Building Blocks for Complex Publishing

A Media Taxonomy

Today USC Annenburg’s International Journal of Communication published my “Proposing a Practical Media Taxonomy for Complex Media Production,” and it makes for a good reason to get back to posting here regularly (at least until my students catch up with me). The abstract:

This article proposes a taxonomy of media designed to clarify the production and critique of complex media publication. I examine the conflation of ideas described by the word media and review prior taxonomic categorizations of this fuzzy concept. Media is broken into layered categories of content, media form, and media channel based on the semiotic and technological roles in mediated communication and then is described as a flow of decisions made in the creation and publication of communicative products. Finally, this taxonomy is applied to clarify the different functions of multimedia, crossmedia, and transmedia storytelling.

In the coming weeks I’ll post a series of examples that help visualize and describe some of the concepts in the article. I’ll start off with interesting examples of the concept of media form, follow with media channel, then examples of multimedia, crossmedia and transmedia storytelling. Stay tuned for those, but in the meantime, you can read or download the article here:

International Journal of Communication

This article also builds on the ideas in these previous posts:

Multimedia, Crossmedia, Transmedia… What’s in a Name?

Transmedia Journalism as a Post-Digital Narrative