Media Industries in Global Frames: Craft, Collaboration, Competition - Introduction

This special section grew from a colloquium “Media Industries in Global Frames: Craft, Collaboration, Competition” and a master class at Lingnan University, Hong Kong, in May 2018. At both events, scholars and graduate students shared thoughts, tools, and contemporary vagaries on media industries in global frames. They were asked to reflect on craft, collaboration, competition, and the research that these three keywords opened in line with problems and their diagnosis in various media industries. Details of the events can be viewed at: https://www.ln.edu.hk/ccs/conference.html#colloquium.

Craft, collaboration, and competition have reach into the range of media industry production, circulation, and research. These keywords are loaded terms, dependent on specific contexts for meaning, and connotations. All three have radically labile senses, prone to change and sensitive to circumstances. All three are Janus-faced, indicating positive and negative, exemplary and culpable activities. These keywords define the practices of the global media industries and in turn illuminate the operations of media industries at their best, and worst