The media are home to an eclectic bunch of people. This book is about who they are, what they do, and what their work means to them. Based on interviews with media professionals in the United States, New Zealand, South Africa, and The Netherlands, and drawing from both scholarly and professional literatures in a wide variety of disciplines, it offers an account of what it is like to work in the media today.

Media professionals face tough choices. Boundaries are drawn and erased: between commerce and creativity, between individualism and teamwork, between security and...

Managing Media Work explores the ways media industries function, how media professionals manage their careers, how media industries engage with creativity and innovation, and how to make sense of this in ways to empower aspiring professionals (as well as those who want to research media management and production). While students who want to enter a media industry may understand the impact the industry has on audiences and politics (as these are the dominant areas of mass communications research and courses offered), these students generally are not empowered to understand how and why the...

Research consistently shows how through the years more of our time gets spent using media, how multitasking our media has become a regular feature of everyday life, and that consuming media for most people increasingly takes place alongside producing media.

Media Life is a primer on how we may think of our lives as lived in rather than with media. The book uses the way media function today as a prism to understand key issues in contemporary society, where reality is open source, identities are - like websites - always under construction, and where private life is lived in public...