By Wajeeha Malik
To highlight the changes taking place in the world of news and entertainment, Northwestern University in Qatar (NU-Q) recently held a conference in collaboration with Qatar National Research Fund (QNRF).
NU-Q’s Fresh Global Media Conference, which took place at the W Hotel in Doha on February 21 and 22, gathered academics and media players from all over the world to discuss the developments in news and entertainment over the past decade.
Professors John Downing and Joe Khalil, both faculty members in NU-Q’s Communication program, organized the conference. According to Professor Khalil, the conference was a way of determining what the emerging media world looks like from Qatar’s perspective.
“The original idea was to do a journal issue [about emerging media players], asking people to write articles for a journal. Then we thought, wouldn’t it be better if we can actually have this group of people come together and think out loud about these issues?” said Khalil. “[The conference] is part of basically showing certain practices on the part of the industry players, and the type of lessons we can learn from them, so that we have a role model [of newly emerging media].”
The keynote speaker was Al Jazeera’s Global Executive Director for Corporate Development and Strategy, Dr. Yaser Bishr, who focused on the economic challenges being faced by the news media.
Other speakers included Dr. Abdulnasser Al Ansari, Deputy Executive Director at QNRF; Annabelle Sreberny, professor of global media and communication at the Centre for Media Studies at School of Oriental and African Studies at the University of London; John Sinclair, honorary professorial fellow at the University of Melbourne; Tristan Mattelart, professor of international communication at the University of Paris 8; Sevda Alankuş, Dean of the Faculty of Communication at Kadir Has University in Istanbul, among others.
These speakers dealt with a variety of issues relating to global media – from piracy to social media revolutions to problems being faced by newspapers in the digital age.
Tristan Mattelart, Professor of International Communication at the University of Paris 8, discussed how piracy is a problem for copyright-based industries.
“One of the main reasons of piracy is the price of cultural products such as DVDs or CDs or films. One of the best ways of bridging this gap between the offer and demand would be to reduce the price of the DVDs, and especially in the markets where the incomes are lower,” Mattelart said.
Sevda Alankuş, the dean of the Faculty of Communications at Kadir Has University in Turkey, discussed the rise of Turkey as a media power, particularly the appeal of Turkish TV series in the Arab world. “If I can find colleagues who will be interested in working together, I will be pleased to do some comparative research about audience reactions to the Turkish serials,” said Alankuş.
The conference concluded with a networking session held at NU-Q, which gave students and faculty a chance to interact with the visitors and discuss their work in detail. A conference report will also be released soon by NU-Q.
“It was our effort at bridging the gap between what students tend to think of as theory and what they think of as practice. If we’re able to get to that stage of fostering a culture that treats theory and practice as one, I think we would be doing our job,” said Khalil.
