1. Cinema Journal 48 | No. 3 | Spring 2009
Teaching Media Convergence
by KEVIN SANDLER
P
rimetime. Must-See TV Audience Flow. Counterprogramming.
These are terms that describe the experience of television for
most of today's media educators, yet they fail to adequately
capture the experience of television shared by today's students.
While past generations may remain locked in traditional viewing pat-
terns and linear engagement modes, the current generation circulates
and produces, timeshifts and placeshifts, blogs and vlogs television on
their own terms: they engage with T V when they want, where they
want, and how they want. Television is no longer simply just television
for them, but an endless supply chain of properties and franchises, like
Lost for instance, whose content can be watched live on ABC, down-
loaded through iTunes to a PlayStation 3, or played as an alternate re-
ality game online or as a video game on a mobile phone. Television, the
most predominant media channel of our lifetime, its economic models,
and the stories it tells have been revolutionized by new technologies,
new markets, new audienees, new genres, and new industries.
How might teachers adapt to what Henry Jenkins calls media
convergence, an era "where old and new media collide," where the
distinctions between entertainment, advertising, and brands blur?' To
help students explore the industrial, cultural, social, and technological
shifts brought on by media eonvergence, I designed an undergradu-
ate course entitled US Media Now devoted to the study of television,
films, and other media-related events as they unfold when the class is
taught. As a media industries scholar and teacher, I focus on issues
such as corporatization, regulation, merchandising, and marketing
and relate them back to issues of narrative, form, and ideology. Four
topics—the Fall television season, branding and product integration,
media censorship, and film distribution and exhibition—provide the
skeleton for the course, which refreshes itself each and every semester.
The Janet Jackson Super Bowl incident on FOX, Britney Spears's per-
formance on the MTV Video Music Awards, and ABC's ill-fated Caveman
show are just a few of the happy accidents provided by such a living
curriculum.
To evaluate student learning in US Media Now, my assignments
take the form of creative projects that simulate professional practices
1 Henry Jenkins, Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide (New York: New York
University Press, 2006), 2.
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2. Cinema Journal 48 No. 3 | Spring 2009
in the media industries. Students track one new television show and one movie block-
buster through an entire semester, analyzing the aesthetic choices, marketing dis-
courses, and industrial conditions from buzz to exhibition. I ask them to apply critical
understandings of media convergence to their chosen texts using three of its key con-
cepts: transmedia storytelling (the flow of stories, images, characters, and information
across various platforms), participatory culture (the new ways consumers interact with
media content, media producers, and each other), and experiential marketing (the
brand extensions that play out across multiple media channels).^ These assignments, I
believe, capture the spirit of what Bevin Yeatman and Sean Cubitt call "creative the-
ory"—an engagement with "how an object is put together, seeing what can be learned
from its construction, and suggesting ways it could be improved upon."'
In preparing them to write their "Creative theory" essays, I ask students to design
integrated, multi-platform marketing strategies for a television show based on the fu-
turist approaches outlined in Joseph Jaffe's Ufe Aßer the 30-Second Spot: EnergLze Tour
Brand with a Bold Mix of Alternatives to Traditional Advertising.'^ J&ííe's approach includes the
internet, gaming, on-demand viewing, experiential marketing, communal marketing,
consumer-generated content, and branded entertainment. I also provide students the
following guidance regarding media convergence:
Remember, that your strategies should engage consumers in positive, relevant,
engaging, and provocative ways to succeed in an incredibly cluttered media
marketplace. Your competition is pretty much everyone: marketers, brands,
media, and even consumers themselves. Be sure to choose your program-
ming and advertising strategies wisely. Your ideas must provide added value
and contextual relevancy for today's consumer in order to foster involvement,
commitment, and loyalty to the show and its brand. In addition, be aware
that TV networks are usually subsidiaries of global media conglomerates.
Synergy may act as a vehicle for cross-promotion and cross-pollination in
your marketing strategies.
In fall 2005,1 chose FOX's Kitchen Confidential, a half-hour single-camera comedy about
the inner-workings of a fancy restaurant. Kitchen ConfidentiaCs central focus on food
made it easy for students to create brand extensions to complement, enhance, and
transform the show beyond the television screen. Unfortunately for FOX, Kitchen Confi-
dential only lasted four episodes, cancelled due to low ratings that were fueled—I like to
think—by the network's failure to tap into various consumption cultures using strate-
gies similar to those used by my students in US Media Now.
2 Jenkins discusses transmedia entertainment and participatory culture at iength in Convergence Culture. Experiential
marketing appears in embryonic form in his American /do/chapter. Together, these three concepts make up the focus
of the Convergence Culture Consortium (C3), a partnership between companies and researchers from/affiliated with
the Comparative Media Studies program at MIT which Jenkins co-directs. I am a consulting researcher for C3. See
www.convergenceculture.org.
3 Bevin Yeatman and Sean Cubitt, "Critical and Creative Media Studies and the Embedded Learning Environment,"
New Review of Film and Television Studies 3, no. 1 (May 2005): 1-14.
4 Joseph Jaffe, Life After the 30-Second Spot: Energize Your Brand with a Bold Mix of Alternatives to Traditional Ad-
vertising {Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, 2005).
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3. Cinema Journal 48 | No. 3 | Spring 2009
I was a bit more prescient when I chose NBC's Heroes for the semester's project in
fall 2006. The show's ability to tap into a shifting media landscape seemed obvious: a
comic-booky, apocalyptic, serialized drama ripe for cultural appropriation and reap-
propriation. However, my students and I were not prepared for the speed by which
convergence travels—especially for a hit show. What began as a traditional television
show website (www.nbc.com/heroes) and a semi-official //«ro«.f website from creator
Tim Krieg (http://www.9thwonders.com) quickly surfaced thereafter as a whirlpool
of content: games, graphic novels, interviews, and blogs. Now, in one week's time—the
assignment was due the day after the airing of the show's second episode—students
witnessed many of their engaging brand-building ideas being uploaded daily on
NBC's websites.
One of my students, Jennifer Cady, who is now a correspondent at E!, turned to
the blogosphere for inspiration in this assignment. She started with the Cluetrain
Manifesto (http://www.cluetrain.com) and explored popular marketing blogs like
Seth's Blog (http://sethgodin.typepad.com). Gaping Void (http://www.gapingvoid
.com), and even Jafie's own Jaffe Juice (http://www.jaffejuice.com). She realized what
the Heroes offerings were missing: conversational marketing. The network created a
blog, but being written from a fake character's point of view, it lacked the appropriate
degree of authenticity that makes blogs work. Much of the other content she noticed
also followed a similar pattern of almost engaging with the viewer, but stopping just
short of completely interacting. Jennifer therefore called for NBC to actively engage
the viewer in its brand extensions, allowing for greater participation in content cre-
ation. For instance, she advocated allowing the show's images to be freely, easily, and
legally used by consumers in order to create their own graphic novels. Then, rather
than letting these creations disappear into fan-árt oblivion, she suggested showcasing
these creations and allowing other fans to add on or edit them like a wiki. Subse-
quently, NBC did incorporate greater interactivity into its Heroes websites during later
seasons.
The following year, in fall 2007,1 chose for my media convergence assignment It's
Always Sunny in Philadelphia from FX, a cable network whose risk-taking extends from
the shows themselves to the marketing department. Multi-platform brand extensions
and user-generated content already existed on the It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia of-
ficial website (www.fxnetworks.com/sunny), its MySpace profile (www.myspace.com/
sunnyfx), and seasonal promotional vehicles like the Sunny Road Trip Experience, the
Sunny SuperFan Contest, and currently, the Sunny Came Show Tour (http://www
.fxnetworks.com/shows/originals/sunny/gameshow.php). This time, FX executives
participated in a conference call with the students to discuss the Sunny brand and pro-
vided feedback on several of their integrated marketing strategies. In fact, one student
actually sold a Sunny idea to FX.
The above student achievements demonstrate how assignments that combine criti-
cal thinking and industry practice can illuminate media convergence concepts and
processes in meaningful, productive ways, as well as how creative theory and other
non-traditional forms of pedagogy can reveal the diverse articulations of meanings
and range of activities Of communication in today's mediascape. Connecting intellec-
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4. Cinema Journal 48 | No. 3 | Spring 2009
tuai engagement to lived reality promotes self-conscious viewing practices and behav-
iors in order to prepare students to become more informed producers, educators, and
citizens of the media. *
Kevin Sandier is associate professor in the Film and Media Studies program at
Arizona State University.
The Plain Person's Guide
to Course Packs
by MARK LANGER
A
ssignments are the basis upon which we evaluate the student's
ability to deal with course materials. It is those course materials
which I wish to address, as their coherency has a strong effect on
a student's ability to proceed with tests, essays, and other assign-
ments that evaluate their command of a class's intellectual content.
The delivery of this content depends primarily on three things—class
interaction (lectures and seminars), screenings, and assigned readings.
It is the last of these that I wish to discuss in order to point out the
advantages of using a course pack.
Why a course pack at all, especially in an age that provides the pos-
sibility of web-accessible or e-Reserves of assigned material? Many
of the intellectual property issues affecting hard-copy course packs
also involve web-accessible materials, such as those using the popu-
lar Blackboard software. Initially, it was thought that the provisions
of the Technology, Education, and Copyright Harmonization Act in
2002, developed to facilitate distance education, provided a loophole
though which course packs could be made accessible online under
Fair Use provisions. More recently, the status of electronic reserves
of materials for students and other internet-accessible readings has
been cast into doubt since the litigation between the Association of
American Publishers and Cornell University in 2007. Although there
has been a lot of discussion about open access course readings in the
future, in the present there is still a very real threat of legal action,
that, for many, makes the use of a course pack a more appealing alter-
native to electronic reserves. Even for those who opt for online read-
ings, the same legal and pedagogical issues affecting the production
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