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In an economic context of sustained growth and low interest rates, many Spanish communication groups adopted expansive business strategies at the expense of high indebtedness. In 2011, the accumulated joint debt of the main groups that operate in the media sector in Spain was around 11,000 million euros. The harsh economic and financial crisis of 2007 soon exposed the errors of many companies, which in that new context were forced to resort to successive refinancing of their credits. We propose an updated analysis of the causes and consequences of the presence of banks and investment funds in the ownership structure of the main communication companies operating in Spain.

Modern Hollywood is dominated by a handful of studios: Columbia, Disney, Fox, Paramount, Universal, and Warner Bros. Threatened by independents in the 1970s, they returned to power in the 1980s, ruled unquestioned in the 1990s, and in the new millennium are again beseiged. But in the heyday of this new classical era, the major studios movies — their stories and styles — were astonishingly precise biographies of the studios that made them. Movies became product placements for their studios, advertising them to the industry, to their employees, and to the public at large. If we want to know how studios work—how studios think—we need to watch their films closely. How closely? Maniacally so. In a wide range of examples, The Studios after the Studios explores the gaps between story and backstory in order to excavate the hidden history of Hollywood's second great studio era.

In the preface to a seminal exposé of the “intern nation,” Ross Perlin (2012) writes, “reality TV truly embraces the intern” (xii). This article describes and analyzes how 20 reality TV intern job ads for 19 different reality TV studios represent the work of interns and internships in the capitalist reality TV industry. By interrogating how the job postings depict the work that reality TV studios expect interns to do, the skills that TV studios expect interns to possess as a prerequisite to considering them eligible for mostly unpaid positions, the asymmetrical power relations between studios and interns, and the studios’ utilization of “hope” for a career-relevant experience to recruit interns, the article argues that the reality TV intern is actually a misclassified worker. The study demonstrates that reality TV interns are workers whose labour feeds reality TV production and that reality TV internships are a means of getting workers to labour without pay. The conclusion establishes some grounds for a reality TV intern class action suit.  

Se analiza y describe la configuración de las estructuras mediáticas de quienes controlan los medios televisivos de cobertura nacional en la América andina: Argentina, Bolivia, Colombia, Chile, Ecuador y Perú. A través de una revisión crítica de documentos, se pone de manifiesto que existen personas, grupos familiares, conglomerados empresariales nacionales y transnacionales de múltiples actividades, que tienen vínculos en varios casos con los políticos y gobiernos de turno, quienes constituyen las estructuras del poder mediático que dominan los contenidos de infoentretenimiento y la opinión pública; la economía y el mercado, el adoctrinamiento ideológico y la política gubernamental en los países de la región andina.

This article considers television interfaces, the screens of menus and metadata that must be engaged, as part of emergent television viewing practices. Found on devices and services such as TiVo, Hulu, YouTube, and Apple's iTunes suite, television interfaces are productive spaces that reframe the programming we watch, introduce new metadata-based aesthetics, alter the rhythms of the time we spend with television, and reveal the struggles between media corporations both established and emergent. After a brief overview of television interfaces, this article interrogates the specific role that television interfaces play as explicitly interactive sites where the emergent media ontologies of customization, navigation, and control are invested and contested.

This article explores the opportunities and problems thus far presented by the movement of old TV shows into new online platforms. Media users can easily view, remix, and share old television content, and media industries struggle to adapt their old business models to these new modes of communication.

This article examines the diverse strategies that the film and television divisions of media conglomerates have employed in circulating their properties online. The author shows how historical relationships as well as long-standing business practices tied to both theatrical motion pictures and prime-time television series have affected decisions about what, where, when, and how content is offered on the Internet. Comparing the Internet-related activities of these different divisions sheds light on the distinct challenges each medium faces in the online realm and also points to the complex nature of the responses of contemporary media conglomerates to new technologies.

When the Federal Communications Commission considered revamping its policies, many political activists argued that media conglomerates had failed to meet their duties to protect freedom of speech. Moveon's dispute with CBS over its proposed Superbowl advertisement and Michael Moore's quarrel over distribution of his documentary, Fahrenheit 911, are cases in point. In matters of pure entertainment, the public expect companies to avoid offensive programming. The press, on the other hand, may well be forced to offend some audience members in order to create a viable forum for political dissent. As journalism and entertainment are increasingly inter-linked, an in depth moral analysis of the media corporation and its obligations becomes increasingly important. I explore Kantian, Utilitarian, and Rawlsian analyses of corporate obligation in the aforementioned cases. I then examine whether or not these results suggest anything more generally about the sorts of mission statements and ethical policies that ought to be endorsed by media conglomerates and whether non-business institutions also require changes. Ultimately, I suggest that at a minimum, media institutions should view the duty to promote the representation of diverse views in a democracy as an imperfect moral and civic duty rather than making programming decisions solely by reference to profit. Ideally, greater access to media access should not be increased for the most powerful unless doing so at the same time increases free speech opportunities for those who currently have the least access.

Perren examines the diverse strategies that the film and television divisions of media conglomerates have employed in circulating their properties online. The author shows how historical relationships as well as long-standing business practices tied to both theatrical motion pictures and prime-time television series have affected decisions about what, where, when, and how content is offered on the Internet. Comparing the Internet-related activities of these different divisions sheds light on the distinct challenges each medium faces in the online realm and also points to the complex nature of the responses of contemporary media conglomerates to new technologies.

This article examines a new breed of highly entrepreneurial, freelance Web producers, who have emerged on the margins of the heavily bureaucratic and conglomerated television industry. Miles Beckett and Greg Goodfried, the creators of the successful Lonelygirl15 (LG15) franchise, are staking their futures on a new form of ad-supported entertainment that they have dubbed social series. This production study examines the producers' self-reflexive statements about themselves and the state of the industry, which they have embedded in the social series as part of its community-building enterprise.