The collection of five contributors entitled “Media and National Minorities” with its fundamental theoretical, analytical and applied content in the interdisciplinary manner, especially media & communication studies, sociological and anthropological perspective, highlighted the situation and image of Slovenian minorities in Italy, Austria and Hungary, namely in Slovenian dominant national, regional and foreign media. The contributions based on collected media material did not only verify the view, produced by some influential Slovenian mass media about minorities but it also verified the potential discrepancy between self-perception of a minority in relation, which the Slovenian media have with the minorities, and the reception of a minority by the Slovenian media public, which we tried to achieve on the basis of anthropological field methods and the production of ethnography for individual minority areas.
COBISS.SI-ID: 270985984
The contribution entitled “The Newspaper and Its Readers: The Media Ethnography of a Local Producer and Consumer Habitus,” introduces us into the discourse analysis of the media ethnography of a concrete Slovenian newspaper, Primorske novice, from Koper-Capodistria, and its readership as well as users of other media. The contribution deals with the problem of ambivalent and complexly socially composed relation between newspapers and their readers. The analysis of the newspaper Primorske novice leads us to a conclusion, that newspapers, editorials and their readerships can be not only a pertinent terrain of anthropological research, but also that this kind of analytical evidence of a certain media relationship can be treated also as a specific metadiscourse of media.
COBISS.SI-ID: 1536309700
The article “The Murdering and Suicide of the Press” by Sandra Bašić Hrvatin and Lenart J. Kučić is based on the premise that the media industry has ended up in a crisis. It is not a crisis of the business model, exclusively concerning the owners and their profits, but a crisis of journalism, about which its main agents will not, cannot or do not wish to talk about. The publishers of dailies (in Slovenia and elsewhere in the world) appeal to save the decaying industry built on the correct assumption that the formation of a public policy in the field of the media is related to the provision of the public interest. And the question is not only who defines public interest, but also what public interest in the field of the media truly constitutes. Public interest is not something that the state paternalistically defines by law or that media owners define when recalling their (alleged) mission in the space of public communication, but rather a matter of public debate among citizens and the subject of continuous negotiation. The article, in addition to a review of possible methods for saving printed media forms and analysis of a concrete case, also offers several ways out. A reform of the current media system will only be possible under the condition of a radical change of the economic model within which the media operates.
COBISS.SI-ID: 1536309956
The collection, Newspapers without Readers? The Rise and Fall of the Press, Journalism and the Newspaper Industry (orig. Časopisi brez bralcev? Vzpon in zaton tiska, časnikarstva ter časopisne industrije), edited by Vlado Kotnik and Sandra Bašić Hrvatin, in its fundamental conception, evaluates the developmental path of the newspaper from its beginnings and its rise in the 19th century to the crisis and its decline in the late 20th and early 21st centuries. The selected articles, penned by authors coming from different cultural environments and intellectual traditions, all indicate that the press should not be considered a mere form of communication or information, but as a complex social, cultural and economic phenomenon which has, with its continuous public vocation, significantly recorded, reflected, marked or balanced the functioning of societies in the past and which, nowadays, during its rapid disintegration, sets challenges of unimagined dimensions and unpredictable consequences before the existence and development of societies.
COBISS.SI-ID: 270987008
The contribution deals with the question of dependence of media from the part of advertisments as primary source of income. The author finds out that the European "media politics" has reorientated the regulation of media from the sphere of political relations into the sphere of technocratic regulation of market. By doing that, it has throned the consumer as the bearer of "civic rights" instead of the citizen. The press crisis therefore cannot be treated beyond the concext of understanding of above-mentioned shortcomings concerning the reception of media.
COBISS.SI-ID: 1536298692