Companion to Media Authorship

“Gray and Johnson have brought together a stellar group of authors whose works deftly explicate the complexities of negotiating ‘authorship’ across a range of cultural production sites. This definitive collection is an important and long-overdue contribution to contemporary media studies.”
Serra Tinic, author of On Location: Canada’s Television Industry in a Global Market

“Wide-ranging and global, historical and contemporary, brimming with insights enlarging our understanding of media production and reception, this book is an important contribution to the study of authorship.”
Michael Z. Newman, author of Indie: An American Film Culture

While the idea of authorship has transcended the literary to play a meaningful role in the cultures of film, television, games, comics, and other emerging digital forms, our understanding of it is still too often limited to assumptions about solitary geniuses and individual creative expression. A Companion to Media Authorship is a ground-breaking collection that reframes media authorship as a question of culture in which authorship is as much a construction tied to authority and power as it is a constructive and creative force of its own.

Gathering together the insights of leading media scholars and practitioners, 28 original chapters map the field of authorship in a cutting-edge, multi-perspective, and truly authoritative manner. The contributors develop new and innovative ways of thinking about the practices, attributions, and meanings of authorship. They situate and examine authorship within collaborative models of industrial production, socially networked media platforms, globally diverse traditions of creativity, complex consumption practices, and a host of institutional and social contexts. Together, the essays provide the definitive study on the subject by demonstrating that authorship is a field in which media culture can be transformed, revitalized, and reimagined.

Jonathan Gray is Professor of Media and Cultural Studies at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, USA. He is author of Watching with The Simpsons: Television, Parody, and Intertextuality (2006), Television Entertainment (2008), Show Sold Separately: Promos, Spoilers, and Other Media Paratexts (2010), and Television Studies (with Amanda Lotz, 2012). He is co-editor of, amongst others, Battleground: The Media (with Robin Andersen, 2008) and Satire TV: Politics and Comedy in the Post-Network Era (with Jeffrey P. Jones and Ethan Thompson, 2009).

Derek Johnson is Assistant Professor of Media and Cultural Studies at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, USA. His research focuses on production cultures and creative identities in the media industries. He is the author of Media Franchising: Creative License and Collaboration in the Culture Industries (2013), as well as co-editor of the forthcoming Intermediaries: Management of Culture and Cultures of Management (with Avi Santo and Derek Kompare, 2014).