Paschal Preston

Dublin City University | DCU · School of Communications

This article is concerned with a comparative assessment of public service and commercial broadcast media in Ireland, specifically in relation to their respective capacities to reflect and promote migration-related diversity and migrant integration. The core material drawn upon in the article derives from the findings of a recent exploratory, pilot-...

This article engages with key questions concerning diversity training issues and trends related to media professionals in contemporary Europe. It draws on interviews with 68 senior journalists and media professionals working in six Member States of the European Union. The study on which this article is based included interview questions on four asp...

In this chapter we consider the concept of convergence in the context of the complex relationships unfolding between technology, socio-economic factors and the contemporary music industry—the ‘canary down the mine’ of the digital media industries. We observe that when it comes to the music industry, technology convergence trends have generally been...

Purpose The goal of this paper is to explore how an approach upfronting the notion of crisis and related restructuring processes may yield certain strategic stakes and anchor points by which to identify and measure the forms and extent of unfolding changes or innovations broadly understood. One key objective of this exploratory project is to undert...

Purpose – Digital technological innovations are commonly perceived to be radically disrupting the power or role of corporate actors within the music industry and their established industrial practices and interests. In particular, the internet is widely regarded as having produced a “crisis” for the music industry. While such assumptions reflect th...

In this paper we propose a more positive and useful reading of the cost disease. We present a case for refocussing the general attention from the characteristics of the cost disease (i.e. the widening production cost and price gap between the product of progressive and stagnant industries) to its sources. This is a useful exercise because the most...

In sections one to three of this paper, we interrogate the relatively new Irish policy concept of the ‘smart economy’ by relating and comparing it to recent theories engaging with the characteristics of the changing industrial economy. This summary review includes concepts such as New Economy, Knowledge Economy, Knowledge/Information Society and th...

This article explains that the most important aspect of W. J. Baumol's idea of cost disease is the fundamental intuition that there are some types of labor's contributions that are irreplaceable by new technologies. These contributions are indentified as “creative inputs”: original ideas, concepts, actions, and inductive solutions to ill-defined pr...

Academic research on service innovation has highlighted the distinct characteristics of services innovation, the knowledge complexes involved, and how services can be autonomous sites of innovation. It also highlights that successful services innovations are often not technology based but can depend on new organizational or managerial practices or...

This article takes as its starting point a critique of technologically determinist accounts of contemporary developments in media and journalism. It is argued that the links commonly assumed to exist between new ICTs and the spatial aspects of mediated communication are in fact more problematic and more ideologically charged than is usually assumed...

This chapter draws on the communication studies literature to consider key aspects of the role of the media in the construction and negotiation of the public sphere and related concepts that impinge on the concerns of this book. We discuss conceptualizations of the public sphere that relate, in particular, to media and political communication. We a...

Along with many national governments, the European Commission has pushed broadband to the fore of social and economic policies in recent years. It has aligned broadband developments with furthering information society and knowledge economy developments.This paper presents a positive scenario for broadband-related developments in the European Union...

Making the News provides a cross-national perspective on key features of journalism and news-making cultures and the changing media landscape in contemporary Europe. Focusing on the key trends, practices and issues in contemporary journalism and news cultures, Paschal Preston maps the major contours of change as well as the broader industrial, orga...

This paper focuses on recent trends and issues in the EU-25 countries related to one key broadband application area: digital media ‘content’ applications. It draws upon recently completed research addressing current and future uses and applications of broadband in the EU-25 area.The paper presents key findings from the BEACON project concerning the...

The paper examines current trends and policy issues related to broadband access and use in the rural areas of European Union (EU) member states. It draws selectively on the findings of a recently completed, multi-country project focused on current and future trends in broadband provision, applications and use in the enlarged European Union.The pape...

This article is based on a case study that explored the introduction of new technology to community groups in Ireland. The initial aim of the study was to investigate initiatives to create gender inclusion, particularly for women. in the production and use of new Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs). The past decade has witnessed a gro...

This article is based on a case study that explored the introduction of new technology to community groups in Ireland. The initial aim of the study was to investigate initiatives to create gender inclusion, particularly for women. in the production and use of new Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs). The past decade has witnessed a gro...

This paper is based on an significant re-working of some arguments advanced in a book published in 2001, 'Reshaping Communications: Technology, Information and Social Change'. A key objective is to extend earlier critiques to identify and discuss some of the `naturalised' and silent operations of information society discourse in the context of the...

This article explores how, in an era of increased globalization with respect to investment, trade and `flows' of certain goods and services, nation-states and cultural factors still play an important, if somewhat changing, role in relation to the development of content for new multimedia platforms. This article critically engages with the `global m...

One of the reasons the proponents of expanded universal service have not made much headway is that they have not been able to provide a coherent justification for the major resource and policy commitments it requires. The lack of consensus on the very meaning of the term "universal service" has added to the confusion. This article argues that it is...

The telephone is one of the most widely used technologies in the advanced industrial economies, typically achieving a household penetration rate in excess of 90%. Over the course of this century, the plain old telephone system (POTS) has become a critical techno-social infrastructure for all sorts of economic, social and personal interactions. The...

This paper seeks to explore a number of key issues related to the direction and com­ ponents of a coherent information sector strategy and more targeted national innovation networks in the Irish context, with a particular focus on the media and other "content" services. In part, the paper is a critical response to the report of the Irish government...

This article begins by examining whether and how the national authorities and political debates in Ireland have responded in particular ways to the European Union's (EU) “information society” initiative and the conceptions and plans for a European information superhighway (ISH) as laid down in Brussels. It identifies a reactive and limited national...

Recent technological, economic and policy shifts have placed the issues surrounding future communications infrastructure development and competition at the centre of European debates in the mid-1990s. This article examines how realistic, viable or universal is the vision of competing, alternative telecommunications infrastructures and facilities, e...

This report summarizes the two afternoon sessions of the NETEPS (Network on European Communications Policy and the Peripheral Regions/Small Countries) workshop. Participants were encouraged to express their views on the main issues which formed the core agenda of the workshop. The Chairperson proposed that participants should address each of the co...

The notion of the knowledge-based economy (KbE) has featured prominently in national and EU industrial and policy discourse over the past few years (EC, 2002). In part, this is linked to the EC's efforts to emphasise the increasing role of research and knowledge-based inputs for the future competitiveness of European industry. Many national and EC...

Whereas the central preoccupation of critical social analysis has traditionally been the way in which economic rationality dominates culture, contemporary social theory has been increasingly concerned with the central role of cultural processes and institutions in organising and controlling the economic The cultural turn in recent criticism and soc...