Media and Performance

A large and growing body of literature shows that audience metrics exert a significant influence in many newsrooms around the world. Scholars assume that this might affect the quality of news, but findings on how audience metrics influence news quality and media performance are scattered. Based on a widely used set of news quality criteria, this article is the first to focus on this question. It reviews and discusses the existing findings by considering the influence of audience metrics across four analytical dimensions: A) the allocation of resources and recognition; B) the volume, practices and rhythms of news production; C) the selection and placement of topics; and D) the formats and styles of news presentation. The analysis reveals that journalists' use of audience metrics has a mainly negative impact on news quality. This effect is the result of both the growing economic pressures on newsrooms and a dominant rhetoric that equates measures of audience size with audience interests and good journalistic work.

Can an ecological perspective provide cues for hybrid arts practice? Over the last fifteen years, Bonemap’s novel collaborative method has produced hybrid and genre independent works within the broad field of contemporary arts. Their specific creative methodology relates to a practice and process imbued with an ecological perspective. The approach incorporates a multimodal and intermedial praxis that expands static representations of human creative environments and genres. Using flux, improvisation, participatory and responsive strategies to harness generative form it is argued that Bonemap work articulate a metaphor of fluid hybridisation.

The authors cite the creative works of Bonemap and other influencers to approach contemporary arts practice with an ecological perspective producing evidence of a fluid hybridisation of artistic genre. Bonemap’s key methodological operations are responsive through the embodiment of ecological perceptions, improvisatory through the virtual and the visceral, and participatory through the experience of the implied and explicit. Practiced as spatial concepts, that inform methodological approaches to practice, Bonemap's ecological and artistic concerns consider hybridity and intermediality as linking materiality and immateriality. The evidence considers the hybrid materiality of ‘unknowing’ and ‘ephemerality’ within creative research that further challenges conventions of knowledge creation and the categorization of form. Bonemap’s methods are shown as moving towards a proposal for fluid hybridity that is set adrift in the sublime aim to articulate an ecological understanding of interconnected meaning and associations as a unique poetic vessel that bridges the interstices of genre.

Can an ecological perspective provide cues for hybrid arts practice? Over the last fifteen years, Bonemap's novel collaborative method has produced hybrid and genre independent works within the broad field of contemporary arts. Their specific creative methodology relates to a practice and process imbued with an ecological perspective. The approach incorporates a multimodal and intermedial praxis that expands static representations of human creative environments and genres. Using flux, improvisation, participatory and responsive strategies to harness generative form it is argued that Bonemap work articulate a metaphor of fluid hybridisation. The authors cite the creative works of Bonemap and other influencers to approach contemporary arts practice with an ecological perspective producing evidence of a fluid hybridisation of artistic genre. Bonemap's key methodological operations are responsive through the embodiment of ecological perceptions, improvisatory through the virtual...