

– Fan magazine research

– Audience reception studies

– Archival research

– Genre studies

– Aspects of film analysis

Potential contributors should submit abstracts of 300 words and a short biography to normma.network@gmail.com by Friday 27th February, 2015.

WebCite, a non-profit tool used by some fan cultures and communities is asking for help in order to raise development funds, or it will close during 2013.

The online citation tool is often used to create back up links for “at risk” pages that are being cited, allowing users to take snap-shots for these online citations and access them at a later date.

This is the page about their campaign: https://fundrazr.com/campaigns/aQMp7

and here is some general information about the tool:
http://www.webcitation.org/faq

Please help publicise this campaign if you can!

(Thanks to Morgan Dawn for this information).