James Hewes was a Publisher and Head of International at BBC Magazines. Part of the team that sold the business to private equity in November 2011, he was then Publishing Director for Top Gear, Good Food, Easy Cook and Lonely Planet Magazine and a Director of BBC Haymarket Exhibitions.
He spent four years in Dubai, running Gulf News Publishing. Responsible for more than 30 product areas, he launched the group’s first consumer title in Arabic – wheels Arabic.
Appointed President & CEO of FIPP in September 2017, he joined from The Art Newspaper, having been Interim CEO since December 2016.
Key Trends in Media Post-Crisis – the impact of coronavirus on the publishing industry
July 1st – 10:00 (Lisbon, PT – UTC +01:00)
The Covid-19 crisis represents the biggest opportunity – and biggest challenge – for our industry in 75 years. The rapid changes that we’re seeing in the way that consumers access our content is accelerating many of the trends that we had been seeing for many years. This session will cover the impact of the crisis on the industry, looking at the positive and negative effects of the dramatic shifts in demand seen in recent months. I’ll also be looking at key pre-crisis trends and identifying which of them will remain relevant in the years to come.
Joy Jenkins is an assistant professor of digital news at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville.
She is also a research associate at the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism at the University of Oxford. Her research focuses on the sociology of news, including changing organizational structures and roles in newsrooms, the potential for news organizations to spur public engagement, and gender representations in media.
She has a particular interest in local media and magazine media. She earned her doctorate in journalism from the University of Missouri in 2017.
Her work has been published in multiple academic journals, including Journalism Studies, Journalism Practice, Journalism, and Feminist Media Studies. She previously worked as a copy editor and reporter at an alternative newsweekly in Oklahoma City and as senior editor at a city magazine in Tulsa, Oklahoma.
Community builders: Situating place-based magazines in the local media landscape
July 3rd – 16:30 (Lisbon, PT – UTC +01:00)
Local media face acute challenges in the online environment. As audiences turn to smartphones, social media, and search engines to access news (Newman, Fletcher, Kalogeropoulos, & Nielsen, 2019), key sources of revenue for legacy news organizations, such as subscriptions and display advertising, have declined, and digital advertising largely fails to address the deficits. Having already faced circulation losses, shrinking newsrooms, and ownership consolidation, local media often have fewer resources to respond to digital shifts (Ali, Radcliffe, Schmidt, & Donald, 2018; Cornia, Sehl, & Nielsen, 2016). Scholarly and industry conversations about the challenges facing local media tend to prioritize newspapers. Magazines, however, remain an important part of the local-media landscape. In the U.S., city and regional magazines fulfill distinctive functions, serving as user manuals for experiencing cities (Sivek, 2014) and offering deeply reported investigative articles and engaging opinion and commentary (Jenkins, 2016, 2019). Additionally, many local and regional newspapers are pursuing editorial and commercial strategies mirroring those found in magazine media, such as long-form features, themed special sections, and tie-in events and products (Jenkins & Nielsen, 2018). Therefore, understanding the challenges and opportunities facing placed-based magazines, particularly in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, can illuminate broader questions and concerns around the future of local media. This talk will address the roots and development of place-based magazines in the U.S. and globally, exploring how they depict their cities, how editors describe the roles they fulfill in their communities, and how scholars can better explore their democratic potential to both inform and galvanize readers.
