Derek Johnson

"Johnson astutely reveals that franchises are not Borg-like assimilation machines, but, rather, complicated ecosystems within which creative workers strive to create compelling 'shared worlds.' This finely researched, breakthrough book is a must-read for anyone seeking a sophisticated understanding of the contemporary media industry." —Heather Hendershot, author of What's Fair on the Air?: Cold War Right-Wing Broadcasting and the Public Interest While immediately recognizable throughout the U.S. and many other countries, media mainstays like X-Men, Star Trek, and Transformers achieved such familiarity through constant reincarnation. In each case, the initial success of a single product led to a long-term embrace of media franchising—a dynamic process in which media workers from different industrial positions shared in and reproduced familiar cultureacross television, film, comics, games, and merchandising. In Media Franchising, Derek Johnson examines the corporate culture behind these production practices, as well as the collaborative and creative efforts involved in conceiving, sustaining, and sharing intellectual properties in media work worlds. Challenging connotations of homogeneity, Johnson shows how the cultural and industrial logic of franchising has encouraged media industries to reimagine creativity as an opportunity for exchange among producers, licensees, and evenconsumers. Drawing on case studies and interviews with media producers, he reveals the meaningful identities, cultural hierarchies, and struggles for distinction that accompany collaboration within these production networks. Media Franchising provides a nuanced portrait of the collaborative cultural production embedded in both the media industries and our own daily lives.

Creative License and Collaboration in the Culture Industries

Media Franchising

Even as the television industry experiences significant transformation and disruption in the face of streaming and online delivery, the television channel itself persists. If anything, the television channel landscape has become more complex to navigate as viewers can now choose between broadcast, cable, streaming, and premium services across a host of different platforms and devices. From Networks to Netflix provides an authoritative answer to that navigational need, helping students, instructors, and scholars understand these industrial changes through the lens of the channel. Through examination of emerging services like Hulu and Amazon Prime Video, investigation of YouTube channels and cable outlets like Freeform and Comedy Central, and critiques of broadcast giants like ABC and PBS, this book offers a concrete, tangible means of exploring the foundations of a changing industry.

A Guide to Changing Channels

From Networks to Netflix

Daniel Herbert

Point of Sale examines media retail as a vital component in the study of popular culture. It brings together fifteen essays by top media scholars that show how retail matters as a site of significance to culture industries as well as a crucial locus of meaning and participation for consumers.

Analyzing Media Retail

Point of Sale

Now in a second edition, this textbook surveys the channels, platforms, and programming through which television distribution operates, with a diverse selection of contributors providing thorough explorations of global media industries in flux. Even as legacy media industries experience significant disruption in the face of streaming and online delivery, the power of the television channel persists. Far from disappearing, television channels have multiplied and adapted to meet the needs of old and new industry players alike. Television viewers now navigate complex choices among broadcast, cable, and streaming services across a host of different devices. From Networks to Netflix guides students, instructors, and scholars through that complex and transformed channel landscape to reveal how these industry changes unfold and why they matter. This second edition features new players like Disney+, HBO Max, Crunchyroll, Hotstar, and more, increasing attention to TV services across the world. An ideal resource for students and scholars of media criticism, media theory, and media industries, this book continues to offer a concrete, tangible way to grasp the foundations of television—and television studies—even as they continue to be rewritten.

Parker Moore, 20 years old, tall and talented, quick to smile and charismatic to all, made a late-night trip to a 7-11 on November 15, 2014. His subsequent murder inside that store sent shockwaves through McMinnville, Oregon and his hometown of Woodinville, Washington. It traumatized the Linfield College and Woodinville High football teams, and shattered the lives of family and friends. His attacker was 33-year-old Juventino Bermudez-Arenas, a mysterious illegal immigrant who lived behind the convenience store. Society will never know the contributions Parker Moore could have made. His irresistible charm earned him instant friends. His rebellious streak made him a free thinker. His charisma commanded rooms. His playful humor brightened the lives of everyone around him. His common sense and down-to-earth faith aided people in their toughest times. His willingness to stand alone for what he believed made him admired. In short, this was a great future leader in the making. Writer Derek Johnson paints a portrait of Parker's life. He then draws on more than sixty interviews with Parker's friends and family to reveal their feelings of devastation and grief, as well as the murder's impact upon their faith.

The Beautiful Life and Tragic Death of Parker Moore

Debbie Poyser

Gives guidance on the installation and setting up of Reason on a PC or Mac. Fully compatible with the new version 2 .0. Also features a hands-on tutorial.

Users' Guide to Propellerhead Reason 2

Hollin Jones

This in-depth guide, now in its third edition, takes readers through every separate Reason device. In addition, all the devices and changes introduced with the V3 update are covered, including the new Remote technology and enhanced browser and workflow improvements.

Fast Guide to Propellerhead Reason

Within corporate media industries, adults produce children's entertainment. Yet children, presumed to exist outside the professional adult world, make their own contributions to it--creating and posting unboxing videos, for example, that provide content for toy marketers. Many adults, meanwhile, avidly consume entertainment products nominally meant for children. Media industries reincorporate this market-disrupting participation into their strategies, even turning to adult consumers to pass fandom to the next generation. Derek Johnson presents an innovative perspective that looks beyond the simple category of "kids' media" to consider how entertainment industry strategies invite producers and consumers alike to cross boundaries between adulthood and childhood, professional and amateur, new media and old. Revealing the social norms, reproductive ideals, and labor hierarchies on which such transformations depend, he identifies the lines of authority and power around which legacy media institutions like television, comics, and toys imagine their futures in a digital age. Johnson proposes that it is not strategies of media production, but of media reproduction, that are most essential in this context. To understand these critical intersections, he investigates transgenerational industry practice in television co-viewing, recruitment of adult comic readers as youth outreach ambassadors, media professionals' identification with childhood, the branded management of adult fans of LEGO, and the labor of child YouTube video creators. These dynamic relationships may appear to disrupt generational and industry boundaries alike. However, by considering who media industries empower when generating the future in these reproductive terms and who they leave out, Johnson ultimately demonstrates how their strategies reinforce existing power structures. This book makes vital contributions to media studies in its fresh approach to the intersections of adulthood and childhood, its attention to the relationship between legacy and digital media industries, and its advancement of dialogue between media production and consumption researchers. It will interest scholars in media industry studies and across media studies more broadly, with particular appeal to those concerned about the current and future reach of media industries into our lives.

Adults, Children, and the Reproduction of Culture

Transgenerational Media Industries

Jonathan Gray

A Companion to Media Authorship “Gray and Johnson have brought together a stellar group of authors whose works deftly explicate the complexities of negotiating ‘authorship’ across a range of cultural production sites. This definitive collection is an important and long-overdue contribution to contemporary media studies.” Serra Tinic, author of On Location: Canada’s Television Industry in a Global Market “Wide-ranging and global, historical and contemporary, brimming with insights enlarging our understanding of media production and reception, this book is an important contribution to the study of authorship.” Michael Z. Newman, author of Indie: An American Film Culture While the idea of authorship has transcended the literary to play a meaningful role in the cultures of film, television, games, comics, and other emerging digital forms, our understanding of it is still too often limited to assumptions about solitary geniuses and individual creative expression. A Companion to Media Authorship is a ground-breaking collection that reframes media authorship as a question of culture in which authorship is as much a construction tied to authority and power as it is a constructive and creative force of its own. Gathering together the insights of leading media scholars and practitioners, 28 original chapters map the field of authorship in a cutting-edge, multi-perspective, and truly authoritative manner. The contributors develop new and innovative ways of thinking about the practices, attributions, and meanings of authorship. They situate and examine authorship within collaborative models of industrial production, socially networked media platforms, globally diverse traditions of creativity, complex consumption practices, and a host of institutional and social contexts. Together, the essays provide the definitive study on the subject by demonstrating that authorship is a field in which media culture can be transformed, revitalized, and reimagined.

A Companion to Media Authorship

Point of Sale offers the first significant attempt to center media retail as a vital component in the study of popular culture. It brings together fifteen essays by top media scholars with their fingers on the pulse of both the changes that foreground retail in a digital age and the history that has made retail a fundamental part of the culture industries. The book reveals why retail matters as a site of transactional significance to industries as well as a crucial locus of meaning and interactional participation for consumers. In addition to examining how industries connect books, DVDs, video games, lifestyle products, toys, and more to consumers, it also interrogates the changes in media circulation driven by the collision of digital platforms with existing retail institutions. By grappling with the contexts in which we buy media, Point of Sale uncovers the underlying tensions that define the contemporary culture industries.

Television and film have always been connected, but recent years have seen them overlapping, collaborating, and moving towards each other in ever more ways. Set amidst this moment of unprecedented synergy, this book examines how television and film culture interact in the 21st century. Both media appear side by side in many platforms or venues, stories and storytellers cross between them, they regularly have common owners, and they discuss each other constantly. Jonathan Gray and Derek Johnson examine what happens at these points of interaction, studying the imaginary borderlands between each medium, the boundary maintenance that quickly envelops much discussion of interaction, and ultimately what we allow or require television and film to be. Offering separate chapters on television exhibition at movie theaters, cinematic representations of television, television-to-film and film-to-television adaptations, and television producers crossing over to film, the book explores how each zone of interaction invokes fervid debate of the roles that producers, audiences, and critics want and need each medium to play. From Game of Thrones to The TV Set, Bewitched to the Marvel Cinematic Universe, hundreds of TV shows and films are discussed. Television Goes to the Movies will be of interest to students and scholars of television studies, film studies, media studies, popular culture, adaptation studies, production studies, and media industries.

Derek Johnson

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