September CommQuote

Thomas Doherty writing in the September 21, 2012 Chronicle Review, coins a new term, Arc TV, don't know if it will stick, but there it is.

"Long top dog in the media hierarchy, the Hollywood feature film—the star-studded best in show that garnered the respectful monographs, the critical cachet, and a secure place on the university curriculum—is being challenged by the lure of long-form, episodic television. Let's call the breed Arc TV, a moniker that underscores the dramatic curvature of the finely crafted, adult-minded serials built around arcs of interconnected action unfolding over the life span of the series. Shows like Mad Men, Breaking Bad, Downton Abbey, Homeland, Dexter, Boardwalk Empire, and Game of Thrones—the highest-profile entrees in a gourmet menu of premium programming—are where the talent, the prestige, and the cultural buzz now swirl. Fess up: Are you more jazzed about the release of the new Abraham Lincoln biopic by Steven Spielberg or the season premiere of Homeland (September 30, 10 p.m., on Showtime)? The lineup hasn't quite yet dethroned the theatrical feature film as the preferred canvas for moving-image artistry, but Hollywood moviemakers are watching their backs."

He goes on to say that while Arc TV has its television antecedents its "real kinship is literary, not televisual. Like the bulky tomes of Dickens and Dreiser, Trollope and Wharton, the series are thick on character and dense in plot line, spanning generations and tribal networks and crisscrossing the currents of personal life and professional duty. Episode per episode, in milieux that stretch from the ruthless geopolitics of a medieval off-world to the gender dynamics of a post-zombie apocalypse, the tide of action ebbs and flows in a meandering but forward direction, gaining momentum over the course of a season (now likely to be a mere 13 episodes), before congealing and erupting in a go-for-broke season finale." 
---from Storied TV: Cable Is the New Novel, by Thomas Doherty, The Chronicle Review

New at Penn: WARC

Penn Libraries has recently added WARC to its rich collection of business intelligence resources. WARC is an international marketing database that includes over 6,000 marketing case studies as well as trend analysis, research reports, and other business intelligence information,  For media industry researchers it is chock full of useful and timely reports and data.

WARC stands for World Advertising Research Center. It has been around since 1985 and is also the publisher of International Journal of Advertising, Journal of Advertising Research and International Journal of Market Research (available from the Penn Libraries e-resources). If you do literature searches on media effects, persuasion, or communication campaigns it is not unusual to pull up articles in the advertising and marketing realm in journals such as these. Let's just say these folks care about persuasion like nobody's business (pun intended).

WARC's Data section contains advertising expenditure data from 80 global markets, a comparison of global media costs (compare costs by market, medium, target audience and time period), Adspend forecasts for 12 key countries, and a wide range of media usage statistic, including TV viewing data from over 70 countries and time spent by media comparisons (television, radio, internet, newspapers, magazines and cinema) in 10 non-US markets.

WARC's Topic section is useful for sifting out soft drink and automotive reports from reports in Media and Entertainment, or Telecoms, to mention the categories of most interest to communication researchers. 

The Industry Trends section has a Media/Tech category where you can find such articles as Cloud Gaming: What the End of the Console Means for Gamers, Brands and the Global Gaming Industry (August 2012). 

Aspen Report on Networks and Citizenship

Networks and Citizenship: Using Technology for Civic Innovation, a Report of the 2011 Aspen Institute Forum on Communications and Society (FOCAS) was published this past spring. Written by Jeffrey Abramson, the Report details the use of ICT's to enhance the public sphere whether in providing information or connecting citizen with government and global networks. The 48 page report can be found here.