This commentary considers citizen journalism emerging from the Syrian Civil War and argues that its usefulness is dependent on an “interpreter tier” of user-generated media analysts. In contrast to discourse celebrating more direct forms of citizen journalism, the piece emphasizes the importance of intermediary layers of meaning-making as the means by which complex fields of amateur information can be made intelligible. This “interpreter tier,” although often ignored in popular and scholarly discourse, takes on an increasingly important function as mainstream sources must increasingly rely on citizen materials produced in far off places.

Podcasts often take the form of traditional public affairs and public service media in a hyper-competitive, neoliberalized space that prizes above all the attention given by individualized listeners to specific creators willing to put some version of their intimate selves on display. This dynamic is present in all forms of commercial media, but it is put in particularly sharp relief in the world of contemporary podcasting. This introductory essay considers this tension and, in doing so, frames the articles that appear throughout the special issue.

This article considers the unique forms of digital labor that emerged in the wake of the downing of Malaysian Airlines flight MH17 over Donetsk, Ukraine in July of 2014. Whereas such investigations traditionally rely on expert analysis and strict information control, the Ukrainians took an unconventional, open-source approach to the case. By releasing key pieces of video evidence on social media, the Ukrainian government recruited a vast roster of skilled online analysts to work on its behalf without expending any financial resources. Placing this user activity in the context of scholarly studies of both fan labor and citizen surveillance, the paper argues that social and economic aspects of online culture enabled Ukraine to benefit significantly from the discourse produced by unpaid workers. Ultimately, the output of these laborers played a key role in counteracting Russia's use of global broadcasting and expensive online propaganda to dominate international debate surrounding MH17.

No abstract

This article considers how three competing subscription video on-demand services (SVODs) – Jewzy, ChaiFlicks, and IZZY – attract American Jewish subscribers via content selection, platform design, and marketing rhetoric. Although these three SVODs offer similar catalogs, they nonetheless foreground distinct elements of Jewish life, history, and practice. This process of commercial framing, the paper argues, creates unique brand identities for the three services that align with three different approaches to the construction of American Jewish identity. The article goes on to show that these SVODs offer an opportunity to revisit core assumptions embedded within Jewish screen studies and minority screen representation studies more broadly. Minority identity on screen is most often studied through the interpretation of key instances of minority representation. These SVODs instead emphasize the dynamics of interpellation, as they hail viewers by appealing to limited, pre-constructed concepts of cultural identity while offering entire platforms worth of representations.