Media Industries Journal

The Media Industries Scholarly Interest Group (MISIG) has launched the inaugural issue of its multi-media, open access journal Media Industries.

Journal statement from the editors:
Media Industries "promotes critical studies of media industries and institutions worldwide. We invite contributions that range across the full spectrum of media industries, including film, television, internet, radio, music, publishing, electronic games, advertising, and mobile communications. Submissions may explore these industries individually or examine inter-medial relations between industrial sectors. We encourage both contemporary and historical studies, and are especially interested in contributions that draw attention to global and international perspectives. Media Industries is furthermore committed to the exploration of innovative methodologies, imaginative theoretical approaches, and new research directions."

The first issue includes an opening essay from the members of the journal's "editorial collective." Additional articles include:

Dirt Research for Media Industries

Charles R. Acland

The Menace of Instrumentalism in Media Industries Research and Education

David Hesmondhalgh

On Automation in Media Industries: Integrating Algorithmic Media Production into Media Industries Scholarship

Philip M. Napoli

There Is No Music Industry 

Jonathan Sterne

The Case for Studying In-Store Media Joseph Turow

I may not have clicked into all the articles but I didn't find one that was over four pages of text; brevity seems to be an unspoken rule, at least for this first issue.   

Spotlight on a pioneering e-journal: Vectors

Vectors: Journal of Culture and Technology in a Dynamic Vernacular, from the University of Southern California's School of Cinema and Television, describes itself as mapping "the multiple contours of daily life in an unevenly digital era, crystallizing around themes that highlight the social, political, and cultural stakes of our increasingly technologically-mediated existence. As such, the journal speaks both implicitly and explicitly to key debates across varied disciplines, including issues of globalization, mobility, power, and access. Operating at the intersection of culture, creativity, and technology, the journal focuses on the myriad ways technology shapes, transforms, reconfigures, and/or impedes social relations, both in the past and in the present." The Journal is edited by an international board and features both submissions and specially-commissioned works "comprised of moving- and still-images; voice, music, and sound; computational and interactive structures; social software; and much more. Vectors doesn't seek to replace text; instead, [they] encourage a fusion of old and new media in order to foster ways of knowing and seeing that expand the rigid text-based paradigms of traditional scholarship. Simply put, [they] publish only works that need, for whatever reason, to exist in multimedia."

Volume I's two issues (2006) dealt with the themes of Evidence and Mobility, respectively. Volume II's issues intriguingly pursue Ephemera and Perception (current issue). Check out the site's Archive for the back issues.