Vicki Mayer

In response to an announcement that New Orleans Times-Picayune were cutting printed issues to three days a week and, shifting to a more digital model of free content, Vicki Mayer and her class of media analysis undergraduates conducted a content analysis to compare the quality of printed and digital platforms. In this study, a 2011 edition of Times-Picayune was compared with the 2013 newspaper and allied digital platforms, namely website and smartphone applications.[3] The content analysis involved the class studying a month of news coverage three days a week for four successive weeks in October 2011 and October 2013- approximately one year before and after the digital overhaul. The class catalogued staff-bylined articles and recorded screenshots of banner stories. This data was subsequently coded into two categories; news beats (e.g. courts, cops, politics, sports) and "hard" or "soft" news. The study demonstrated that the 2013 news operation produced a higher quantity of content than did its 2011 predecessor. Furthermore, it provided solid evidence that digital platforms produce softer, less-well-sourced, poorer quality news, even when published by the same news organisation.

Mayer's book Below the Line: Producers and Production Studies in the New Television Economy[4] (Duke University Press, 2011) reflects contemporary media production studies literature, which has displayed a resurgent interest towards the labour activities of media workers. The purpose of this book is to “deconstruct the monopolies of creativity and professionalism that have structured the producer as ontologically different from all the other people who serve the television industry’s symbolic and material economies” (p. 3). In doing so, Mayer acknowledges the shifting dynamics of labour by highlighting a new media economy of workers who identify themselves within the industry, despite their work remaining ‘undervalued’ or ‘invisible’. She illuminates the “hidden labour” of individuals such as ‘soft-core’ cameramen, reality-program casters, 'do-it-yourselfers' and public-access and cable commissioners, who not only create content necessitated by the television industry, but also produce themselves in the service of capital expansion.

Mayer hereby argues that the entry of nonprofessional creative participants fail to disturb the hierarchy in which the creative professional are the referent value. She explores this notion by tracing how the “TV producer” category became associated with creativity and professionalism through four ethnographical case studies on ‘largely invisible’ television productions: i) television set assemblers in Brazil, ii) softcore video cameramen in New Orleans, iii) reality TV casters, and iv) local cable television citizen regulators. The empirical detail of these studies demonstrate labour as professional and creative work that essentially unsettles the industry's mythological account of a businesses driven by auteurs, manned by the executive class, and created by a talented minority. For this reason, Mayer's book challenges conventional paradigms that ascribe creativity and professionalism to narrow tasks performed by an elite group, fulfilling her aim to “repoliticize the ordinary” (p. 186). She subsequently critiques the self-deluding “rhetoric of the creative economy” by revealing its “implicit material inequalities” (p. 176) relating to gender, ethnicity, class, location and place, in order to demonstrate the new television economy as a wide net that exploits those excluded from hierarchies.

These conclusions reveal the paradoxical nature of the new media economy: a system that provides a wider range of access to production, whilst simultaneously offers workers less security, safeguards and stable employment. The book is hence a useful lens to demonstrate the nature of modern labourers who, in an era where work invades almost every aspect of our social life, engage with complex exercises in attempts to make themselves as ‘marketable’ as possible.

• Mayer, Vicki. Almost Hollywood, Nearly New Orleans: A Film Economy Romance. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2017.
• Mayer, Vicki. Below the Line: Television Producers and Production Studies in the New Economy. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011.

• Banks, Miranda, Bridget Conor and Vicki Mayer, eds. Production Studies, The Sequel! Cultural Studies of Media Industries. New York: Routledge, 2015.
• Alexander, S.L., et al. The Times-Picayune in a Changing Media World: The Transformation of an American Newspaper. New York: Lexington, 2014.

• Mayer, Vicki and Sonia Virginia Moreira, “Brazilian-U.S. Communication Forum.” International Journal of Communication 3 (2009): 667–714. [Edited journal issue]