In counterpoint to conventional examinations of images of journalism which tend to concentrate on its informational role in the political process, this book provides a lively analysis of journalism in its other guise - as entertainment. In a series of interrelated studies, the authors examine the theoretical problems in assessing popular journalism and consider common examples of its manifestations - its relationship to media stars, the coverage of sport, and the presentation of news in a `popular' form.

A provocative collection of articles that begins with the idea that the "popular" in classrooms and in the everyday lives of teachers and students is fundamentally political. This anthology includes articles by elementary and secondary public school teachers, scholars and activists who examine how and what popular toys, books, films, music and other media "teach." The essays offer strong critiques and practical pedagogical strategies for educators at every level to engage with the popular.

Whether it's the rule-defying lifer, the sharp-witted female newshound, or the irascible editor in chief, journalists in popular culture have shaped our views of the press and its role in a free society since mass culture arose over a century ago. Drawing on portrayals of journalists in television, film, radio, novels, comics, plays, and other media, Matthew C. Ehrlich and Joe Saltzman survey how popular media has depicted the profession across time. Their creative use of media artifacts provides thought-provoking forays into such fundamental issues as how pop culture mythologizes and demythologizes key events in journalism history and how it confronts issues of race, gender, and sexual orientation on the job. From Network to The Wire, from Lois Lane to Mikael Blomkvist, Heroes and Scoundrels reveals how portrayals of journalism's relationship to history, professionalism, power, image, and war influence our thinking and the very practice of democracy.

This book addresses a topic in journalism studies that has gained increasing scholarly attention since the mid-2000s: the coverage and evaluation of arts and culture, or what we term ‘cultural journalism and cultural critique’. The book highlights three approaches to this emerging research field: (1) the constant challenge of demarcating what constitutes the ‘cultural’ in cultural journalism and cultural critique, and the interlinks of cultural journalism and cultural critique; (2) the dialectic of globalization’s cultural homogenization and the specificity of local/national cultures; and (3) the need to rethink, perhaps even redefine, cultural journalism and cultural critique in view of the digital media landscape. ‘Cultural journalism’ is used as an umbrella term for media reporting and debating on culture, including the arts, value politics, popular culture, the culture industries, and entertainment. Therefore some of the contributions this book apply a broad approach to ‘the cultural’ when theorizing and analyzing the production and content of cultural journalism, and the professional ideology, self-perception, and legitimacy struggles of cultural journalists and editors. Other contributions demarcate their field of study more narrowly, both topically and generically, by engaging with very specific sub-areas such as ‘film criticism’ or ‘television series.’ This book was originally published as a special issue of Journalism Practice.

In this book, originally published in 1985, British and North American geographers present original and challenging viewpoints on the media. The essays deal with a diverse content, ranging from the presentation of news to the nature of television programming and from rock music lyrics to film visions of the city.

Articles cover many aspects of contemporary culture, including the queer cowboy, the emergence of lesbian chic, and the expansion of queer representations of blackness. This accessible volume offers useful analytical tools that will help readers make sense of the problems and promise of queer pop culture.

In this book we ask students to do three things: (l)To keep a media journal in which they reflect on the uses they make of the voices and images of popular culture; (2) to read and respond to the work of other media critics, to test their own views and experiences against those of the writers included in these pages, and (3) to try their hands at writing media criticism themselves. All three kinds of work ask students to find and write about texts from the media culture around them, to think critically about what they see and hear on their television sets and radios, in magazines and newspapers, on city streets and shopping malls, at the movies, and at concerts and clubs. To put it another way, we believe that a book such as this can provide only some of the materials for a course on writing about popular culture, that the remaining materials must always come from the media themselves and the experiences students have with them. Our aim is not to inculcate students with a certain set of critical methods or terms or to introduce them to the academic study of popular culture, but to offer them opportunities to rethink and write about their own experiences with the media, to come to their own understandings of our common culture.