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Hamburg.
The next speaker at ECREA 2010 is Karen Klitgaard Povlsen, whose interest is in how digital media might reconfigure the media system as such, and how that reconfiguration might also be a reconfiguration of cultural, social, and political citizenship. Her specific project is examining food and recipes on the Internet as well as in older media, building on interviews with practitioners in this field.

Recipes, of course, are a very old genre, and most people will have read a recipe at one point or other during their lives. They can be described in the first place as lists (similar …

Hamburg.
The last ECREA 2010 panel tonight starts with my QUT colleague Tanya Nitins, whose interest is in locative media. There’s been significant development in this in recent times, through wireless devices and and GPS-enabled phones. This divides into social-annotative, commercial-annotative, navigational, and combined forms of locative media.

A number of concepts have been applied to this – LBS, geospatial Web, GeoWeb, pervasive computing, sonic signage, GPS, and many other terms. We must therefore develop the language to communicate more clearly with one another as we research these technologies.

Social annotative media allow us to add geographic data to content …

Hamburg.
The next speaker at ECREA 2010 is Veronica Barassi, whose interest is in researching social media and political activism. The relationship between these practices remains underresearched, and while the democratic potential of social media has been highlighted, it is also undermined by a political culture of free labour, neoliberal surveillance, and corporate control.

One way of addressing this is to understand social media as practice – and Veronica has conducted an ethnographic study of three political groups of in Britain, Italy, and Spain. Key conclusions from this is that social media become tools of opportunity and challenge for social …

Hamburg.
The next speaker at ECREA 2010 is Max Hänska-Ahy, whose interest is in the use of Twitter and satellite TV in the recent Iranian election and its aftermath. The outcome of the election was highly disputed, of course, with widespread protests; domestic media and other channels of communication were shut down or disrupted by the government. External media sources (BBC World News, CNN, etc.) remained important sources of information during this time, but their satellite channels, too, were disrupted.

Such satellite channels are produced at a great distance from Iran, however, and relied almost exclusively on user-generated content which …

Hamburg.
The next session I’m attending at ECREA 2010 starts with Arne Hintz, whose focus is on policy agendas for participatory media – which here means a wide range of media forms from radio to online.

Community radio, for example, has traditionally been quite strongly regulated, along with the overall broadcast sector; there is a dual non-commercial/commercial media system, and in some countries also still a strong pirate radio tradition. Gradually, a three-tier broadcast system (community, public service, commercial) has emerged in many countries, and some pirate stations have been given licences.

Hamburg.
The next speaker in this interesting ECREA 2010 session is Kostas Saltzis, whose focus is on the coverage of breaking news by UK Websites. Online journalistic practices here tend to focus on updating and maintaining online stories; this is a break from the newspaper approach that necessitated stories to be finished ahead of sending the daily paper to the presses.

24/7 news cycles mean that breaking news must be covered immediately, at any time, however, and this challenges the status of the news story as a finished product. Debate here may sometimes focus more on the speed rather than …

Hamburg.
The next speaker at ECREA 2010 is Inta Brikše, whose interest is in Latvian and Russian news media’s coverage of each other’s countries. Russia is still seen as a major enemy of Latvia, for historic reasons, so it is interesting to examine how each country is framed by the news media of the other.

The study examined the Websites of three Russian and three Latvian newspapers, as well as of three Latvian newspapers which are published in the Russian language. This content was examined for issues, sources, source types, causes for coverage (events, opinions, …), and levels of neutrality …

Hamburg.
The next speaker at ECREA 2010 is Pere Masip, whose focus is on the multimedia content of Spanish online newspapers. There is a growing presence of video on such sites, indication new content as well as business models. Why and how is video used on news Websites, then? This study examined the Websites of three of the biggest Spanish newspapers, as well as of the most visited online-only news site in Spain.

Between 14 and 17% of stories on the three newspaper sites had videos; just over 10% of the online-only site. Such videos are mainly integrated with text …

Hamburg.
This morning’s keynote at ECREA 2010 is by Peter Golding, who will discuss the processes of building European research networks. Much of the research in media and communication studies is inherently international; the media are largely dominated by a handful of major transnational corporations, for example. Europe is interesting as a testing ground for the ideas that stem from this – current developments take place especially in areas that exist beyond a mere focus on national public service broadcasting.

Only collaborative research can effectively explore to examine the future shape of the media industries – especially their economic structures …