Paschal PRESTON | Dublin City University (original) (raw)

Books by Paschal PRESTON

'Making the News' provides a distinctive multi-level and cross-national perspective on the key fe... more 'Making the News' provides a distinctive multi-level and cross-national perspective on the key features of journalism and news-making cultures in the changing media landscape of contemporary Europe.

Focusing on the key trends, practices and issues in contemporary journalism and news cultures, Making the News maps the major contours of change as well as the broader industrial, organizational, institutional and cultural factors shaping journalism practices over the past two decades.

Making the News seeks to revisit and renew a multi-dimensional approach to understanding current journalism trends and the major influences on news making practices. The book is framed around a multi-layered approach in order to address the individual, meso-level and macro-level factors deemed essential to a rounded understanding of what or who influences the news. To this end, core chapters are focused on five major, if often overlapping, categories of influences. These five levels of analysis comprise:- individual, institutional, organizational, political economic and cultural.

Making the News moves beyond the tendency to focus on journalism trends and newsmaking practices within a single country. It draws on unique, cross-national research to examine current journalism practices and related newsmaking cultures in 11 West, Central and East European countries. The background studies include in-depth interviews with almost 100 senior journalists and subsequent workshop discussions with other interest groups.

The book addresses the growing role of online journalism, the internet and other digital media developments within a coherent framework. Whilst interrogating naive techno-centric perspectives, the book explores the interplay of professional, technical, organizational and other factors in shaping innovation and change in newsmaking practices across ‘new’ and ‘old’ news media sectors.

Making the News also investigates the extent and forms of any emerging common news culture or shared ‘public sphere’ in contemporary Europe. In the context of the EU integration project (‘intensified globalisation’ at a world-region level) and the widespread adoption of digital technologies, it addresses the persistence of banal nationalism in journalism and news cultures.

In sum, Making the News links reviews and discussions of the existing literature to original research engaging with the views and experiences of journalists working at the ‘coal face’ of contemporary newsmaking, to provide an original study and useful text for students and professionals. Framed around a multi-level approach to the factors shaping news cultures and journalism practices in the early 21st century, Making the News bridges the frequently-encountered divide between journalism studies on the one hand, and media or political communication studies, on the other.

Papers by Paschal PRESTON

Introduction - Communication and the Pursuit of Democracy in the New European and Global Order, P... more Introduction - Communication and the Pursuit of Democracy in the New European and Global Order, Paschal Preston and Farrel Corcoran. Part 1 Contesting Core Concepts - "Civil Society", Democracy and the Regulation of the Media: Conceptions of Civil Society and the Re-regulation of Television - A Comparative Analysis, Colin Sparks and Anna Reading Economic Restructuring, Media Democratisation and Conceptions of Privatisation in Central-Eastern Europe, Slavko Splichal The Limits of Conventional Notions of Competition in Media Policymaking - the Case of Austria and Ireland, Paschal Preston and Andrea Grisold. Part 2 Globalisation and Culture - the National and Regional in the New Europe: Recent Trends in Coproductions - the Demise of the National, Sharon Strover The Dialectics of Identity Politics - the Case of Regionalist Television in Spain, Richard Maxwell The Political Economy of News Flow within Europe - News Agencies and their Media and Nonmedia Markets, Michael Palmer The Political Economy of Dinosaurs - GATT, Hollywood and Europe, Janet Wasko. Part 3 Inequalities and Change - Gender, Peripherality and Minorities in the New Europe: The President's Men - Television, Gender and the Public Sphere in Eastern-Central Europe, Anna Reading Communicating Sameness and Containing Diversity - Communication Policies and Ethno-National Policies in the EU, Charles Hubbard The Reform of Communications Policy in Greece, Natasha Constantelou. Part 4 "Convergence" and the Reshaping of European Telecommunications and Information Flows: Local Versus Global in the Modernisation of Central European Telecommunications - a Case Study of US Corporate Investments, Andrew Calabrese The Development of Telecommunications in Transitional Markets, Jill Hills and Josef Klucka Competition in the Local Loop - Toward an Anticyclical Competition Policy, Ian van Cuilenburg and Paul Slaa.

In the light of the MEDIVA project findings we have built a set of Media Assessment Indicators ai... more In the light of the MEDIVA project findings we have built a set of Media Assessment Indicators aimed at monitoring and evaluating a media outlet's capacity to reflect migration related diversity and promote migrant integration. Such monitoring and assessment can take the form of self-evaluation and self-monitoring (by the management of a media outlet) or it can take the form of an institutional monitoring and assessment mechanism, performed by the state, by a media ombudsman or by a media professional association.

Reshaping Communication: Technology, Information and Social Change, 2001

The European Public Sphere and the Media, 2009

Preston, P. and Metykova, Monika (2009) 'Media, Political Communication and the European... more Preston, P. and Metykova, Monika (2009) 'Media, Political Communication and the European Public Sphere', in Triandafyllidou, A. et al. The European public sphere and the media : Europe in crisis. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 34-50. ... There are no files associated ...

Business Innovation and Disruption in the Music Industry

Media and Convergence Management, 2013

In this chapter we consider the concept of convergence in the context of the complex relationship... more In this chapter we consider the concept of convergence in the context of the complex relationships unfolding between technology, socio-economic factors and the contemporary music industry—the ‘canary down the mine’ of the digital media industries. We observe that when it comes to the music industry, technology convergence trends have generally been defined in rather negative terms. In essence, they are generally represented in terms of a fundamental ‘crisis’ especially for the recorded music sub-sector. Here, we move on to critically interrogate the conventional wisdom that implies technological trends and convergences are leading to some sort of fundamental decay or decline in the power and role of the music industry. Instead, we propose that whilst the initial disruptive effects of the radical new digital technologies may have induced a certain ‘crisis’ for the prevailing models and practices of the recorded music industry, these have also prompted and been accompanied by new opportunities for restructuring and reshaping of the sector’s scope and operations.

info, 2012

PurposeThe goal of this paper is to explore how an approach upfronting the notion of crisis and r... more PurposeThe goal of this paper is to explore how an approach upfronting the notion of crisis and related restructuring processes may yield certain strategic stakes and anchor points by which to identify and measure the forms and extent of unfolding changes or innovations broadly understood. One key objective of this exploratory project is to undertake a comparative investigation of the major commonalities and differences between the specific forms, features and manifestations of “crisis” tendencies and counter‐tendencies in two sub‐sectors of mediated “content”: the music industry and the news media industry.Design/methodology/approachThe paper engages with issues and concerns relating to these two particular sub‐sectors of the media and cultural industries and considers relevant concepts and indicators of crisis and recent developmental trends in these domains. It introduces the background setting and implications of “crisis” and introduces some distinctive concepts and other aspect...

Telecommunications Policy, 1999

The telephone is one of the most widely used technologies in the advanced industrial economies, t... more The telephone is one of the most widely used technologies in the advanced industrial economies, typically achieving a household penetration rate in excess of 90%. Over the course of this century, the plain old telephone system (POTS) has become a critical techno ...

The Political Economy of Communication, Mar 13, 2021

The Service Industries Journal, 2010

This paper proposes a more positive and useful reading of cost disease. A case is presented for r... more This paper proposes a more positive and useful reading of cost disease. A case is presented for refocussing general attention from the characteristics of cost disease (ie widening production cost and price gap between the product of progressive and stagnant industries) to its ...

Needs that are shared by members of an organization can trigger an organizational learning proces... more Needs that are shared by members of an organization can trigger an organizational learning process. To a large extent, needs are implicitly anchored in organizations and people can hardly articulate them. In this article, we present Bewextra, a method that allows for identifying hidden needs in organizations. Thereby, we trigger a knowledge conversion process, which is similar to Nonaka’s SECI-spiral. In two case studies, we present how our Bewextra-process is applied to projects in educational contexts in Austria. In a first case study, we show that a combination of learning from past and future experiences extend the scope of the overall outcome. Since learning from future experiences requires a distinct environment (enabling spaces), we present a second case study. Here, we conducted a Bewextra-process with a large number of participants (n > 170), focusing on learning from future experiences.

One of the most significant economic developments over the past decades has been the rise in inco... more One of the most significant economic developments over the past decades has been the rise in income and wealth inequality. After decades of benign neglect, the issues of economic and social inequalities have reentered the stage of mainstream political attention in the Western heartland over the past couple of years. This is due, in part, to the high public profile of publications by Thomas Piketty and Tony Atkinson. In line with the growing significance of deepening economic inequalities, this Special Section engages with two broad, if overlapping, questions: (1) How do new forms of economic inequality, power, and privilege relate to relevant theories and conceptualizations of the media and institutions of public communication, whether in the fields of communication studies or political economy? (2) What role do the new forms of economic inequality play today in the typical narratives of mediated communication, and how is such inequality framed and discussed?

THIS ARTICLE PRESENTS selected findings from the ‘Media for Diversity and Migrant Integration’ pr... more THIS ARTICLE PRESENTS selected findings from the ‘Media for Diversity and Migrant Integration’ project (hereafter MEDIVA), a European Union funded project involving six Member States (Ireland, Greece, Italy, the Netherlands, Poland, and the UK), which aimed to assess the capacity of media to reflect the increasing ethnocultural diversity of European societies. The specific focus of the project was on Third Country Nationals (TNCs) or persons without European Union citizenship. In this article we present the project’s content findings for Ireland, focusing specifically on representations of TNCs in a range of national print and broadcast outlets. The media’s contribution to promoting more inclusive societies can be understood in terms of at least four interrelated roles: (i) promoting fair and polyphonic representations; (ii) presenting balanced portrayals of migration-related issues; (iii) engaging immigrants as media professionals (e.g. as journalists and spokespersons), and; (iv) ...

The Handbook of European Communication History, 2019

Reshaping Communication: Technology, Information and Social Change, 2001

The European Public Sphere and the Media, 2009

Business Innovation and Disruption in the Music Industry

Media and Convergence Management, 2013

info, 2012

Telecommunications Policy, 1999

The Political Economy of Communication, Mar 13, 2021

The Service Industries Journal, 2010

The Handbook of European Communication History, 2019

Javnost - The Public, 2016

After decades of benign neglect, the issues of economic and social inequalities have re-entered t... more After decades of benign neglect, the issues of economic and social inequalities have re-entered the stage of mainstream political attention and debate in the western heartlands of the capitalist system over the past couple of years. On the face of it, this is no accident or surprise. The renewed attention on economic and social inequality unfolds against a background of very slow, partial and highly uneven “recovery” from a major financial crash which emerged in the north-Atlantic core in 2007–2008. In this setting we observe that the growing attention to issues of inequality in recent times is not unrelated to the manifest amplification of the longer-term trend towards increased economic inequalities that has become more evident in the period since 2008. This article will draw on (engage with) recent work and debates in neighbouring academic fields (political economy, economic sociology, political studies) concerning the sources, meaning and implications of growing economic inequalities. It pays particular attention to the high-profile work of Thomas Piketty on inequality trends. The article will consider the implications of such research and inequality trends for what now passes as liberal economic and political theory and also for the study, forms, conceptualisations and practice of political communication.