An Introduction To Convergence

“What the future fortunes of [Gramsci’s] writings will be, we cannot know. However, his permanence is already sufficiently sure, and justifies the historical study of his international reception. The present collection of studies is an indispensable foundation for this.” —Eric Hobsbawm, from the preface Antonio Gramsci is a giant of Marxian thought and one of the world's greatest cultural critics. Antonio A. Santucci is perhaps the world's preeminent Gramsci scholar. Monthly Review Press is proud to publish, for the first time in English, Santucci’s masterful intellectual biography of the great Sardinian scholar and revolutionary. Gramscian terms such as “civil society” and “hegemony” are much used in everyday political discourse. Santucci warns us, however, that these words have been appropriated by both radicals and conservatives for contemporary and often self-serving ends that often have nothing to do with Gramsci’s purposes in developing them. Rather what we must do, and what Santucci illustrates time and again in his dissection of Gramsci’s writings, is absorb Gramsci’s methods. These can be summed up as the suspicion of “grand explanatory schemes,” the unity of theory and practice, and a focus on the details of everyday life. With respect to the last of these, Joseph Buttigieg says in his Nota: “Gramsci did not set out to explain historical reality armed with some full-fledged concept, such as hegemony; rather, he examined the minutiae of concrete social, economic, cultural, and political relations as they are lived in by individuals in their specific historical circumstances and, gradually, he acquired an increasingly complex understanding of how hegemony operates in many diverse ways and under many aspects within the capillaries of society.” The rigor of Santucci’s examination of Gramsci’s life and work matches that of the seminal thought of the master himself. Readers will be enlightened and inspired by every page.

Here is the third of a four-volume set that constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 12th International Conference on Human-Computer Interaction, HCII 2007, held in Beijing, China, in July 2007, jointly with eight other thematically similar conferences. It covers multimodality and conversational dialogue; adaptive, intelligent and emotional user interfaces; gesture and eye gaze recognition; and interactive TV and media.

Preface: what is new about today's news audiences -- What's old is new, what's new is old; Text box: what is newsworthy; Text box: Las Vegas Sun -- Eight elements of a news story and the tools to build it; Text box: GlobalPost.com -- Sources and background information: reporting before the reporting; Text box: my five tips for more focused searches; Text box: U.S. courts basics; Text box: Storify.com -- Sources and background information: reporting before the reporting; Text box: Twitter on the beat -- Law & ethics: reporting rules of the road; Text box : trust but verify; Text box : Storify.com -- Building the spot single story; Text box: types of leads; Text box: story types; Text box: breaking news and making connections -- Capturing context and tone: using words, pictures and/or sound; Text box : practicing convergence in sports -- Packaging the story: the daily wrap; Text box : the story is dead, long live the story; Text box : the print or text story; Text box: the radio script; Text box: the video script -- The multimedia story: how to help audiences get what they want; Text box: Andy Carvin and curating news -- Feature or enterprise news stories; Text box: what makes someone a good profile subject; Text box: the Christian science monitor -- Digital storytelling: design and data -- Law and ethics: producing and disseminating news.

Learn how to deliver news in any and all media. This one volume teaches you how to master all of the skills needed to be a converged journalist. Don't think only broadcast or print. Think online, air waves, magazines, PDAs, cell phones and electronic paper. Convergent Journalism an Introduction explains what makes a news story effective today and how to recognize the best medium for a particular story. That medium may be the web, broadcast, radio, or a newspaper or magazine - or, more likely, all of the above. This text will explain how a single story can fulfil its potential through any media channel. Convergent Journalism an Introduction shows you, the news writer, editor, reporter, and producer how to tailor a story to meet the needs of various media, so your local news story can be written in a form appropriate for the web, print, PDA screen and broadcast.

Media studies scholars and commentators have categorised the media in distinct periods: 'old media' such as television, radio and print; 'new media' which include online media, computers, and PDAs. Now we are in a period of 'media convergence' - print newspapers sent as MP3 - but also the increasing convergence of media policy, media ownership and media practices. This book looks at how 'traditional' media companies are moving in to converged media, questions of ownership, questions of working practices and questions of the audience.