0th Week Newsletter: Welcome to the Oxford Media Society!

Hello all, and welcome to Oxford Media Society for Hilary Term 2023!

We are back for the new year with a fantastic new committee, and a store of interviews lined up with speakers from across the industry. And keep an eye out for our weekly newsletters, where different committee members will share their thoughts on the media, and give their best article recommendations for the week. This term, we want to do some real thinking about the role and the future of the media industry: from print to digital, text to video, reporter to filmmaker to advertiser, everything we’ve grown up with is in flux, and the potential is unbelievable.

What we hope to consider is that things might not be in flux in the way we assume. James Marriott’s column in The Times, recommended below, reminds us that the status quo in the UK and the US doesn’t necessarily apply to the rest of Europe, just as the supremacy of digital over print is far truer of the Anglophone world than it is of the press in continental Europe. And the potential of journalism to tell stories through a range of different voices and a range of different media, to explore exciting new modes of communication, is greater than ever. See the FT Magazine’s new photo essay collection on the meaning of different work, collating different cultural attitudes to the raw essentials of what people do. And the more voices we hear, the more nuanced our beliefs and opinions can be: in the new issue of the London Review of Books, Linda Colley considers Suella Braverman’s prospective policies towards illegal immigrants by reviewing a new history of convicts and punishment. We’ve never had more opportunities at our fingertips to learn more about the world and other people’s perspectives, and I hope Media Society provides a useful conduit.

Happy New Year!

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