The dissertation offers a historical inquiry about how television's material traces entered archival spaces. Material traces refer to both the moving image products and the assortment of documentation about the processes of television as industrial and creative endeavors. By identifying the development of television-specific archives and collecting areas in the 1950s to the 1970s, the dissertation contributes to television studies, specifically pointing out how television materials were conceived as cultural and historical materials "worthy" of preservation and academic study. Institutions, particularly academic and cultural institutions with archival spaces, conferred television with a status of legitimacy alongside the ascent of television studies in the 1960s and 1970s. Institutions were sites of legitimation, however, television's entrance into these archival spaces depended on the work of various individuals within academic, archival, and industrial structures who grappled with defining television's intangible archival values and dealt with material obstacles. In examining several major institutions and the factors at play in archiving television, we can trace how television was valued as worthy of academic study and conceptualized as historical evidence. The following research questions structured this historical inquiry: How did different institutions approach television as archivable in the 1950s to the 1970s? Who were the determinators within these institutions, who could conceptualize television as archivable? What were the factors that enabled television's material traces to enter archival spaces? How did television directly or indirectly enter these archival spaces? Drawing on historical methods, the research primarily examined the archives of the archives, meaning institutional documents that illuminated the archival process and perceptions about television and media. The dissertation focused on five case studies: the Museum of Modern Art, the Mass Communications History Center at the State Historical Society of Wisconsin, the Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater Research, the UCLA Film and Television Archives, and the Museum of Broadcasting. These case studies represent the various institutional contexts that applied an archival logic to television. Cultural institutions, academic archives, and industry-initiated archives worked as sites to legitimate television, transforming ephemeral broadcast moments into lasting historical and cultural material.

The following study explores two separate yet intimately related aspects of the nature documentary, as film and as television production. It first provides a context in which to understand and appreciate the vast amount and variety of material that has been produced in this unique segment of the mass media, a segment still underrepresented in mass communications studies. The context is established by performing an original historical survey of the nature documentary genre, a genre which the survey dates to some of the very first images recorded as motion picture film. The survey then follows the course of the genre to the present time. In turn, the survey provides a chronological and contextual framework for exploring mythologies that have informed the nature documentary since its inception. The study advances the thesis that, as with fictional media, the nature documentary has been the instrument of mythopoeic force. It endeavors to identify, type, and analytically deconstruct a number of the operating mythologies, as well as to trace their evolution and/or stasis over the course of the genre's history. The ultimate goal of this study is to initiate scholarly dialogue and additional historical and critical research about this largely overlooked and under-appreciated form of mass media. Indeed, the nature documentary has had a long history of communicating to an ever less rural population perceptions of an increasingly distant natural world. The study offers a point of departure for productive further investigation of subject matter that in itself serves as a distinct lens through which to view the development of mass media and its relationship to modern western culture.

This study examines newspaper portrayals of the American insane asylum between 1887 and 1895. The focus is on the way the mental health system was represented to the public in the era of Nellie Bly, the stunt journalist who investigated a Manhattan insane asylum in 1887. The project reveals the ways in which the newspapers aggregated a variety of narratives around the insane asylum which ultimately presented the institution in such a way that served the needs of the press. For those without firsthand knowledge of the insane asylum, the newspaper was the primary source of information. In that medium, there was a system of knowledge created and disseminated, one that integrated and conflated the public answer to mental illness with other sociopolitical issues such as economics, crime, gender, and ethnicity. The content created a meaning in which the deteriorating asylum system was presented contradictorily as an ineffective yet permanent public reality. Furthermore, newspapers reinforced and augmented an existing shame around mental illness. Mental illness evolved from a private/family concern to one of public import over the course of the 19th century. Thus, mental affliction became more than a moral failing or a character flaw; it had been elevated to a social problem to be tended by the government. Therefore, the problem of the mentally ill fell under the jurisdiction of the metro newspaper, which often published articles relaying asylum expenses, investigations into the failing asylums themselves, or speculations as to the cause of a person's sickness.

The thesis offers a revised institutional history of US cable network Home Box Office that expands on its under-examined identity as a monthly subscriber service from 1972 to 1994. This is used to better explain extensive discussions of HBO’s rebranding from 1995 to 2007 around high-quality original content and experimentation with new media platforms. The first half of the thesis particularly expands on HBO’s origins and early identity as part of publisher Time Inc. from 1972 to 1988, before examining how this affected the network’s programming strategies as part of global conglomerate Time Warner from 1989 to 1994. Within this, evidence of ongoing processes for aggregating subscribers, or packaging multiple entertainment attractions around stable production cycles, are identified as defining HBO’s promotion of general monthly value over rivals. Arguing that these specific exhibition and production strategies are glossed over in existing HBO scholarship as a result of an over-valuing of post-1995 examples of ‘quality’ television, their ongoing importance to the network’s contemporary management of its brand across media platforms is mapped over distinctions from rivals to 2007. Suggesting much longer institutional continuities and influences for understanding HBO’s success, the thesis outlines the development and influence of these strategies through a critical chronology of the network’s history. In doing so, the thesis aligns with trends for rigorous media histories that consider the origins, long-term precedent and cyclical institutional strategies that govern contemporary industry practices.

The figure of the user is often overlooked in Internet histories, which frequently focus on larger treatments of infrastructure, governance, or major contributions of specific individuals. This thesis constructs a philosophical and ideological history of the Internet user and examines how that figure has changed though the evolution of the Internet. Beginning with the Web 2.0 paradigm in the early 2000s, a growing state and corporate interest in the Internet produced substantial changes to the structure and logic of the Internet that saw the user being placed increasingly at the periphery of online space as the object of state surveillance or behavioral tracking. The three case studies in this thesis investigate the combination of technological constraints and discursive strategies which have aided in shaping the contemporary user from active architect of the Internet itself to passive, ideal consumer of predetermined online experiences.

While localism is a particularly important aspect of Congress' mandate that broadcasters serve "the public interest, convenience or necessity," the history of US radio broadcasting exhibits persistent tensions between nationalism and localism, which have intensified in recent decades. Current concerns about the loss of localism in US radio broadcasting invite us to reinterpret US radio history from a local perspective. This dissertation traces the tensions between localism and nationalism in US radio broadcasting through four forms of radio broadcasting constructed specifically to serve localism and the public interest: the 10-watt Class D license, full power public radio as typified by National Public Radio, the Low Power FM (LPFM) license established in 2000, and the controversial use of low power radio by religious broadcasters. The Class D license, US public radio, and LPFM all originated with the stated objective of serving the public in meaningful ways which commercial broadcasting cannot. Yet to date, each of these has failed to meet this goal, whether due to legislative action, organizational failure or conflict amongst broadcast entities. Further, each of these case studies illustrates the conflict between nationalism and localism ever-present in efforts to establish radio broadcasting services that adequately and meaningfully serve local publics. Through a critical-historical analysis of the tensions between nationalism and localism in US radio broadcasting, this dissertation offers an understanding for the reasons and implications of the continued failure of radio's ability to serve local communities in the United States. In doing so, I look to the failures of the past to suggest how we may revise the current LPFM license to effectively serve local publics.

The Swedish newspaper industry was for many years characterized by geographically separated markets. This allowed for open discussions and learning. In addition, economic objectives were often not expressed by the owners of the newspaper companies. This dissertation analyzes two organizations which mirrored these distinctive traits of the industry. The Lindesberg Group (1956-2008) was a secretive group of CEOs. It is described how this group started in a time of crisis to share experiences, how it developed an intricate system of benchmarking, but later transformed into an exclusive personal network with a reputation of power and influence in the media industry. Centertidningar AB (1973-2005) was a group of newspapers owned by the Centre Party. The newspapers were originally acquired to promote a political message, but they soon turned into a profit generator. This dissertation shows that the orientation for profit came from the managers rather than from the owner, and how the managers took complete control from the politicians but made the Party rich. Comparisons to other organizational forms are made, such as the open price associations. Theories of interfirm cooperation and corporate governance are used. An inverse relation between hierarchical integration and open discussions is found. It is shown that many board functions can be replicated by managers. The dissertation is of interest to scholars in business history, media economics, governance, accounting, and organization studies. Christoffer Rydland is a researcher at the Department of Marketing and Strategy (MaST) and EHFF at the Stockholm School of Economics. He is also the illustrator of the cover. A seabird, standing on a small stone, represents the leader's loneliness in the hierarchy. A sea mark on the horizon represents his search for navigation. (Lake Siljan, Midsummer 2009.) / <p>Diss. Stockholm : Handelshögskolan, 2013</p>

This dissertation is about the intellectual reception of TV in 1980s China. While Chinese media have often been a topic within studies of globalization and global political economy, Chinese TV history still has not gained enough scholarly attention. Chinese scholars' extant studies of TV history have provided valuable knowledge, but a more extensive and critical view of the interaction between TV and culture is still lacking. This dissertation aims to explore Chinese TV history in the pivotal decade of the 1980s from the viewpoint of cultural studies. Using theories of media technology, globalization and gender studies, this dissertation reexamines how a western technology was introduced to and then embedded in Chinese culture. This study of the popularization of TV in 1980s China is historical-critical supplemented with oral history interviews. Well-known Chinese periodicals were studied whose goals were not just to educate people, as was the normal role of media under socialism, but also to entertain them. These magazines include Life Out of 8 Hours, Popular TV, Popular Cinema, Modern Family, and Chinese Advertising. The dissertation also analyzes TV dramas produced in China or imported from other nations in order to examine the interaction between various ideologies of Chinese society and those of international media. It explores how the hybridity between western TV culture and Chinese traditions was represented in popular Chinese visual media. The confusions and ambitions of modernization appeared in the representations of visual media. The intellectual reception of TV in China was a negotiation between tradition and modernity, nationalism and internationalism. Chapter one examines how the Chinese media introduced and represented TV in the 1980s. Chapter two investigates how TV was presented by 1980s Chinese media as a symbol of modern life, wealth and higher social status. In chapter three, I examine how TV, a modern medium, was linked media to nature. Chapter four concentrates on the relationship between TV and other media technologies, such as film and print media. Chapter five focuses on gender representation in discourse and images promoting TV, its dramas, and related media such as TV and film magazines. The epilogue provides a brief review of the general situation of Chinese TV since the 1990s.

Today, both the way a story is told and how long the viewer's attention can be held are often as important as the story itself. This study shows how online media sets new standards for narrative and continues some print traditions. This study focuses on the dialogue between print and online media. A quantitative and qualitative analysis of this dialogue through story length, readability, shovelware and story packaging shows the numerous effects the Internet has had on news media content.

This theses is divided into two main sections. First one, called TV show České století in scholarly discourse, is dealing with the TV show České století in the context of historiographical evolution, memory studies and historians' disputes and comments. Second one, called Utilization of TV show České století for teaching history, is practical and elaborates on using the TV show for teaching history classes. This part contains a complex approach for teaching history classes about the Velvet revolution at gymnasiums using epizode The very last hooray, including the historical, didactic and methodological analysis.