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Doctor Who is one of television’s most enduring and ubiquitously popular series. This study contends that the success of the show lies in its ability, over more than half a century, to develop its core concepts and perspectives: alienation, scientific rationalism and moral idealism. The most extraordinary aspect of this eccentric series rests in its capacity to regenerate its central character and, with him, the generic, dramatic and emotional parameters of the programme.
Out of Time explores the ways in which the series’ immortal alien addresses the nature of human mortality in his ambiguous relationships with time and death. It asks how the status of this protagonist – that lonely god, uncanny trickster, cyber-sceptic and techno-nerd – might call into question the beguiling fantasies of immortality, apotheosis and utopia which his nemeses tend to pursue. Finally, it investigates how this paragon of transgenerational television reflects the ways in which contemporary culture addresses the traumas of change, loss and death.

Newspapers have long been enthralled by accounts of cute, cuddly, strange, dangerous and endangered beasts, and by extraordinary and sometimes apocryphal narratives of natural phenomena. This study explores the incidence of several such stories in the British press: from reports of the "ethnic" conflicts between different species of squirrel to the tragedy of Cecil the slaughtered Zimbabwean lion. It takes in, along the way, the celebrity of Knut the polar bear, the Tamworth Two and the Exmoor Emperor. It surveys the media representation of the natural landscape from the crocodile-infested reaches of the River Thames out as far as the bleak wastes of the former planet Pluto. In doing so, and in conversation with reporters and players in these tales, it investigates the political subtexts and social meanings of such stories, and seeks thereby to reveal the real value of such soft, sentimental and sometimes silly news.

From the Arab Spring to British summer riots, from the War on Terror to The X Factor, from social networking sites to online electioneering, the influence of new media technologies is clear. This book analyses the impact of such interactive media on contemporary politics and society. It explores how new media technologies give their users a sense of empowerment, and questions whether these technologies really directly empower their users at all.
When viewers cast their votes in reality television shows, is that really a form of democratic participation?
Does Facebook actually enhance the quality of its users’ friendships and increase their social capital?
Does the video game player develop the liberating agency the game appears to promise?
Do online forms of politics essentially increase levels of democratic involvement?
Will Wikipedia truly teach us anything?
Can Web 2.0 ever set us free?
Drawing upon interviews with figures from politics and the media, this book examines the possibilities which underlie these technologies and questions some of the key assumptions which we make about them.

This book brings together the work of British, American and Australian scholars and practitioners in a substantially new edition of this popular collection. It examines the practices of reportage in an era of social networking and online news, an age of altered audience expectations in which the biggest tabloid scandal is the conduct of the tabloid press itself. It debates notions of subjectivity and objectivity in journalism today, explores how new technologies have mobilized professional and aspiring journalists alike, examines the practices and impacts of citizen journalism and user-generated content, investigates the political and cultural value of populist news and interrogates how radical ongoing developments in political, economic, professional, institutional and technological conditions are continuing to change the nature of the news industry in the second decade of the twenty-first century.

What takes place when we examine texts close-up? The art of close reading, once the closely guarded province of professional literary critics, now underpins the everyday processes of forensic scrutiny conducted by those brigades of citizen commentators who patrol the realms of social media.

This study examines at close quarters a series of key English texts from the last hundred years: the novels of Virginia Woolf and James Joyce, the plays of Samuel Beckett, the poetry of Sylvia Plath and Philip Larkin, the films of Alfred Hitchcock and the tweets of Donald Trump. It digs beneath their surface meanings to discover microcosmic ambiguities, allusions, ironies and contradictions which reveal tensions and conflicts at the heart of the paradox of patriarchal history. It suggests that acts of close reading may offer radical perspectives upon the bigger picture, as well as the means by which to deconstruct it. In doing so, it suggests an alternative to a classical vision of cultural progress characterised by irreconcilable conflicts between genders, genres and generations.

This book offers an international perspective on the current – and future – state of contemporary news-making. The thirteen contributors explore how evolving conditions and technologies of production and reception are changing the practices of journalism across the world – from Britain to Latin America, from the United States to China. The essays examine the role of the journalist in the era of mobile journalism, online journalism and citizen journalism, and ask how our understanding of journalism has changed and will continue to change in response to the rise of the blog, the camera phone and new modes of broadcast and publication. Finally, the volume asks how a new kind of journalist might continue to act as the mediator between people and power in a modern democratic state.