Department of Communication Studies

The depression of the 1930s forced private and public charities across Canada to adapt to new circumstances. The crisis was particularly acute for the Montreal Council of Social Agencies, a minority English Protestant organization in a city reluctant to accept any responsibility for public services. The Council was forced to assume the burden of relief services for its community. The abrupt and long term disruptions in the operations of the Council caused by the Depression forced it to reevaluate and reassess its role in social services. Consequently, the Montreal Council of Social Agencies tried to compel municipal, provincial and federal governments to play larger roles in welfare work to relieve immediate and future problems. Most importantly, the Montreal Council of Social Agencies was guided through the 1930s by the principles of the Charity Organization Society, which were retained and reinforced rather than weakened by this crisis.

The largely unregulated early years of Canadian radio were vital to development of broadcasting policy. The Report of the Royal Commission on Radio Broadcasting in 1929 and American broadcasting both changed the direction of Canadian broadcasting, but were mitigated by the early, largely unregulated years. Broadcasters operated initially as small, independent, and local broadcasters, then, national networks developed in stages during the 1920s and 1930s. The late adoption of radio broadcasting policy to build a national network in Canada allowed other practices to take root in the wake of other examples, in particular, American commercial broadcasting. By 1929 when the Aird Report recommended a national network, the potential impact of the report was shaped by the path of early broadcasting and the shifts forced on Canada by American broadcasting and policy. Eventually Canada forged its own course that pulled in both directions, permitting both private commercial networks and public...

This issue of the Journal of Radio & Audio Media features two symposia. The first symposium, assembled by Phylis Johnson and Matthew Linfoot, explores LGBTQ+ and Radio/Audio Media. As noted by Johnson and Linfoot, this collection comes almost 50 years after the Stonewall Uprising on June 28, 1969 in New York (Johnson & Linfoot, 2018). The array of work contained in the symposium demonstrates the range of scholarship in the field that intersects radio/audio and LGBTQ+ communities.

This paper looked at online communication between producers of BBC’s show Sherlock and NBC’s show Hannibal with their fans. The main aim was to investigate engagement of producers with fans on social media and the use of accounts on social media, e.g. whether TV shows interact with fans through the use of the official network, a production company affiliated accounts or people involved with the show use their own accounts to communicate with fans. Kent and Taylor’s five features of dialogic public relations (Mutuality, Propinquity, Empathy, Risk and Commitment) were used to analyse communication. The results show that two shows share many similarities but the main differences in approach to communication come from the business structure of two broadcasters, public versus commercial. Both shows also showed evidence of dialogic PR techniques, but BBC’s Sherlock also utilised elements of publicity.

Tweening the Girl challenges the argument that the tween market began in the mid-1990s. It was actually during the 1980s that young girls were given the label “tweens” and were heralded by marketers, and subsequently the news media, as one of “capitalism’s most valuable customers.” Tweening the Girl expertly traces
the emergence of the tween during this era as she slowly became known to the consumer marketplace as a lucrative customer, market, and audience. It clearly illustrates how “tweenhood,” which is often assumed to be a natural category of childhood, is actually a product of the industries of the youth media marketplace, which began to position the preteen girl as a separate market niche carved out of the transitory space between childhood and adolescence. Relying
predominantly upon a textual analysis of trade publications from the 1980s and early 1990s, the book eloquently maps out the synergistic processes of the marketing, advertising, merchandising, and media industries as they slowly began to take interest in the girl and began to define her as a tween: an empowered female consumer who is no longer a child but not quite a teen.

Canadian communication studies have largely ignored Canadian children's media as a field of study. The children's cultural industries in Canada are rich and diverse. This article argues that these cultural industries need to be constitutively integrated into scholarship on the Canadian mediascape, as does the presence of young people as active participants in Canadian media culture. Focusing primarily on English-language television to illustrate this point, the article first outlines the long history of children's media production in Canada, then discusses reasons why such scholarship is missing from the field, and concludes by outlining the impacts of this oversight. RÉSUMÉ Les études en communication canadiennes ont généralement négligé la recherche sur les médias canadiens pour les enfants. Pourtant, les industries culturelles pour enfants au Canada sont riches et diverses. Cet article soutient que la recherche sur les médias canadiens devrait tenir compte de ces industries culturelles ainsi que de la présence de jeunes en tant que participants actifs à la culture médiatique canadienne. Portant principalement sur la télévision anglophone pour illustrer cette nécessité, l'article passe d'abord en revue la longue histoire de la production médiatique pour enfants au Canada, soulève ensuite des raisons pour lesquelles la recherche sur ces productions a été lacunaire et se conclut en présentant les conséquences de ces lacunes.