Pop Culture for Beginners promotes reflective engagement with the world around us and provides a set of tools for thinking critically about how meaning is created, reinforced, and circulated. Privileging a semiotic approach, the book’s first part, “The Pop Culture Toolbox,” outlines the development of pop culture studies; explains the semiotic framework; introduces students to a variety of critical lenses including Marxism, feminism, postcolonialism, and Critical Race Theory; and then offers an overview of several pop culture “pivot points” including authenticity, convergence culture, intersectionality, intertextuality, and subculture. The book’s second part provides a series of units, prepared in consultation with subject area experts, built around topics central to popular culture studies: television and film, music, comics, gaming, social media, and fandom. Each chapter includes “Your Turn” activities and discussion questions, as well as possible assignments and suggestions for further reading. The unit chapters in part two also include enabling questions as beginning points for thinking critically and sample readings demonstrating relevant scholarly approaches to popular culture; important vocabulary terms throughout are included in a substantive glossary at the end.

The first volume to answer definitively and for the first time the question: what is a news picture and how does it work?

The first introductory textbook to situate popular culture studies in the United States as an academic discipline with its own history and approach to examining American culture, its rituals, beliefs, and the objects that shape its existence.

"Spreadable Media" maps fundamental changes taking place in the contemporary media environment, a space where corporations no longer tightly control media distribution. This book challenges some of the prevailing frameworks used to describe contemporary media.

Some say it's simply information, mirroring the world. Others believe it's propaganda, promoting a partisan view. But news, Michael Schudson tells us, is really both and neither; it is a form of culture, complete with its own literary and social conventions and powerful in ways far more subtle and complex than its many critics might suspect. A penetrating look into this culture, The Power of News offers a compelling view of the news media's emergence as a central institution of modern society, a key repository of common knowledge and cultural authority. One of our foremost writers on journalism and mass communication, Schudson shows us the news evolving in concert with American democracy and industry, subject to the social forces that shape the culture at large. He excavates the origins of contemporary journalistic practices, including the interview, the summary lead, the preoccupation with the presidency, and the ironic and detached stance of the reporter toward the political world. His book explodes certain myths perpetuated by both journalists and critics. The press, for instance, did not bring about the Spanish-American War or bring down Richard Nixon; TV did not decide the Kennedy-Nixon debates or turn the public against the Vietnam War. Then what does the news do? True to their calling, the media mediate, as Schudson demonstrates. He analyzes how the news, by making knowledge public, actually changes the character of knowledge and allows people to act on that knowledge in new and significant ways. He brings to bear a wealth of historical scholarship and a keen sense for the apt questions about the production, meaning, and reception of news today.

"The authors are familiar with the emerging jargon of media convergence and they define large parts of it well. They have also laboured impressively to gather and define useful examples of journalese …This book is a labour of love that reflects immense care and learning. It makes a helpful contribution to a fledgling field of academia and to uniting the cultures of news and journalism studies." Tim Luckhurst, University of Kent, UK This comprehensive glossary offers clear and insightful definitions of the most significant keywords in news and journalism studies. Ranging from 'above the fold' to 'zinger', and with over 400 terms in between, it covers words associated with newspapers, radio and television news, magazines, photojournalism and internet reporting. Other examples include 'agenda setting', 'libel', 'news values', 'objectivity,' 'scoop' and 'tabloidization'. Written by two of the field's leading scholars, it offers an informed perspective on the key terms. It considers a range of genres, including business, crime, environmental, fashion, lifestyle, investigative, science, sports and war journalism as well as looking at new alternatives such as 'Wikinews' and 'Twitter'. This lively and engaging treatment will provide students, researchers and journalists with a solid grounding in the fast-moving vocabulary of news and journalism studies.

The Comic-Con phenomenon—and what it means for your business The annual trade show Comic-Con International isn’t just fun and games. According to award-winning business author and futurist Rob Salkowitz it’s a “massive focus group and marketing megaphone” for Hollywood—and in Comic-Con and the Business of Pop Culture, he examines the business of popular culture through the lens of Comic-Con. Salkowitz offers an entertaining and substantive look at the show, providing a close look at the comic-book and videogame industries’ expanding influence on marketing, merchandising, and the entertainment industry. Rob Salkowitz is founder and Principle Consultant for the communications firm MediaPlant, LLC.