creative industry essay

British Council Creative Economy

New and changing dynamics, john newbigin, what is the creative economy.

How the term ‘creative industries’ began

The term ‘creative industries’ began to be used about twenty years ago to describe a range of activities, some of which are amongst the oldest in history and some of which only came into existence with the advent of digital technology. Many of these activities had strong cultural roots and the term ‘cultural industries’ was already in use to describe theatre, dance, music, film, the visual arts and the heritage sector, although this term was itself controversial as many artists felt it demeaning to think of what they did as being, in any way, an ‘industry’.

‘Industries’ or not, no one could argue with the fact that these activities – both the narrowly defined cultural industries and the much wider range of new creative industries – were of growing importance to the economy of many countries and gave employment to a large number of people. But no government had attempted to measure their overall economic contribution or think strategically about their importance except, perhaps, the US government which, for almost a hundred years, had protected and fostered its film industry, not just because of its value to the US economy but because it projected US culture and influence around the world. Although they did not constitute an easily identified industrial ‘sector’ in the way that aerospace, pharmaceuticals or automotive are seen as sectors, one thing all these activities had in common was that they depended on the creative talent of individuals and on the generation of intellectual property. In addition, to think of them as a ‘sector’, however arbitrary the definition, drew attention to the fact that they were part of or contributed to a wide range of industries and professions, from advertising to tourism, and there was evidence that the skills and work styles of the creative sector were beginning to impact on other areas of the economy, especially in the use of digital technologies.

The first attempt to measure the value of the creative industries

In 1997, a newly elected Labour government in the UK decided to attempt a definition and assess their direct impact on the British economy. Drawing on a study published in 1994 by the Australian government, Creative Nation , and on the advice of an invited group of leading creative entrepreneurs, the government’s new Department for Culture, Media and Sport published Creative Industries – Mapping Document 1998 that listed 13 areas of activity – advertising, architecture, the arts and antiques market, crafts, design, designer fashion, film, interactive leisure software, music, performing arts, publishing, software, television and radio – which had in common the fact that they “… have their origin in individual creativity, skill and talent and … have a potential for wealth creation through the generation of intellectual property”. The concept of intellectual property (in other words the value of an idea that can be protected by copyright, patents, trade marks or other legal and regulatory mechanisms to stop it being copied or turned to commercial advantage without the permission of the person whose idea it was) was seen as central to any understanding of creative industries – and continues to be so.

Critics argued that the study was creating false distinctions and that individual creativity and talent were at the heart of many other areas of activity, from bio-sciences to engineering. Of course, that is true but the study had deliberately chosen not to include the creative work of scientists and engineers that is built on systematic analysis and enquiry, and to focus instead on the more random drivers of creativity in the social and cultural spheres. Another criticism was that the study failed to acknowledge the difference between businesses that actually generated intellectual property value through the creative talent of individuals, and were typically small, under-capitalised SMEs or micros (‘small or medium enterprises’, meaning they had between 25 and 500 employees, or ‘micro-businesses’, meaning they had 10 or fewer employees), and businesses that benefitted from owning and exploiting that intellectual property that were typically large, heavily-capitalised transnational conglomerates, sometimes with very little evidence of ‘creativity’ in the way they operated. The two kinds of company could not be more different from each other and yet they were both being defined as part of the ‘creative industries’. Despite these and other criticisms the study attracted considerable interest, particularly when a follow-up analysis in 2001 revealed that this arbitrarily defined creative sector was generating jobs at twice the underlying rate of the UK economy as a whole.

How thinking about the creative industries has evolved

Twenty years later, the concept of the ‘creative industries’, and their importance, is recognised by almost every government in the world and is beginning to give way to a much more inclusive idea of a wider ‘creative economy’. Of course, the desire to define specific industries as ‘creative’ persists, and will no doubt continue to be so. In some countries the definitions revolve closely around the arts and culture. Other countries have broader definitions that include, for example, food and gastronomy on the basis that food and cuisine have both economic and cultural significance. Other countries have a definition that includes well-established business-to-business industries such as publishing, software, advertising and design; the 11th Five-Year Plan of the Peoples Republic had as one of its central themes the need to “move from made in China to designed in China” – a classic exposition of the understanding that generating intellectual property is more valuable in the 21st century economy than manufacturing products. Other countries, including the UK, have wrestled with the tricky question of where to locate policy development for ‘creativity’ within their government structures – is it economic policy, industrial policy, cultural policy, education policy, or all four?

The more policy analysts and statisticians around the world thought about how to assess the true impact of the creative industries the more it became apparent that much more fundamental rethinking was necessary. For a start, the fusion of the arts and creative industries with digital technology was spawning whole new industries and skills that were not captured by the internationally recognised templates for measuring economic activity , the so-called ‘SIC’ and ‘SOC’ codes (Standard Industrial Classifications and Standard Occupational Classifications). This had the perverse effect of making important new areas of skill and wealth generation effectively invisible to governments and made international comparisons almost impossible. There were other obvious anomalies – not every job in the creative industries was ‘creative’ and many jobs outside the scope of the creative industries, however one chose to define them, were clearly very creative. The UK organisation Nesta , and others, began to explore this area, coming to the conclusion that the number of creative jobs in ‘non-creative’ industries was probably greater than the number of creative jobs within the creative industries. How could one begin to measure their impact? Moreover, the massive impact of digital technology was transforming every industry, creative or not, while the internet was opening up an ever-changing variety of platforms for new creative expression which, in turn, was generating all kinds of new and very obviously creative businesses. For example, within a decade and a half of its birth the videogames industry had surpassed the hundred year old film industry in value. And if ‘design’ was to be included as a creative industry, which it obviously was, where did that leave process design which was a creative discipline but one whose impact was felt across every other area of economic activity from retail to transport planning and health?

The more policymakers thought about the creative industries the more it became apparent that it made no sense to focus on their economic value in isolation from their social and cultural value. A United Nations survey of the global creative economy, published in 2008, pointed out that far from being a particular phenomenon of advanced and post-industrial nations in Europe and North America, the rapid rate of growth of ‘creative and cultural industries’ was being felt in every continent, North and South. The report concluded “The interface between creativity, culture, economics and technology, as expressed in the ability to create and circulate intellectual capital, has the potential to generate income, jobs and exports while at the same time promoting social inclusion, cultural diversity and human development. This is what the emerging creative economy has begun to do.”

The creative economy has a cultural and social impact that is likely to grow

In a time of rapid globalisation, many countries recognise that the combination of culture and commerce that the creative industries represents is a powerful way of providing a distinctive image of a country or a city, helping it to stand out from its competitors. The value of widely recognised cultural ‘icons’, such as the Eiffel Tower in France, the Taj Mahal in India or the Sydney Opera House in Australia has given way to whole cultural districts that combine arts and commercial activity, from the Shoreditch district of London with its design studios, tech businesses, cafes and clubs to huge prestige projects such as the West Kowloon cultural district in Hong Kong or the cultural hub on Sadiyaat Island in Abu Dhabi that represent billions of dollars of investment.

Awareness of this broader significance was reflected in a UK government publication of 2009, Creative Britain , which argued that effective long-term policies for the creative industries depended on policy initiatives, many of them at city and regional level, that were social as much as economic and that included, for example, the need for radical changes in the way children’s education was being planned, if Britain’s economy was to achieve long-term success as a home of creativity and innovation.

By 2014 staff at Nesta felt the debate had moved on so significantly that a new definition was was called for; a simple definition of the ‘creative economy’, rather than ‘creative industries’, as “…those sectors which specialise in the use of creative talent for commercial purposes”. The same year, in an analysis of the UK’s cultural policy and practice, the writer Robert Hewsion observed in his book Cultural Capital – The Rise and Fall of Creative Britain, “It is the configuration of relationships that gives a system its essential characteristics. Thus, it is less helpful to define the creative economy by what it does, than try to understand how it is organised”.

This, in turn, opens up a whole new arena for discussion. It seems that these industries, especially the thousands of small and micro-businesses that are at the cutting edge of creativity, may not only be of growing economic significance but, in some sense, are a harbinger of a whole new economic order, providing a new paradigm for the way in which businesses are organised, education is understood and provided, value is measured, the working lives and career prospects of millions of people are likely to develop and how the cities they live in will be planned and built. In particular, the rapid growth of automation and the use of artificial intelligence and robotics, which heralds the so-called “Fourth Industrial Revolution”, is certain to have a major impact on employment globally. Researchers at Oxford University estimate that up to 47% of jobs in the US could be replaced by machines in the course of the next 20 years, while their figure for the UK is 35%. But a 2015 study by Nesta, ‘Creativity vs. Robots’ argued that the creative sector was to some extent immune to this threat, with 86% of ‘highly creative’ jobs in the US, and 87% in the UK, having no or low risk of being displaced by automation.

It is sometimes said that where oil was the primary fuel of the 20th century economy, creativity is the fuel of the 21st century. In the same way that energy policy and access to energy was a determinant of geopolitics throughout the 20th century, it may be that policies to promote and protect creativity will be the crucial determinants of success in the 21st. If that is true then we will have to rethink the way governments are organised, the way cities are planned, the way education is delivered, and the way citizens interact with their communities. So, thinking about what we mean by creativity and the creative economy could not be more important!

As Special Advisor to the Minister for Culture, Rt Hon Chris Smith MP, he was closely involved in developing the UK government’s first policies for the creative industries in the 1990s. He was Head of Corporate Relations for Channel 4 Television (2000-2005) and executive assistant to Lord Puttnam as the Chairman of the film company Enigma Productions Ltd (1992-97). As a policy advisor to the Leader of the Labour Party and Leader of the Opposition, Rt Hon Neil Kinnock, MP, (1986-92) he had responsibility for environmental and cultural issues, amongst others.

He is a member of the UK government’s Creative Industries Council; Chairman of the British Council’s Advisory Group for Arts and Creative Economy; member of the Advisory Board of the Institute for Creative and Cultural Entrepreneurship at Goldsmiths, University of London; and of the Arts and Humanities Research Council’s Knowledge Exchange Oversight Group. He is a member of the International Board of Advisors of Srishti Institute of Art, Design and Technology in Bangalore and an Honorary Professor at the University of Hong Kong.

He was a youth worker in East London for 6 years and writer-in-residence for Common Stock Theatre. He has also worked as a journalist and as an illustrator.

He was awarded an OBE for “services to creative industries and the arts” in the 2015 New Years Honours List.

www.creativeengland.co.uk

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Go on then … what are the creative industries?

Head of School of Creative Arts, James Cook University

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Creativity is the X factor of modern industry. When it slumps, our economy splutters.

Creativity is the source of the unprecedented wealth of the last two centuries. Yet we still understand very little about it.

Ideas create the industries and societies that generate the capital and income that lifts the world up. That is simple to say but difficult to achieve.

In the 1990s we began to talk about creative industries. We bundled fashion, design, advertising, architecture, publishing, software, movies, television and similar enterprises into their own sector. They became a lobby. In major economies, creative industries make up about 3%-5% of employment. As poorer economies develop, the size of their creative industries grows.

The term “creative industries sector”, though, is a bit of misnomer. For any industry can be creative. Conversely, fashion and design industries and their ilk often are lame. Little is creative or even interesting about today’s consumer computer companies.

In 2000, creative industries evangelists promised us a brilliant future. Some 30% of the population would belong to the creative class. The baton of creativity would pass from computing to bio-technology. Broadband networks would revolutionise business. Yet none of this happened.

Instead we ended up with prolonged global stagnation. We are in this pickle because we are less creative today than we were 50 years ago.

Any industry can be creative. Agriculture is just as important as media. Creativity should not be confused with glamour. Movies are glitzy but today they are also mostly banal. The days of Alfred Hitchcock and John Ford are long behind us.

The same is true of technology. If we compare the period 1930-1969 to 1970-2009, the per-capita number of significant Australian inventions declined.

More lobbies, more policies and more government money won’t fix this. Bio-medical research is a cautionary example. After 1970, research money in real terms exploded. Yet the number of new molecular entities approved for drug use in the United States in the 2000s was barely more than in the 1950s.

The arts are equally miserable. In the 1950s, discussion raged about the relative merits of figurative and abstract art. Tradition was pitched against modernity, ornament against smooth surfaces. Then along came arts council funding.

This was followed by obsequious hyper-ventilating discourses and finally the “neo” and “post” movements. The result was tedium. We can barely recollect the names of the practitioners of this anaemic era, let alone compare them with the monuments of Cubism, De Stijl or Abstract Expressionism.

In the past 40 years, the most interesting work in the arts has been in commercially-minded design and architecture. Works like Rem Koolhaas and OMA’s 2008 China Central Television (CCTV) Headquarters in Beijing are impressive. But these remain the exception.

This suggests that, for all our rhetoric, we still do not understand how creativity works. We try to institutionalise something that defies institutionalisation. There is no document-driven procedure for creativity. It is very hard to nail down. This is because what lies at its heart is very odd.

Creative people do what most people including most clever people do not do. They take what others normally think of as being unrelated and put them together. That is what it means to be creative. It is a very off-putting thought process, not unlike that of an acerbic comedian.

Someone at AT&T had the idea of putting together the concepts of (wired) telephony and (wireless) radio in 1917. Almost a century later we carry in our pockets the fruits of that original thought meld. Very few people think like that.

Creative societies allow those who do the freedom to muse and the room to convince others that their outlier idea will soon enter the mainstream and define the norm.

Creative people look at the exception and see it as the rule. They are not being difficult or outlandish. While often witty, they are not self-consciously wacky. They just see X as Y. That is their gift and their curse.

They see change as continuity not novelty. Creators are innate conservatives born with a wicked sense of irony.

Some societies and some eras go along with this. Some don’t. We pay lots of lip-service to the creative economy. But our time is not very creative. The arts and the sciences are dull. Technology and industry are not very innovative. No new industry sectors are emerging. This is a big problem.

The French economist Jean-Baptiste Say rightly observed in the early 19th century that in a modern dynamic economy supply creates demand. This means that without interesting and exciting products people save their money, and sluggish economies stagnate. That’s where we find ourselves in 2013.

Our larger problem is that we mistake glamour for creation. We think that working in the air-conditioned pastel offices of a designated creative industry makes us creative. It does not. We need to stop mistaking pretty labels for real entities.

We now have to go back to scratch. We need a hard re-think about what creativity is and how we encourage it. We need to de-regulate creativity and let it off the leash. Since the 1970s we have forged a society fixated on petty rules and stern processes. Universities are among the worst offenders.

The result is not creation but enervation. We call our research and development creative but mostly it is not. We are risk-averse and shy of discovery.

One of the few exceptions to this in the past 40 years was Silicon Valley in the 1970s, 1980s and early 1990s. It was truly free-wheeling. It was a place where a young man like Steve Jobs could combine his love of modernist aesthetics and electronic technologies. But that’s long gone.

Silicon Valley in its brief hey-day was philosophically libertarian. Today it is wearisomely left-liberal. Sanctimony has replaced discovery. Moralism has supplanted gusto. The fire of excitement has given way to the same ideology of correctness that haunts the universities today. Big ideas have been replaced by minute rules.

PayPal’s Peter Thiel is right when he observes that the technology and economics of our other key industries such as air travel and energy are stuck in the 1960s and 1970s . American critic and scholar Camille Paglia is right when she observes that, since the early 1970s, the arts have been a wasteland .

And I can’t see much monumental in the sciences since the structure of DNA was discovered in the 1950s. The incidence of classic science papers declines sharply after 1970.

We are not like Germany in the 1890s or California in the 1950s. One produced a stream of great philosophy and science; the other a stream of great technology. Until the tap was switched off – in one case by totalitarianism; in the other case by big government liberalism.

Little of our era will enter the history of ideas. Twittering on about creative industries makes no difference if our industries are not creative.

Our biggest problem today is that we lack ambition, energy and imagination. Our problem is us. Only we can fix that problem.

This is a foundation essay for The Conversation’s new Arts + Culture section. If you are an academic or researcher with relevant expertise and would like to respond to this article, please use our pitch facility .

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Cultural and creative industries.

Vicki Mayer Vicki Mayer Department of Communication, Tulane University
https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190228613.013.552
Published online: 26 September 2018

The critical study of cultural and creative industries involves the interrogation of the ways in which different social forces impact the production of culture, its forms, and its producers as inherently creative creatures. In historical terms, the notion of “the culture industry” may be traced to a series of postwar period theorists whose concerns reflected the industrialization of mass cultural forms and their attendant marketing across public and private spheres. For them, the key terms alienation and reification spoke to the negative impacts of an industrial cycle of production, distribution, and consumption, which controlled workers’ daily lives and distanced them from their own creative expressions. Fears of the culture industry drove a mass culture critique that led social scientists to address the structures of various media industries, the division of labor in the production of culture, and the hegemonic consent between government and culture industries in the military-industrial complex. The crisis of capitalism in the 1970s further directed critical scholars to theorize new dialectics of cultural production, its flexibilization via new communications technologies and transnational capital flows, as well as its capture via new property regimes. Reflecting government discourses for capital accumulation in a post-industrial economy, these theories have generally subsumed cultural industries into a creative economy composed of a variety of extra-industrial workers, consumers, and communicative agents. Although some social theorists have extended cultural industry critiques to the new conjuncture, more critical studies of creative industries focus on middle-range theories of power relations and contradictions within particular industrial sites and organizational settings. Work on immaterial labor, digital enclosures, and production cultures have developed the ways creative industries are both affective and effective structures for the temporal and spatial formation of individuals’ identities.

consumption
creative industries
cultural industries
intellectual property
communication and critical studies

Communication studies always have taken an interest in the production of culture as both a universal human feature and a social formation. As a universal, each individual comes into being through the transformation of his or her environment, producing the self via the reproduction of language and symbolic goods. Whereas animals may also construct their environments in collective formations, it was famously Karl Marx who wrote, “what distinguishes the worst of architects from the best of bees is this, that the architect raises his structure in imagination before he erects it in reality” (Marx, 2007 /1967, p. 198). Marx rejected the dualism between the mind and the material, including the body that would be enrolled in labor. Under industrial capitalism, workers exchanged their own resources for wages. In return, those resources were marshaled in the production of goods that workers did not own, as property or as an extension of their imaginations.

The study of cultural and creative industries thus was founded in a concern with the ways historical social forces have impacted the production of culture, its forms, and its producers as inherently creative creatures. This has involved the study of particular industries and their organizational features, as well as overarching relationships between policies and markets in enabling the industrialization of culture and the constitution of labor. Even as the capitalization of culture has intensified and generated new questions around the industrialization of culture, communication scholars nevertheless share a concern about the ways work and the social are mutually constitutive.

The Culture Industry

The initial formulation of “the culture industry” points to the critical concerns among members of the Frankfurt School, in particular Theodore Adorno. A German émigré to the United States during the rise of the Third Reich, Adorno began writing about the culture industry as part of a longer collaboration with fellow émigré Max Horkheimer. Within the Dialectic of Enlightenment ( 1997 / 1944 ), the chapter “The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception” outlines the basic concerns around the industrial production of culture.

Set during the rise of mass advertising and media industries, the culture industry encompasses the production, circulation, and consumption of cultural goods. Culture, in other words, could not be separated from the material processes that involve humans as both producers and consumers of its forms and contents. As producers, the culture industry employs workers who must rationalize their labor for the efficient assembly of mass media goods. Much like Henry Ford, whose production model for automobiles brought this product to the consuming masses, the management of the culture industry relied on the scientific control of human inputs in conjunction with new technologies that could better isolate work roles into discrete and measurable processes. The intensification of labor processes within the industrial model not only generates more capital for owners of the culture industry, but it has complementary impacts on the entire cycle of production and consumption. Workers expand the market for culture by creating more and cheaper goods that seem to address the personal needs of the workers and which they not only can afford, but also feel obliged to consume after the exhausting workday. The culture industry thus alienates workers from the holistic fruits of their own creative capacities, at the same time that it reifies the objects of their labor with the mystical ability to communicate personally with consumers. The class consciousness of workers according to their material realities is subsumed by their participation in the seemingly democratic marketplace of goods.

Adorno’s theory of the culture industry reflected critical scholars’ concerns over the rising and concentrated power of mass media industries throughout the mid- 20th century . In the United States, the vertical integration of film and broadcasting industries, along with the horizontal integration of national newspaper chains and newswire services, grew faster than other industries that faced either regulatory capture, such as telecommunications, or “trust-busting,” such as oil and railroads. The integration of domestic film studios with distributors and movie theaters, together with an international policy of technology capture, importation tariffs, and block booking, had ensured the rise of a cartel in global film production. Sociologists and economists working on the through the 1930s and 1940s showed that eight film studios, known as the “majors,” dominated global box offices (Wasko, 2015 ). Similarly, the concentration of commercial broadcast networks, first in radio and then in television, could be attributed both to the interconnectedness of equipment manufacturing, production, and distribution of contents and to the government’s protectionism of these networks’ airwave access over that of other public users. The news industry, in contrast, achieved economies of scale through an oligopoly of national chains served by a select group of international wire services.

Together these trends stoked fears of what C. W. Mills ( 1956 ) called a US “power elite” that could easily manipulate the public through economic, political, and military control. These manipulations could be evidenced through the direct complicity of the culture industry with national state policy objectives in World Wars I and II, the Cold War, and Vietnam. Meanwhile, the US political strategy for emerging from the Great Depression by stimulating consumer demand led to a flood of advertising and marketing designed to sell consumerism, first as an American value, and then as a Western democratic value in postwar and decolonizing societies. Whereas these state–market alliances consolidated the US power elite, they frequently challenged the producerist legal systems internationally, setting the stage for the later dismantling of public media systems and the establishment of consumerist legal systems under the geopolitical banner of the free flow of information and free trade.

Beyond propaganda, however, critical scholars in accordance with Adorno showed how the culture industry altered the relationship between cultural producers and their products. The first anthropological study of Hollywood was notable in concluding that Hollywood was a “dream factory,” not only in making ideology into entertainment, but also in making a compliant workforce that sacrificed creative individuality for corporate hierarchy (Powdermaker, 1950 ). For one, the agglomerated power of the culture industry was leverage against organized labor, which steadily declined in power over the course of the 20th century (Wasko, 2015 ). Time management and the rationalization of labor processes, or taylorization, allowed management in the culture industry to speed the production of goods and further detach workers from any ownership over the finished products (Braverman, 1998 ). This detachment, what the critical theorist Georg Lukács ( 1971 ) called “reification,” was codified in changing US legal definitions of property for cultural workers and their employers. By the mid- 20th century , case law had eroded employees’ rights to control their creative contributions to industrialized production processes. Legal contracts established the rights of corporations to own workers’ knowledge through the mechanisms of independent contracting, or work-for-hire (Fisk, 2010 ). Intellectual property law in the United States defended consumers’ rights to access a marketplace of goods over cultural producers’ rights of ownership in that marketplace, including copyrights, patents, and licenses.

These definitions of property extended to consumers as well when cultural industries, through research and measurement techniques, quantified and sold audiences as commodities to advertisers and sponsors. Through the ratings system, the “audience commodity” became the main profit driver for the US broadcasting industry, according to communications theorist and activist Dallas Smythe (Lent, 1994 ). Following the cycle of national production and consumption presumed in Adorno’s theory of the culture industry, cultural producers were then doubly reified as the tradable cogs in a factory-style production line and as the quantifiable audience on sale to advertisers.

The Turn to Cultural Industries

The critical agenda driving theories of the culture industry ran parallel to the growth of empirical research into the differences between various communication and media industries captured under this umbrella, as well as the differences between commercial and publicly managed frameworks for mass cultural production.

In the United States, Lewis Coser and Richard Peterson sought to develop a “production of culture perspective” in sociological and communication research into the plurality of cultural industries (Peterson & Anand, 2004 ). Influenced by both the administrative techniques and the functionalist sociology developed in the 1950s and 1960s by Paul Lazarsfeld and Robert K. Merton through the Columbia University Bureau of Applied Social Research, Peterson would build a research agenda with others primarily in organizational sociology, such as Paul DiMaggio, Wendy Griswold, and Diana Crane. Peterson theorized that different cultural industries, their structuring and internal organization in terms of workers’ roles and constraints, led to different outcomes in the types of mass culture produced. He thus broke with Adorno and others who claimed capitalism would have more generalizable impacts on cultural contents and their ideological orientations. In doing so, Peterson and his contemporaries developed what Merton ( 1968 ) called “middle-range” theories, which limited their critical scope to the functioning of particular cultural industries and the activities of their employees within legal and regulatory frameworks for the production of culture. To this day, much of the media industries scholarship in the United States invests in middle-range theory building (see Havens, Lotz, & Tinic, 2009 ).

The pluralization of cultural industries research also occurred in the United Kingdom, where public and private political frameworks for the production of mass culture clearly seemed to structure cultural contents in different ways. Beginning with the development of British cultural studies in Birmingham in the 1960s and extending across humanities and social science disciplines, cultural studies scholars argued for the equal stature of producers and consumers in the production of cultural meanings. Richard Johnson ( 1986 ) extended this insight to the study of cultural industries as organizations within a “circuit of culture,” through which cultural producers and consumers shared and altered the meanings of mass media goods and their contents. Unlike the production of culture perspective, which cited the primacy of cultural industries and their organization in producing culture, researchers using the circuit of culture, such as Stuart Hall and Martin Barker, tended to give cultural industries less primacy as the creators of semiotic meanings in cultural texts. This approach also extended Adorno’s cultural industry theory by considering the circulation of global cultural goods between different stages of production and consumption.

Using a combination of the production of culture and the circuit of culture approaches, the study of cultural industries as diverse institutions whose workers are shaped but not determined by social structures has been a dominant strand in communication and media studies globally. These studies are typically limited to the study of media industries as cultural industries and commercial culture, with less attention to either forms or organizations for community or alternative cultural production. 1 Studies in this lineage have addressed particular key roles in cultural industries, especially those with authority over content decisions, such as news editors as gatekeepers, television producers as creators, and a variety of other managerial professionals (Whitney & Ettema, 2003 ). These studies have followed the mantra that cultural industries afford their workers a degree of creativity within constraints, downplaying the forces of reification and exploitation that concerned critical communication scholars. At the same time, these studies have pointed to the variation between cultural industries that have emerged from different historical trajectories within dynamic regulatory and legal structures. New cultural industries invited comparative study of different kinds of cultural products and services. The advent of cable television and satellite pluralized the study of television industries, while the growth of mobile telephony and the Internet diffused the study of communication and cultural production across a variety of digital industries. Even cultural industries that scholars once considered in the singular became pluralized as they integrated more functions. Such was the case for the advertising agency, which came to encompass in-house marketing, branding, public relations, and sales industries.

Meanwhile, cultural industries themselves were restructuring. Starting in the late 1970s, the spread of computer networks and digital technologies allowed many cultural industries to become more mobile in locating different aspects of the production process across many different time zones and geographies. Sponsored by the globalization of financial capital and aided by the liberalization of communications networks, cultural industries that had been largely confined to national circuits of production, distribution, and consumption could now leverage various locations in decentralizing their operations. The national model for cultural production had reached an apex in terms of generating capital as oversaturated consumer markets could not offset noncompetitive sunk costs in labor or materials. Called a “spatio-temporal fix” (Harvey, 1982 ), national political economies looked for ways to allow capitalism to expand instantaneously and to accrue surplus profits transnationally.

Enabled by the new digital technologies themselves together with the policies, media and cultural industries merged outlets and platforms for the distribution of their products. New digital copyright laws offered cultural industries maximalist protections in developing new technologies that would safeguard intellectual properties from piracy, in the language of the industries, and sharing, in the language of consumers (Gillespie, 2007 ). Convergence had broad implications for industrial organizational cultures, which became more porous, allowing more participants into the production process, but also more ephemeral, as organizations started, ended, and recombined. Both copyright regimes and convergence spread globally, enforced first through mandated compliance with the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund terms for aid and development, and then through international treaties aimed specifically at the liberalization of cultural trade and copyright protectionism. These changes impacted all industries, their workers, and their consumers based on their unique national histories. The critical communication tradition, which had grown out of the culture industry tradition in the United States and Europe, now expanded to chart the new geography of cultural industries and their complicities with liberalized cultural markets in France (Miege, 1987 ), eastern Europe (Garnham, 1993 ), Latin America (Bolano et al., 2000 ), and Africa, Southeast Asia, and the Middle East (Mowlana, 1996 ).

In summary, the structures that had contained cultural industries within national boundaries were now pushing them centrifugally both in search of new markets and in creating market-driven efficiencies. Cultural industries moved into ever larger and more competitive markets, in which the consumer bases often became more highly specialized, forging niche audiences. Many cultural industries were motivated to seek new markets by concurrent reductions in public funding for culture, including the arts, public service broadcasting, and heritage production. These changes happened unevenly depending both on the industry and its governance within different countries. In many regions with public service broadcasting, such as Europe, Latin America, and Asia, the global spread of cable and satellite technologies accompanied the liberalization of those public markets. In the United States, the near-defunding of the National Endowment for the Arts in the 1990s pressured artists, performers, and other self-employed cultural workers to be more entrepreneurial and rent-seeking in their endeavors (Gibson, 2002 ). Highly commercialized cultural industries, such as film, also transformed. Hollywood production companies could shed the least profitable sectors of their production processes through outsourcing, independent freelance contracts, and location-based film shooting. The latter process has been referred to as “runaway production” because it has meant the dispersal of film labor and locations previously centralized in Southern California to places as far away as New Zealand, the Czech Republic, and Argentina (see Gasher & Elmer, 2005 ).

All of this occurred as social scientists were simultaneously defining more commercial industries as cultural and looking to more noncommercial cultural practices as contributors to urban regeneration. As Stuart Cunningham ( 2002 , p. 58) puts it in a retrospective of the time: “The former took industry in the direction of culture; the latter took culture in the direction of industry.”

Enter the Creative Industries

Many scholars use the modifiers cultural and creative interchangeably when referring to various industries for the production of culture, but to some scholars the distinction is crucial, marking a new orientation. Whereas cultural industries developed as a term in relation to power relations that governed the production and distribution of cultural goods and texts, the emergence of creative industries as a discourse developed within a power center. Creative industries dates to 1997 , when UK Prime Minister Tony Blair established a task force to quantify the economic value of cultural industry sectors to the overall economy. The initiative, which the traditional Left called a “tactical political maneuver” (O’Connor, 2012 , p. 390), itself fit into an overall policy strategy to seek out new centers for revenue generation in the postindustrial economy. The resulting 1998 document defined the creative industries as those whose “activities . . . have their origin in individual creativity, skill and talent and which have the potential for wealth and job creation through generation and exploitation of intellectual property” (DCMS, 2001 , p. 5). In other words, creative industries could be instrumental in staving off the slow declines in tax revenues, employment, and key industrial sectors, most notably manufacturing, while also promoting the creative capacities of their workers. Through the present century, policymakers in various countries sought to seek out their competitive advantages among creative industries in order to quantify and boost their overall impacts at both national and regional scales.

Following a nation-branding campaign in the 1990s called “Cool Britannia,” government agencies under a New Labour government in the United Kingdom increased public funding and started a National Lottery to seed and to incentivize creative industry clusters in 13 sectors. Those industries that the government formerly considered “cultural,” such as publishing and film, were combined with more traditional arts, crafts, and performance sectors as well as new all-digital industries, such as software and games. The government used new public management techniques to assess the value of culture based on consumption metrics and intellectual property receipts. The strategy was based on the economic principle that industries within any particular sector would benefit from the agglomeration and sharing of resources, particularly labor. In turn, the strategy put a premium on the employment of a young, college-educated workforce that could settle in close proximity to businesses offering increasingly shorter-term contracts. Creative industry policies thus touted “creativity” as a valuable job skill while fostering new models for flexible work conditions within and across firms in these geographically located clusters (Oakley, 2004 ). As flexibility inferred the power of employers to casualize workers at will, creative industry growth happened concurrently with the growth of a new social class of creative workers, also called the “precariat” (Standing, 2011 ) or the “cognitariat” (Miller & Ahluwalia, 2012 ).

In Australia, the political approaches to cultural and creative industries intersected directly with communication and media scholars, many of whom had taken an active role in influencing industries via cultural policymaking. Following a trajectory established in the late 1980s among cultural studies scholars, these scholars take up Tony Bennett’s ( 1999 ) adaptation of Michel Foucault’s theory of governmentality to defend a cultural studies that would actively work on policy and resist reducing culture to only its most profitable expression. Located in research institutes, especially the Centre for Creative Industries and Innovation at Queensland University of Technology (CCI), Terry Flew, John Hartley, and Stuart Cunningham, among others, urged researchers of media and popular culture to work within government institutions and their bureaucracies to have a greater impact on the making and circulation of culture and mass media. In more practical terms, these reformers hoped to spur more localized and authentic cultural productions in order to tip the balance both against the heavy importation of foreign-made cultural goods and the use of the country as a filming backlot for cultural representations set elsewhere. The ability of cultural policy enthusiasts to intervene in the stimulation of cultural industries was in part supported by a Labour Party government that allowed scholars to intervene in public broadcast regulation, the production of indigenous and minority programming, and the development of museum and heritage industries.

In contrast, communication and media scholars in the United States have given relatively little attention to the creative industries initiatives that have driven regional development strategies in each state. Informed by Richard Florida’s ( 2002 ) theory of the “creative class,” urban planners have attempted to replicate his high correlations between economic growth and population indices of creative professionals and urban bohemians. These plans have involved redirecting public monies towards public–private partnerships to attract and retain creative industries that can use incentives to leverage the best economic conditions for growth as measured by the numbers of start-ups, placemaking initiatives, and real estate values in “creative cities” (Markusen, 2014 ). Critics of these plans, including Florida himself, have shown that the “race to the bottom” for publicly seeding creative industries has come at the costs of increased social stratification, inner-city gentrification, and a more precarious workforce that lacks a safety net in social services (see Mayer, 2017 ).

Meanwhile, creative industry initiatives in India, China, and many East Asian countries focused on capturing segments of creative industries’ production chains that could synergize with those countries’ strengths in industrial manufacturing and services. Spurred by the liberalization of UK and US markets, and often in consultation with Australian and British universities, these countries pursued the development of creative industries associated with the “knowledge economy” and the concentration of computer literacy, such as animation, video games, and software design (O’Connor & Xin, 2006 ). In particular, Hong Kong, Singapore, Taipei, and Seoul were attracted to creative industry urban policies that fed official aspirations to become “world cities” (Kong et al., 2006 ). Launched often under the auspices of authoritarian or highly centralized forms of government, the policies have promoted the close intertwining of creative production with economic growth, while shedding Eurocentric notions of liberal personhood and autonomy associated with creativity in the original British articulation.

Across the globe, creative industries policies accompanied the international export and coproduction of various forms of national popular culture and their genres. Contrary to previous critiques of the one-way flow of cultural goods from the global North to the South and the global West to the East, export booms in Latin American music and film, Japanese anime and manga, Indian film and fashions, as well as a variety of Asian pop genres demonstrated the complex flows between geographies formerly considered central or peripheral. Three industrial trends have underwritten these booming export markets. First, the expansion of global media conglomerates diversified their products through a variety of localized subsidiaries. This happened particularly in audiovisual industries, such as television and film, which could be distributed through new cable systems and satellite technologies. For example, although News Corporation, an Australian-based company, purchased STAR TV as a satellite network for delivering foreign programming to Asia, the company restructured STAR into several localized companies, including STAR India, STAR China, and STAR Select for the Middle East. Each of these subsidiaries has become a media and entertainment producer for its specific region, leading a cultural marketization process that Daya Thussu ( 2005 ) named “Murdochization” after News Corporation’s media mogul. Second, many global media conglomerates operate in joint ventures which allow new independent companies to secure both financing and distribution outside of the “media capitals” where once-national goods were concentrated (Curtin, 2003 ). These agreements tended to promote the creation of cultural properties that could be deployed across a maximum number of goods that target the most lucrative consumer niches. Thus, international film, comics, video game, fashion, and merchandising industries gravitated towards animated Japanese properties that were “odorless,” or lacking a cultural specificity, which targeted global youth markets with disposable income (Iwabuchi, 2002 ). Finally, the clustering of creative industries in media capitals has led to diasporic and transnational export markets that did not necessarily depend on co-ventures. The expansion of Bollywood entertainment industries transcended film across a variety of South Asian diasporic media (Punathambekar, 2013 ). Similarly, Nollywood’s video film industries have expanded and circulated their products globally with little formal support from either transnational conglomerates or formal government structures (Miller, 2016 ).

In 2008 , the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) identified creative industries as “among the most dynamic sectors in world trade.” Arguing that “every society has its stock of intangible cultural capital articulated by people’s identity and values,” UNESCO defined creative industries in terms of any “knowledge-based activities that produce tangible goods or intangible intellectual or artistic services with creative content, economic value and market objectives” (UNCTAD, 2008 , p. 4). Directed at stimulating the assessment and development of creative economies in developing countries, the UNESCO report pointed to the impacts of creative industries in urban revitalization, in offering attractive jobs, and in promoting social inclusion in advanced societies. At the same time, the report eschewed a singular definition of creative industries, and instead compared different models of classification based on sectoral industries, core and peripheral industries, or types of intellectual properties. The UNESCO recommendations for developing countries included further market liberalization, the protection of domestic and international copyrights, and a strong emphasis on the relationship between creative industries and cultural tourism.

Critical Approaches to Creative Industries

Even as the positive predictions around the formation and expansion of creative industries have grown as part of policy agendas worldwide, communication scholars have questioned their optimism. As with the scope of creative industry policies, so too communication scholars have disagreed about which industries, workers, and economic sectors should be captured under this umbrella term. Critical approaches to creative industries, however, focused on key claims that its policy proponents have made about labor, property, consumption, and the environment.

Some of these critiques developed from the trajectories established by critics of the culture industry in the mid- 20th century . Extending a range of dependency scholars who attributed cultural imperialism to the growth of the culture industry in Latin America in particular, Toby Miller was prominent among a growing chorus of critical scholars who pointed to the unequal distribution of labor processes around the globe. Creative industries, Miller ( 2016 ) theorized as early as 1990 , depended on a New International Division of Cultural Labor (NICL) that doubly degraded the value of labor in advanced and developing countries. In the former countries, creative industry jobs formed a labor force of highly educated workers that would compete for increasingly casualized forms of cultural work. In the latter countries, creative industries relied on an underclass of unprotected laborers who could withstand poor wages and environmental conditions to manufacture the goods that carried the intellectual properties and brands developed by the former workers. Although the people in each labor force would experience their exploitation in different ways, the NICL explained how creative industries could exacerbate social inequalities in the face of eroded labor and environmental laws, the corporate capture of cultural properties, and the diversion of public goods into creative industry incentives.

Subsequent research into workers and working conditions in creative industries revealed both material and symbolic forms of discrimination in creative industries. Sociological researchers working in the United Kingdom and in the Netherlands have done the most extensive analysis of industry workforces, based on both demographics and career trajectories. These studies have shown that while some creative industries were more open to people with working-class backgrounds, for example video gaming, the best-paid jobs overall seemed to be dominated by white men from rather privileged backgrounds. These social inequalities not only reproduced economic disparities but also reinforced cultural power hierarchies in terms of distribution and consumption (Oakley & O’Brien, 2015 ). This social stratification in the labor market was exacerbated in the United Kingdom both by the defunding of public higher education in the arts and humanities, and by the rising importance of social networks and unpaid internships as prerequisites for attaining entry-level jobs. Ongoing scholarship by a number of feminist scholars, such as Roslyn Gill and Angela McRobbie, and critical race scholars, such as Arlene Dávila and Anamik Saha, have demonstrated that creative industry policies have entrenched historical discrimination trends based on gender, sex, and race.

At the same time, research showed that even those with the best jobs faced increasingly precarious conditions across creative industries. Described in positive terms as “boundaryless” or “portfolio” careers, creative industry workers increasingly experienced the anxiety of temp workers as public and private employers moved to contract-based labor forces. Workers across many creative industries operated as “multi-taskers” under time crunch pressures with new requisite forms of sociality, such as teamwork and continuous digital connectivity (Gregg, 2013 ). Associated with the rise of a feminized service labor sector that was paid to perform “emotion work,” in the words of Arlie Hochschild ( 1983 ), creative industry workers depended on social networks to maintain continuous employment while also engaging in a variety of self- and brand-promotional activities through social media. These researchers also drew on an Italian autonomist Marxist tradition that pointed to these instances of immaterial labor as evidence that society had become a “social factory” (Negri, 1983 ), in which there are no longer boundaries between public and private spheres or the use-value and exchange-value of one’s private emotions.

Building from the theory of the social factory, creative industries have also derived profits from what Tiziana Terranova ( 2004 ) identified as free labor. Terranova pointed to how new media uses commodified labor power when corporate owners collect and sell users’ private data. In a debate that has also encompassed Smythe’s conception of the audience commodity, digital labor scholars have theorized the ways that consumers act as producers, or prosumers, when they offer their private data through everyday Web navigation and Internet uses, which has also been called “playbour” in recent times to signify the merging of work and fun (Scholz, 2013 ). This debate has been intersected by feminist scholars of digital labor who have recalled other forms of unwaged work, such as domestic chores and childcare, in order to demonstrate the continuities between creative industries and traditional forms of control over the reproduction of capital within the family unit (Jarrett, 2015 ). Through all of these cross-disciplinary critiques applied to cultural work and creative industries, there have also been threads of optimism as autonomist, feminist, and digital labor scholars have identified new solidarities around work identities and new horizons for resistance to labor conditions.

Interestingly the increased critical attention to creative industry producers and consumers has come at a moment when the popularity of creative industry policies may be declining. Climate change science has put a negative spotlight on creative industries that either encourage unsustainable uses of raw materials or develop new technologies that are planned to be obsolete in order to increase future sales (Maxwell & Miller, 2012 ). Further, the social inequalities found within creative industry labor and consumer bases have been tied to the overall gentrification trends in the cities where they locate. For example, in large metropolises creative industry sectors have shared common interests with the profit motives of real estate and financial sectors, leading to a boom-and-bust cycle that has changed the face of neighborhoods from diverse enclaves to places of high-end “loft living” and leisure consumption (Zukin, 1989 ). Only time will tell if the aura that surrounds creative industries as a more privileged version of the ways all humans produce culture is ebbing, or perhaps simply flowing into another discourse about the relations between human creativity and the production of culture.

Discussion of the Literature

Much of the literature on cultural and creative industries fits into Graham Murdock’s ( 2003 ) taxonomy for research and theorizing, which includes work on:

Analyses of the ways shifts in the political economy impact industrial organizations and the ways culture is produced;

Mappings of the current state of a given industry with its connected sectors and processes;

Trade research into market strategies and trends among industries;

Qualitative investigations of professional or workers’ roles within comparative cultural industry sectors;

Longitudinal studies of the careers of individual cultural and creative workers; and

Ethnographies of the processes of creation, production, and distribution of a particular cultural good or product.

In addition to these topics, which tend to be empirically grounded in particular industries, communication and media scholars in the most recent period have pushed for new research that either hones or broadens the boundaries of cultural and creative industry research. David Hesmondhalgh and Anna Zoellner ( 2013 ), for example, advocate for a normative ethics of what is good work in advanced societies as a means of rescuing the specificity of creative work from other labor sectors. This trajectory further extends to the contemporary formation of creative worker communities (Mayer, Banks, & Caldwell, 2009 ), their moral economies for sharing resources (Banks, 2006 ), and their lay theories that guide work practices (Caldwell, 2008 ). While some of these researchers are embedded in the industries they study, others have made alliances with professional guilds, labor unions, and social movements based around class and work. The entanglements between researchers and their subjects have raised epistemological concerns about the unequal power relations between researchers and their subjects, which Laura Grindstaff ( 2002 ) described as “studying up” or “studying sideways” because of the relative lack of authority that those in the academy have relative to industry professionals. Some of this research is intended to be used for advocacy by improving cultural policy, standards, or work conditions within creative industries, or by supporting creative workers marginalized by those industries.

Conversely, other researchers since 2010 have pushed to deconstruct assumptions that have guided the cultural and creative industry scholarship. Rejecting limiting inquiries about cultural and creative industries as a reaffirmation of US hegemony around property ownership, Jack Qiu ( 2017 ) argues that research should expand to capture broader political economies upon which global cultural and creative industries depend. This expanded focus has opened the terrain of cultural and creative industry research to include the manufacturing and recycling of digital technologies in the Global South (Grossman, 2007 ), the infrastructures for energy, Internet, and broadband distribution (Parks & Starosielski, 2015 ), and the labors of nonwhite and Global South populations in the service of those industries (Nakamura, 2014 ; Shade & Porter, 2008 ). At the same time, theories of cultural and creative industries have involved re-evaluating the ontological biases in terms such as producer and professional (Mayer, 2011 ), as well as in legal definitions of piracy (Pang, 2012 ), formal versus informal media economies (Lobato & Thomas, 2015 ), and media infrastructures (Larkin, 2008 ). As the study of cultural and creative industries continues to incorporate a more transnational focus and broaden to capture more people within its circuits of production and exchange, the object of study more and more resembles its original Marxist imperative to examine the production of culture as both a universal human feature and a social formation.

How to Write a Creative Essay: Your Fresh Guide

What Is a Creative Essay

In a world full of logic, facts, and statistics, being able to unleash your true creativity might seem like a fresh breath of air. Sometimes, all we need is to shut our minds, let our thoughts flow through, and immerse ourselves in endless imagination. To think about it, being able to let your imagination run wild yields something genuinely exceptional, an outcome that is not restricted to mundane reality which eventually opens a whole new universe of broadened horizons.

Now, imagine that you can bring together your unique thoughts onto a piece of paper and organize them in a specific format, so when one reads through it, one can easily follow your points while simultaneously being captured by your set of perspectives. Notice how there is an intersection between creativity and organization? These two do not have to be mutually exclusive. That's why in this article we intend to explain how you can put your creative thoughts into words, arrange these words into paragraphs and finally structure these paragraphs in a well-defined creative essay outline.

Now that we have your undivided attention let us briefly explain what is a creative essay and what kind of assignment it represents when you're given one. A creative essay is more than just throwing words on paper to reach a certain character limit. Such an essay assesses your ability to discover and clarify notions to your audience. In academic writing, creative essays can provide you the chance to showcase your research ability together with your vocabulary and composition skills.

Nearly all educational levels, including universities, need students to produce creative essays. When picking creative essay topics, you often have great flexibility. Your professor may give you a subject or category to specialize in, but you are allowed to choose any concept as long as it fits the specified area.

While having the flexibility to write about whatever you want is fantastic, the thought may also be somewhat intimidating. So, read on to get the key tips on how to write a creative essay, along with a step-by-step guide in the following paragraphs.

And if you ever pondered how to write in cursive , we've got you covered on that too!

Helpful Tips for Writing a Creative Essay

In case you were wondering, yes, there are some tactics for writing a creative essay that you may employ. Therefore let our college essay writer provide you with the following useful advice to make your creative essay examples more intriguing and unique:

Start Off Strong: Using an attention-grabbing introduction is a common piece of creative writing advice. One approach to achieve this is to open the narrative with a retrospect, which might throw off the timeline by bringing the audience back into the heart of the scene at the very start of the narrative.
Employ an Outline: Make an outline after you have a topic. Consider your favorite book by your favorite creator. Does it follow a clear framework? A solid start, body, and closing? Very likely, it does, and your essay needs to reflect that. Therefore, before beginning, devote some time to developing a creative writing essay outline.
Take Risks: Do it without hesitation. Often, writings that take chances and push limits end up being the most impactful. Don't be shy to experiment with different writing styles, a unique writing tone, or a subject that causes you to feel uneasy. Present your own ideas and allow them to make a statement.
Use Descriptive Language : Provide descriptive elements that show off your vocabulary to help others understand your creative essay ideas. Writing creatively is all about illuminating a scene with phrases. Employ descriptive words to evoke strong mental images in your audience. To assist your reader in visualizing the situation you're portraying, include sensory information such as vision, sound, flavor, sensation, and scent.
Use Extended Metaphors: An extended metaphor strategy is frequently used in creative writing. It could be better to use an analogy to communicate the idea by making parallels, which people find simpler to grasp than to struggle through attempting to lay out a difficult topic in a basic manner.
Edit Extensively: Few succeed on the first try. When you've finished the initial version, go back and review it to see whether your arguments are in the best sequence and if your writing truly stands to reason. In the era of technology, it's simple to cut and paste sections of your essay into where they would suit better to help your essay flow smoother. Remove everything that doesn't support your essay's main idea or topic.

How to Write a Creative Essay: Breaking Down a Creative Essay Outline

Apart from the tips above, you might need a step-by-step guide demonstrating essential writing steps. While creative essays adhere to an outline much like other types of essays, such as book review format , they use a slightly different framework known as the 3-Point Structure. This involves: The Setup -> Confrontation -> Resolution. Let's break down each component below:

Set Up: Generally stated in the introduction, the setup establishes the characters and their connection with one another. What are the predefined links between the main members? Give the readers enough information to begin making assumptions about how the narrative will evolve.
Confrontation: Written in the body, the narrative must have a Defining Moment. At this conflicting point, the calm sea becomes a violent storm. This turn of events could be foreshadowed by the plot's hints, or it might just happen out of nowhere. Your decision as the author will determine your actions. For instance, you can start implying that the storyline seems strange before returning to normal without making significant changes. Alternatively, the narrative can be moving along without incident when a significant event occurs, abruptly changing the course of the story.
Resolution: After the story's pivotal moment, the drama will have intensified and gradually subsided. There will eventually come a time when the tension picks back up and reaches a pinnacle. Now, this could either be revealed at the end of the narrative (a cliffhanger) or disclosed anywhere between the middle and the beginning. This also depends on you as the author.

Creative Essay Introduction

Establishing the scene in a creative essay opening is the first thing to be done in any storytelling. Provide a brief description of the area, the period of the day, and the history of the present situation. This opening setting is key because it establishes the atmosphere and flow of the whole storyline. Having said that, be sure to enliven the scene as much as possible to let the reader see it perfectly. Employ explicit descriptions; poetic devices, analogies, and symbols are excellent ways to change the tone of the text right away.

Creative Essay Body

The bodies are employed to advance the storyline and convey the message. But you may also employ these sections to switch up the motion and emotion. For instance, as the author, you may include the conflict immediately if the plot progresses slowly. The reader is taken aback by this, which alters the narrative’s tone and pace. Also, you might stage a phony conflict to keep your audience on edge.

Creative Essay Conclusion

Usually, the creative writers may wrap up the narrative in the end. Set up a conflict, then give the resolution to wind up the conversation. Most of the time, the ending won't lead to the story's climax, but many expert writers employ cliffhangers. Using such creative essay writing techniques, the reader might be kept in a state of suspense without revealing what happened to the characters.

Creative Essay Topics and Ideas

Before putting yourself into creative essay writing, you should pick among creative writing essays topics that you will be talking about. Here we got some fresh creative essay topics from our top college essay writer to make your choice easier:

Explain an event in your life that spiraled out of control and flipped its course.
Create a scenario that directs the end of the world.
Camouflage the concept of love in a story that is completely irrelevant.
Design in a story in which one person's beliefs or ideas helped reform the future of society.
Propose a scenario in the distant future in which technology controls all.
Describe something that you can't live without; it might be your hobby or a thing that you are dedicated to.
Express your thoughts about a topic that hurts you.
Imagine that you became invisible for one day. What would you do?
What would your reaction be if one day you woke up in someone else's body

Naturally, you can create one that is completely unique to you and the ideas that you form. These creative writing topics are here to get you started on the right path towards a brilliant story.

Creative College Essay Topics

Now that our coursework writers guided your curiosity through different creative writing tips and writing structure, you might fancy some topics for creative nonfiction essay to give you a more clear idea. Let us walk you through some inspirational creative essay titles:

'Being My True-Self in Solitude' - Describe when you were completely alone and what lessons you took from it. Here you can examine the notion of isolation and how it may inspire your creativity. You can also discuss a solo excursion you undertook, a moment when you felt abandoned, or a period when you deliberately sought solitude to contemplate and refresh.
'My Life's Soundtrack' - Talk about your favorite song or a piece of music that sums up your character or reflects your life. Your essay might examine a specific line of lyrics that speaks to your life experience. You can also describe how the beats and rhythm highlight a particular memory or challenge you overcame.
'Dear Future Me' - In this essay letter, you can converse with your future self in 10 years. First, talk about your present self, what you're grateful for, and what you wish would go differently in the future. Ask your older self questions about how things have changed over these years, and reflect upon your main aspirations.
'My Perfect Imperfections' - Recall a moment when you acknowledge your weaknesses or flaws. Appreciate the thought that imperfections are a normal and lovely aspect of human existence. You may also discuss overcoming self-doubt or a physical trait you used to detest but have come to adore.

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Example of a Creative Essay

Aldrine was already hitting his mid-30’s and the pressure from parents and peers was building up fast. While he admitted that marriage was an essential rite of passage, he was also keen not to marry an entirely incompatible partner with whom he would struggle all through adulthood. The father was already losing patience and several of his peers had been sent with threats that he would eventually be ostracized.

Did you like it? You can also buy essays online from us, and our authors will write it flawlessly and within the stipulated time frame. You can also read an article about book review format , there you will also find useful information.

Wrapping Up

As we come to an end, we hope you gained a clear insight into what is creative essay and how to write it. Some people will always find it simpler to write creative essays than others. Yet, by putting the tips above into practice, you should be in a strong position to generate work that you're happy with.

You could be left-brained, more comfortable with analytical thought processes than with eloquent language. In this case, you may embark on a journey with the help of our qualified paper writer team, who has produced a ton of creative college essay topics. We know that every creative essay is different, and each of our writers can vividly depict a scene that will astound you. Have some doubts? Buy essays online today and be assured of our promise!

Are You Short on Creative Writing Topics?

Whether you need a compelling personal statement, a thought-provoking argumentative essay, or a captivating narrative, we've got you covered.

FAQs on Creative Essay Writing

If you feel like some questions were left unanswered, don't you feel disappointed just yet! Our dissertation writers for hire compiled the most frequently asked question on creative essay writing, so take a look for additional information:

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Creative industries careers: shifting aspirations and pathways from high school to university—a NSW case study

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Published: 14 October 2022
Volume 50 , pages 1663–1681, ( 2023 )

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Kathryn Grushka ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-4228-3606 2 ,
Ari Chand ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-0216-9059 3 ,
Kristi Street 3 ,
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Creative careers are responding rapidly to new creative practices, new audiences, emerging digital platforms and technologies. These careers are well paid, resistant to automation and permeate all aspects of society. Yet students’ and teachers’ perceptions and attitudes are not in alignment with the reality of a job in Australia’s Creative Industries. Research exploring the perceptions of a creative career in high schools showed there was a significant disconnect between perceived jobs and actual jobs, impacting on student aspirations to work in the creative industries. Current narratives in schools need to shift beyond an outdated idea of traditional “Arts” towards the realities of a contemporary creative workforce which combines digital, entrepreneurial and creative skills. A mixed method Australian state case study, was conducted in regional school communities, collecting data from across creative classroom practice, surveys and interviews. The findings point to a limited understanding of creative careers held by specialist teachers, careers advisors and students. This resulted in severely limited advice being provided to high school students in terms of choices of secondary curriculum and educational pathways for a creative career.

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Introduction

Educational pathways from high school to university were examined with the aim to inform and improve high school students’ and teachers’ attitudes towards a career in the creative industries. Curriculum design and subject choices in high school are significant factors influencing participation in higher education (Gore et al., 2015 ). While the Australian Curriculum presents the “Arts” as containing the interdisciplinary skills and understandings foundational to creative career futures, challenges are emerging, which include how the Arts and HASS curriculums are promoted and implemented (MacDonald & Hunter, 2021 ; NAVA, 2021 ). A key issue raised by this research is how the term “Arts”, as “Fine Arts”, still carries past assumptions about professional pathways and these continue to dominate curriculum implementation in schools. We argue that while contemporary art practices are studied they represent a narrow band of actual creative practices and careers in contemporary society. Curriculum change for the “Arts” has remained a low priority for many years. The consequences of this has resulted in little reform in curriculum content and classroom practices so our research focussed on presenting a cultural and creative industires showcase to expand high school understandings to meet current creative careers. The expanding creative workforce offers secure, meaningful and well-paid careers which are resistant to automation (Trembath & Fielding, 2020 , p. 8; Cunningham et al., 2022 , p. 3). Creative jobs abound yet curriculum implementation, with ongoing siloed subject streams; an emphasis on science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) and past narrative assumptions about “Arts” skillsets and traditional jobs will not future-proof the career aspirational pathways of young creatives.

Employment in Australia’s Creative Industries is growing at nearly twice the rate of other industries with creative workforce research dispelling the myth that all creative careers are low paid (Cunningham & McCutcheon, 2018a ). It is true that the Arts sector is poorly paid with incomes for the Visual Arts and Publishing jobs described as “not keeping pace with the average earned by the Australian workforce” (Cunningham & McCutcheon, 2018a , 2018b ). However, it is important to view the Arts as only one of four sectors that make up the Creative Industries. The Arts sits alongside the media, design and information technology (McIntyre et al., 2019 , p. 11) and, when the creative industries are viewed more accurately, as defined by the research literature, then the perception that creative careers are poorly paid is inaccurate.

Unfortunately, traditional job narratives and negative attitudes across the Creative Arts more broadly in high schools and in the broader community prevail. This research was motivated to explore how these misconceptions around the value of a creative career impacts the aspirations of high school students. The research set out to address this idea through two questions: firstly, what knowledge and opportunities are needed in regional high schools to pursue tertiary education for a creative career? (RQ1); secondly, what should be done to improve careers teachers/advisors’ understanding of creative careers? (RQ2).

To improve perceptions of creative careers and educational pathways the Creative Industries Careers: Re-imagining Regional and Remote Students’ opportunities was funded in 2016 as part of The Higher Education Participation and Partnerships Programme (HEPPP). The project invited high school students, and career and specialist teachers from Visual Arts, English and Technology subjects to provide their understanding of creative industries careers and the subject pathways that support such aspirations. The study captured 600 participant responses and it was conducted pre-COVID19 in regional New South Wales where future workforce demands in farming, mining, and manufacturing are in decline (Rural Councils Victoria, 2018 ). The research also drew on educational research into secondary and tertiary pathways exploring career aspirations and choices of Australian students (Gore et. al 2015 ; Gore et al., 2018 ; Naylor et al., 2013 ).

Equity, aspirations and career employment futures

One of the key principles driving reform in higher education is for improved participation of equity groups so they “match the distribution of such groups in the total population” (Gore et al., 2015 , p. 156). A research team at the University of Newcastle, led by Professor Jennifer Gore, explored occupational choices based on socioeconomic status and career aspirations of Australians school students (Gore et al., 2015 , 2018 ). The research identified student backgrounds and how “school-related factors play a key role in shaping and supporting students with aspirations in the arts” (Gore et al., 2018 , p. 528). Students’ reasoning for career aspirations were based on a limited understanding of the range of possible careers, for example: Mechanic, Animal Trainer, Sportsperson, Police Officer, School Teacher, Engineer or Doctor (Gore et al., 2018 , p. 167). In addition, career advisors identified high school students were being encouraged into the Sciences, paralleling community perceptions and family, with career advisors impacting little on student career choice (Lyons & Quinn, 2010 ). This research suggested that interventions in high schools around subject choices, focusing on both students and teachers might shift the Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) policy focus if a deeper link between subjects and a wider range of possible careers were supported by clear reasons for pursuing specific careers (Gore et al., 2018 , p. 171).

One significant barrier identified in the career aspirations study showed that historically Arts careers, specifically becoming a visual artist, musician, actor or performer, were not associated with high financial rewards or employment stability. It was this understanding which was found to affect a student’s capacity to aspire to a career in the “Arts” (Gore et al., 2018 , p. 520). Over time, these misunderstandings have created a narrative present in schools and community that an “Arts” education results in diminished employment opportunities. Coupled with STEM policy imperatives, creative career pathways out of high school receive little traction either from teachers or career advisors. Our study sought to disrupt such perceptions through creative pedagogical interventions and position Creative Industries as a significant career option.

Australia’s creative and cultural workforce

The Creative Industries workforce is greater than the Arts (McIntyre et. al 2019 , p. 11). Incomes from the traditional Arts sector are poorly paid and represent only 1.8% of the total creative workforce (Trembath & Fielding, 2020 , p. 8). Workforce statistics confirm that above average incomes were earned in other creative areas like advertising and marketing, architecture and design, and software and digital content and make up more than three quarters of the creative workforce (Cunningham & McCutcheon, 2018b , p. 1). Creative jobs like a creative director, graphic designer, filmmaker or social media marketer earn substantially more. Sharing this knowledge about creative career prospects was a key part of the educational intervention that addressed these long-held misunderstanding in school communities. Uncoupling these perceptions, in the broader community and in high schools, and re-coupling them with subject areas such as English and Technologies would better align with the skills needed for a creative career.

Even with a post-COVID workforce, the growth in creative workforce statistics continues to be positive (Cunningham et al., 2022 ). Many creative careers in design, media and information technology are digitally focused and were not significantly impacted by COVID. These workers were able to pivot quickly and adjust their workflow allowing them to continue to provide creative services during the pandemic. However, this was not the case for creative content creators and artists, particularly those relying on live performances and large audience gatherings (Trembath & Fielding, 2020 , p. 8) who were COVID supported (Australian Government, 2021 ). It is, though, important to remember that this represents a small percentage of the creative workforce.

Investigating high school perceptions around creative careers prospects was conducted through an educational and experiential intervention called the Creative Industries Roadshow (aka Roadshow). Project funding focused on remote and regional schools in New South Wales (NSW) and included access for First Nations students in Tamworth, NSW. The Roadshow offered information sessions about creative careers and educational pathways for students and teachers, as well as student workshops and a screening/exhibition to showcase the creative digital artefacts created by the high school students. A case study methodology was employed to collect evidence of narratives, attitudes and perceptions around creative career pathways in order to answer the research questions.

Methodology

A qualitative case study adopting a mixed method approach sought to provide delineation as the factors impacting on aspirational careers choices are hard to identify through a single survey approach (Daymon & Holloway, 2011 ; Yin, 2009 ). The case study was further informed by the disciplinary fields of ethnography, narrative inquiry, and arts-based ways of knowing (Barone & Eisner, 2012 ; Jagodzinski & Wallin, 2013 ; Kerrigan, 2018b ; Yin, 2009 ). The Roadshow team were positioned as participant inquirers (Grushka et al., 2014 ) as they were actively present and participants throughout all the Roadshow events. By combining participant reflective observations with the collection of traditional surveys, interviews and filmed documentation of high school students’ engagement in the creative workshops, the research integrated multiple sources of data. These data provided a descriptive and interpretive understanding of human, organizational, and societal communication and experiences (Daymon & Holloway, 2011 ).

The authors of this paper designed and delivered the Roadshow. In doing so, they were immersed in a world of creative practice observations, conversations, note taking and analysing student digital learning outcomes as they were formally and informally assessing the experiences of the research participants (Grushka et al., 2020 ). The identification of four discrete research methods, described below, embeds the data in multiple participatory and reflective methods which “recognizes the centrality of the phenomenon studied and empowers the voices of the participants within the research” (Netolicky & Barnes, 2018 , p. 510). The methods helped to neutralise perceived qualitative “weaknesses of each form of data” that cannot be evidenced well using written and numerical modes (Creswell & Poth, 2018 , p. 14). It also ensured that “the researchers continue to interrogate its limits and possibilities for the goals of knowledge production, re-presentation, or deepened understandings of realities” (Netolicky & Barnes, 2018 , p. 510).

A pilot of the Roadshow was completed, ensuring one school could host the Roadshow, allowing five more to join in the hub activities. The hub model reduced travel time for students and teachers and allowed eight Roadshows in four months to be delivered to 40 NSW High Schools, across 13 Principal Networks. The regions visited were the Central West, New England, Mid North Coast and the Hunter (see Table 1 for names of participating schools with the first school being the hub school).

Ethical approvals for the surveys, interviews and observations were given through three rounds of ethical protocols with the University (HRCE), Education Department (SERAP) and First Nations National Ethics (NEAF). Four key participant groups were identified: high school students, careers teachers/advisors, university student mentors and university alumni.

The multiple methods were: (1) interviews about creative career pathways with university alumni, high school students and careers teachers/advisors; (2) evaluation of teachers’ and students’ experiences of the Roadshow; (3) focus groups with university student mentors to document ethnographic and critical reflections on the Roadshows and (4) visual observations recorded on film during the fieldwork, showing students’ and teachers’ lived experiences as they participated in the Roadshow. Multiple data sets provide different viewpoints offering “meta” constructs (Fredricks et al., 2004 ) which gives analytical insights and validation to the research participant’s lived experience, emergent knowledge and qualitative data.

Method 1—interview participants pathways to creative careers

Interviewees were recruited using purposive sampling, where the sample was representative of the target population and were “deliberately selected on the basis of their known attributes” (Denscombe, 2010 , p. 35). The target population was divided into two smaller groups: university students and alumni. Both samples intended to capture lived experiences of the participants’ pathway through high school onto university and then into a creative career. There were 19 university students recruited in 2017 who were enrolled across degree programs which align with four Creative Industries areas—Communication (11), Fine Arts and Illustration (4), Visual Communication Design (3) and Information Technology (1). The university students were selected for their openness and willingness to recount personal stories about university life, discuss career aspirations, and share intimate knowledge of university degrees and subject choices. These university students became the Mentors who delivered the digital media workshops to high school students. Most Mentors attended four Roadshows and presented their personal educational pathways during the Roadshow’s information sessions, with personal profiles placed on the project website.

The second participant sample were six alumni, graduates from the creative industry programs offered at UON (see Table 2 ). A “descriptive interview” technique (Weerkkody, 2015 , p.188) captured their educational pathway from high school to a Creative Industries (CI) degree and into a creative career or business. Key questions included high school subjects and career aspirations, route to university, program of enrolment, subjects studied and Work Integrated Learning whilst at university followed by career development post university. To comply with ethics the filmed interviews were approved by the alumni before being placed on YouTube.

These interviews were recorded and edited to form the series “See what you can be” (Kerrigan, 2018c ), which was screened during the Roadshow to the students and careers teachers/advisors. The series was designed to be used post-Roadshow as part of the online program for high school students from Years 7–12.

Method 2—survey evaluation with teachers’ and students’ experiences on the CI roadshow

Evaluation surveys were conducted with 53 careers teachers/advisors and 534 high school students, (230 females/204 males). (See Table 1 ). The majority of high school students selected the workshop themselves, with a small group of students placed by teachers. The 2 hour workshops used mobile digital technologies in filmmaking, animation and virtual reality (VR). Students were able to use virtual reality goggles and pitch a VR idea, or make a film on an iphone, or create a stop frame illustrated animation on an ipad. To replicate industry practices, students were asked to work in small groups. The Roadshow ended with a showcase of the student work revealing various levels of digital literacy, abilities to understand and swiftly implement a creative brief, to share ideas with peers and execute those ideas collaboratively.

The Mentors coordinated the workshops and led the student evaluation sessions by reflecting on their aspirations for the day, including whether they could imagine a career in the creative industries and what skills they might need to achieve that career.

The specialist and careers teachers attended a professional development information session focused on CI careers and skills required to encourage innovative use of digital technologies for creative careers. There were 41 teachers who participated during the Roadshow, with 11 participating online, through the website. The evaluation asked teachers to provide their initial understanding of creative careers and new understanding of pathways to a creative career after the professional development session. The evaluation comprised 12-questions—nine multiple choice and three open ended—and was delivered online.

Method 3—focus group and reflective practice on roadshow delivery

The strength of this method is that it reflects human interactivity (Creswell & Poth, 2018 , pp. 43–44; Schön, 1983 ) by drawing on teaching research using “an insider–outsider, participant–researcher” approach which defends the collection of data from the researcher’s subjective point of view (Netolicky & Barnes, 2018 , p. 506). This permitted the research team to collect and analyze the data while delivering student workshops or professional development session. The research focused on the collecting emergent multiple narratives (Netolicky & Barnes, 2018 ) captured through participant observations (Yin, 2009 ) and reflective practices (Schön, 1983 ). Participant-researcher data were collected from the university student Mentors who were filmed delivering the information sessions and workshops to capture their experiences ethnographically (Kerrigan, 2018b ; 2018d ). Video testimonials recorded by the Mentors captured personal reflective moments during the Roadshow. Mentor observations were also collected progressively through meeting minutes, diary notes and emails. This feedback loop allowed for continual improvements to be made to the delivery of the Roadshow.

A final focus group was conducted with 11 Mentors when the Roadshows were completed, allowing for a more guided and detailed reflection on the effectiveness of the intervention. The questions focused on high school student engagement, skills and comprehension of CI educational pathways. The Mentors reflected and discussed changes they observed in high school students’ perceptions and possibilities about pathways into a creative career. The focus group transcription was de-identified.

Method 4 creative artefacts and visual documentation of roadshow participants

Documentary filmmaking and photography were used as visual research methods (Kerrigan, 2018b ; 2018d ) to capture the lived experiences of the students and teachers at each Roadshow. Filmed interviews with Careers Teachers/Advisors and students were conducted using a semi-structured qualitative technique (Creswell & Poth, 2018 ). The filmed footage from eight Roadshows was edited into the documentary which provided the opportunity for analysis of key themes. These included building digital mobile literacies and collaborative process skills as students demonstrated that they could connect their natural dispositions and talents to paid CI professions (Fig. 1 )

CI Roadshow Documentary (Kerrigan et al., 2018a )

Results—knowledge and opportunities needed to pursue a creative career (RQ1)

The Roadshow activities were designed to emphasise how artistic, performative and creative skills can be developed through educational pathways that can lead to a creative career. The results were drawn from three participant samples representing the three discrete stages of the educational pathway: high school students who participated in the Roadshow, university students as Mentors who delivered the Roadshows and university alumni who featured in the “See what you can be” series screened at the Roadshow. The results from the alumni and Mentors indicate their educational pathway to pursue a creative career were convoluted and required perseverance, persistence and tenacity. They stressed that career opportunities mapped from high school subjects to a university degree to a prospective creative career, were often only presented as subtle connections.

Analysis of the university alumni interviews emphasised subject choice in high school, with no clear reasoning to career aspirations. Two alumni clearly identified creative careers during high school (animator and events planner), another wanted to do forensic science while two others were unsure of their career options. Both subsequently found employment after high school in traditional jobs (administration and the railways).

The pathway into university was seamless for three of the six alumni, enrolling directly into a creative industry degree from high school, with one taking a gap year. The two participants who found mainstream jobs after high school took years to pursue their creative degrees. The last participant completed two creative degrees, one directly after high school and the other later in life, which allowed her to fulfill her desires to be an artist.

All the participants were satisfied with their careers. One owns and runs a business making commercial and real estate films. Three are employed full-time with corporations and businesses doing strategic and digital marketing, one is a website designer specialising in User Experience and another a 2D animator. The last two participants were not earning enough income to make a living from their creative career in fine arts, and one of these was supplementing their income by working in an Art Gallery.

The Mentors presented their pathways into a university degree in person at the Roadshow. For the Mentors schooling was only three to five years earlier and they reflected on their experiences, journeys and lack of career information about the creative industries during their schooling. One mentor noted,

I’m from a very rural country school, and I know that we didn’t have anything in the way of creative industries where I’m from, and I wanted to kind of be able to get out there and show other people in the same sort of situation. Like, give them experiences that I know I didn’t have. (Focus Group Mentor C)

Many mentors identified as being the first person in their families to aspire to a university education, often citing this as the motivation for their involvement in the Roadshow.

Interestingly, most Mentors alluded to the soft skillset needed for work in the Creative Industries, skills like collaboration, communication, and practical project-based skills that they felt had developed in tandem with a university degree. They also reflected on regional students’ perceptions of potential aspirational careers, noting this was similar to their own experience/pathways into a university. The Roadshow allowed the Mentors to have frank and motivating conversations with students about potential pathways into a university. One mentor recounted a High School student’s anxiety around their ATAR result: “ And he really appreciated just having us there, talking to him and explaining, ‘No, this isn’t the only path, like there are other ways if you want to get in’” (Focus Group Mentor B). The Mentors reiterated that their careers advisors had lacked specific understanding about the skill sets and subject choices required for creative industries employment and acknowledged the constraints of the teacher-student relationship within high schools may well limit a student’s ability to aspire.

The High School students were the largest participant sample with all students attending the Roadshow workshops, extending and enhancing their digital skills as they all made creative digital artefacts. It was obvious some students possessed media arts abilities (Dezuanni, 2021 ), while some were being exposed to these media technologies for the first time, particularly with VR. In the workshops the Mentors observed ‘positive participation for on-task learning behaviours’ with the high school students demonstrating individual and collective initiatives. Students were observed being persistent, concentrating, paying attention, asking questions, extending skills and contributing to workshop activities.

The survey evaluations with open-ended student responses provided deeper insights into why the students attended the Roadshow with several enjoying “using the technology” and expressing that this was the first opportunity they had to use mobile digital technologies. In terms of addressing career aspirations students were able to name the degrees that would lead them into creative careers such as an animation, design, filmmaking, communication or media degree. The majority of students were able to connect degrees with job titles. Responses included—photographer, actor, support technician, cameraman, game designer, IT pathways, web designer, graphic designer, industrial designer, illustrator, writer, journalist, drone flyer, coder, software engineer, film maker, cinematographer, video editor, producer and animator.

Students became more articulate when later describing creative careers, for example; “a game designer and/or an animator”; “I can imagine a career in game design and coding”; “I can imagine film making …I would need co-operation skills and work management”. A very honest student said, “I can’t really imagine myself in a creative industry career as I am interested in other areas”. These responses illustrate the effectiveness of the Roadshow as an intervention that succeeded in broadening the career choices presented to students for future creative career pathways. To facilitate the discussion around creative industries with parents most schools promoted the event in their newsletters and Facebook pages and provided links to the project’s website. Local media coverage of the event highlighted the important ways universities impacted and affected high school students’ perceptions of career opportunities within the broader community.

The “CI Roadshow” documentary (Kerrigan et al., 2018a ) used visual ethnography to capture the high school student’s knowledge as they participated in the Roadshow opportunities. The Mentors described the speed with which students developed digital skills while using unfamiliar technologies. The success of this pedagogical implementation was confirmed as every student created a digital work. Many students in the animation workshop requested to take home the acetate so that they could continue drawing and making stop-motion animations. The VR workshop attracted gaming students, who had not had access to the VR headsets before. The Mentors explained that VR could be used for more than gaming and film, with applications in other settings like disability and health. Student interviews described their collaboration through teamwork when using animation and short film making. The power of experiential learning was evident, with adaptability being a trait that emerged as part of the creative skill set required to pursue a career in a rapidly changing career landscape.

By capturing the execution of the creative process (Nemiro, 2004 ), with a focus on the making moments, the ethnographic documentary shows how high school students develop creative, digital and technical skills. Frequently, the achievement of making an artefact with new technology dominates while the creative ideation process is overlooked in preference of technical mastery. The documentary demonstrated the high school students’ engagement in the creative process where technologies and ideation were mixed, such as moving between analogue skills, like planning and drawing to digital image capture occurring throughout all stages of refinement of their artefact. Soft skills endure and define career potential, and the filming was able to capture the development of creative process skills for a creative career.

Results—improving careers teachers/advisors understanding of creative careers (RQ2)

The “CI Roadshow” documentary (Kerrigan et al., 2018a ) interviewed a rural school’s careers teacher/advisor Jane Heggarty who confirmed the normal career aspirations for rural high school students were farming, mining or small business in the local community. Heggarty emphasised the importance of the Roadshow intervention, as it allowed students to identify that they indeed have a passion for creative learning and that it can connect to paid employment (Kerrigan et al., 2018a , @ 4:20). Heggarty went on to explain that many students may watch TV but not think of it “as a creative industry with a possible position for them” (2018, @4.45). She emphasised that students that did YouTube clips, did not make the connection between that hobby and a paid position as a filmmaker. Heggarty asserted that the workshops provided one way to change career aspirations, to refocus students on a creative career “where they can earn good money” (Kerrigan et al., 2018a @4.50).

Of the 53 careers advisors/teachers who completed the survey, one was Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander. Nearly half declared they were career advisors (41%), with the remaining teaching subjects that are key for creative industries. The largest teacher cohort being from Visual Arts (36%) followed by Technology—multi-media, software (11%), English (9%) and Music (2%).

The teachers’ understanding of the creative industries was initially assessed through the survey with them indicating a clear preference toward traditional career trajectories promoting options such as visual art teaching or graphic design. Surprisingly there were three creative careers amongst the survey results including the first result of media and advertising (70%) followed by Trade (60%), Engineering (58%), Public Service (58%), Design (58%), Architecture and Building Construction (48%), Farming (45%), Medicine or Health Care (48%), Mining (42%), Retail (40%) and Science (36%).

After viewing the “See What You Can Be” series and interacting with Mentors and academics, the teachers’ preferences shifted significantly. When asked if they had a better understanding of employment and careers a high school student could seek after university study the response was overwhelmingly positive (100%). The highest results were Animation (100%), Graphic Design (100%), Filmmaking (97%), Digital Media (88%), Photo-media (84%), Interior Design (81%) and Illustration (81%). Teachers’ probability of recommending a university degree for a career in CI was extremely likely (56%), and very likely (38%) being the highest responses.

The open-ended responses showed that some careers advisors provide students with information based on the careers the student expresses an interested in: “Generally students only think of trades, retail, nursing, teaching” (Teacher 33). A teacher from Gunnedah, one of the remote communities, said:

This is a rural community and many of our students want to work on the land. They are also influenced by the career paths of their parents which are largely in mining and agriculture. It is difficult to raise their aspirations. (Teacher 32)

The same teacher went on to elaborate on the knowledge they gained from the Roadshow:

This workshop has shown me the potential of combining creativity with more traditional career paths. It has also provided resources that I can adapt to classroom careers lessons to broaden students’ perceptions about the importance of creative industries in future employment. (Teacher 32)

The teachers provided positive responses to the short survey questions about how the YouTube series expanded their understanding of possible careers and pathways to creative careers. Two examples were:

The wide range of careers and possible business ideas, the different pathways students take, the trend towards remote self-employed businesses. The need for a range of employability skills. (Teacher 33); A wider range of industries are involved in creative industries and the future careers are going to be content creation based. (Teacher 41)

A number of the teachers had taken on board the need to bring technology and arts together, and that, pathways will vary for some of the creative careers, as they are responding to creative practices and technologies that are continually emerging. For example:

Jobs of the future are yet to be created. (Teacher 27) There are many new and merging industries, especially in the areas of Technology and Arts. Many people are not working for others but are starting up their own businesses. The areas that students can get into now are still evolving. Many current Technology based industries will continue to evolve and some jobs have not even existed yet. (Teacher 49)

Teachers perceived the most likely place for a career in the creative industries to be in a major city (65%) or overseas (47%) whereas big regional towns (23%), and rural towns (14%), were low scoring. Most still see NSW TAFE as the main pathway into existing Creative Industries. A few teachers, though, were keen to ensure remote and regional communities were going to be treated equitably:

Many rural and remote students are limited in technology due to costs to maintain up to date resources both hardware and software. (Teacher 50) Global education is coming faster than what smaller communities think. Global employment availability is not widely known in smaller communities. (Teacher 43)

The teachers were asked how likely it would be for students to have a career in the Creative Industries in the place they live now with the highest response being somewhat likely (21%) followed by not so likely (18%) with extremely likely and very likely returning the lowest results (10%).

Careers teachers/advisors indicated creative job titles were more easily identified, pathways to tertiary programs and possible careers were clearer, and creative careers could involve a combination of traditional and creative pathways. However, family and contextual factors may be major influences in a student’s career choice. Unsurprisingly, these findings are consistent with the educational research into secondary and tertiary pathways discussed in the literature review.

The Professional Development session gave careers/teachers advisors access to the project website which provided additional information on creative industry careers, including lesson plans to integrate digital technologies into the classroom and information on degree programs. The website was accessed post-Roadshow recording 786 unique visits with 2575 page views, which confirmed when given the right information teachers were proactive in accessing new ideas about how to improve their understanding around creative careers.

The CI Roadshow delivered an experiential intervention that succeeded in assessing past and current high school students’ knowledge about pursuing a creative career and how to recognise the educational opportunities to achieve this. The results found interest, perseverance, persistence and tenacity are important factors in ensuring creative skills could be obtained through formal educational pathways leading to meaningful and well-paid creative careers. From a high school student’s point of view the pathway to a creative career could be significantly improved by ensuring that careers teachers/advisors have more accurate information about creative career pathways from high school to university. This indicates professional development that can identify: creative skills developed in school subjects and how these underpin creative occupations, job titles, related salaries and potential areas of employment growth.

By focussing on low SES regional and remote students this project delivered a multi-pronged approach, including using a participant–researcher method to connect real life stories to student learning experiences. This approach identified insufficient emphasis on creative problem solving and soft skills development occurring in high schools across subjects. This knowledge gap is significant because it prevents students from connecting their creative aptitudes and talents with a career and consequently prevents them from aspiring or pursuing a creative career at the tertiary level. The Mentors’ pathways demonstrated how a creative education could be achieved, but that strong subject connections would have benefited them in their choices. Hearing the mentors’ personal stories was a powerful learning moment for both high school students and teachers and it encouraged students to aspire. This was particularly significant as it is likely many of these rural high school students may be the first person in their family to attend university. The Mentors also discussed building skills beyond those attainable in a university setting. Work integrated Learning (WiL) opportunities provided at university for a creative career had proved invaluable for the Mentors’ own career aspirations and were attractive to high school students.

The results confirm that careers advisors/teachers in this study had very limited understanding of future creative workforce needs which was problematic for their students. Career advisors recommended narrow pathways for high performing Creative and Performing Arts students, predominately encouraging them into visual arts/music teaching. Most also indicated they are underprepared to explain tertiary pathways that seek to accommodate future creative workforce changes. Teachers did point out the digital infrastructure challenges in rural areas, with poor quality internet making working remotely “from home”, a liability rather than a possibility. It was clear that teachers in subject areas like Art, English, Technology and Design working in remote and regional schools need more information to explain possible creative career pathways. Overall, teachers neglected to see how broader definitions of the Creative Industries including creative services and integration with STEM disciplines could increase creative careers and entrepreneurial possibilities. The lack of information about what is possible beyond an educational setting and what is accessible as examples in regions is another missing link to reshaping current beliefs of students, teachers and parents about possible creative career futures.

A key finding is that school community perceptions about creative career possibilities are slow to shift and more professional development opportunities for Careers Teachers are needed to expanded perceptions and understandings around creative careers. The attitudes and perceptions of creative careers were found to be completely out of step with the creative economic research presented earlier in this paper. Regional employment opportunities also need to move beyond the traditional regional occupations and this intervention showed it was possible to shift perceptions with a focussed campaign on pathways to creative careers. Regional and remote student access to and participation in higher education appears to be diminished because of STEM policy initiatives. The disconnect between university study areas and creative economies requires immediate attention particularly the NSW Creative Arts and Australian curriculum where the Arts study areas, such as media arts are yet to be implemented in classrooms.

The continued emphasis on STEM policy and the siloed nature of subject streaming in high schools has not been addressed and the critiques around the implementation of the national curriculum for the Arts and HASS (MacDonald & Hunter, 2021 ; NAVA, 2021 ) continues. The foundations for meaningful interdisciplinary approaches to learning are present in the Australian Curriculum such as the consideration of the General Capabilities (ACARA, 2022 ). At present the NSW curriculum remains out of step with other states like Victoria and Queensland who have a more progressive presentation of creative and digital media curriculum.

What is clear from these critical debates is that professional development for teachers and career advisors is an immediate imperative and career opportunities need to be urgently updated, linked to the general capabilities and interdisciplinary creative pedagogies adapted across subjects. All teachers need to recognise the benefits of creative pedagogies, the creative processes and skills learnt in and across the Arts curriculum as it links to general capabilities and technologies. Both these capabilities are significant and transferable into broader creative industry occupations such as design (websites, graphics and apps) or to media (photography, filmmaking and social media). Linking the language of Creative Industries and the role of creatives in future employment is a key strategic outcome of the study. A shift in language and subject connections may go partway to undoing the siloed subject teaching that has been occurring, and could release the bindings of career futures attached to current curriculum perceptions. Arts-based digital creative pedagogies and associated soft skills, demonstrated in the Roadshow, can bring benefits to all curriculum.

Limitations

The Roadshow could have included music as a subject area. The ethical approval processes prevented the collection of pre-survey data from high school students. Hence specific survey responses were not able to be achieved, so the pre-survey was turned into a post-survey. Future research could be designed with a pre-survey for students and careers advisors/teachers that may provide deeper insights into attitudes around creative career prospects.

The schools visited were teaching old ideas about pathways to a career in the Arts. Creative industry career pathways and educational research must be used to align the secondary and tertiary policies, curriculums, and teaching programs to provide stronger pedagogical and curriculum connections, which in turn, can lead to more purposeful study pathway for students with aspirations to gain an education that will lead to a creative career. To achieve this significant energies must be put into disrupting and provoking existing narratives in schools, across siloed subjects, teaching and career staff, and in community about viable jobs in the creative sectors and how to develop the appropriate skill set. The schools visited promoted technologies but not related arts processes and pedagogies which offer strong links to soft skills. This targeted intervention was able to shift outdated perceptions of careers teachers/advisors’ attitudes away from a narrow understanding, framed through a siloed curriculum, and where pathways to creative careers go beyond traditional art forms such as painting and drawing. Creative industries embrace technologies, communications, and the sciences and such a connection is a more complementary stance towards the highly promoted STEM subjects.

School communities were open to changing their understandings and hopefully this could lead to possible subject re-alignments where traditional arts subjects are matched with technology subjects or even science subjects. It could be possible to disrupt the current rhetoric associated with identifiers like “artists”, to be replaced with “creatives”. The Arts and its creatives are powering the next generation offering employment opportunities across art-science, media, design and information technologies sectors. The capacity to shift to a contemporary “creative” narrative may require considerable re-shaping of future NSW creative education curriculum, but any curriculum change must be accompanied by professional development. This study has identified that without professional support for teachers and career advisors such as that offered by the Roadshow, where the creative pedagogies were modelled, workforce change will remain slow and students unsure about their creative employment futures.

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Kerrigan, S., Grushka, K., Chand, A. et al. Creative industries careers: shifting aspirations and pathways from high school to university—a NSW case study. Aust. Educ. Res. 50 , 1663–1681 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13384-022-00574-9

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The State of Creativity

26 April 2023 14 March 2024
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The State of Creativity reflects on creative industry policy over the last 10 years and asks where next for the creative sector. It includes contributions from 24 creative industry thinkers from seven UK universities and across the creative sector. In the report, researchers highlight the priority areas for creative industries policy, and research. These short essays are supported by on-the-ground case studies from those working in the creative sector, including Syima Aslam from Bradford Literature Festival, entrepreneur Tom Adeyoola, and the Royal Shakespeare Company’s Sarah Ellis.

The report suggests that priority areas for creative industry policymakers over the coming years include the need to focus on creative education in schools and universities, ending unequal access to the arts and the regenerative power of the creative sector, if the UK is to fully realise the potential of its world-leading creative industries.

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The report was launched on 27th April 2023 at a conference attended by policymakers, researchers and industry professionals. It also marks the £11 million investment from the AHRC for a further five years of the Creative PEC, as it moves to a new North/South twin-hub model in June this year, led by Newcastle University, with the RSA.

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Hasan is Professor of Economics of the Creative Industries and Director of the the Creative PEC, which is led by Newcastle University with the RSA, and funded by the AHRC. The Creative PEC is charged with improving the evidence base for policies to support the UK’s creative industries.

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Cultural And Creative Industries Essay

Type of paper: Essay

Topic: Creativity , Industry , Culture , Art , Economics , People , Investment , Business

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Cultural and Creative Industries

Cultural and creative industries mean various economic activities concerning the creation or exploitation of information and knowledge. They have been an essential part of people’s lives and social advancement. These spheres are closely connected with production of things and ideas nobody knew about before. Cultural and creative industries are based on an intellectual activity of people. Innovations help to reduce cost of productions and to design new highly developed goods. They are the engine for progress and development of human thoughts. Nowadays, the role of cultural and creative industries start to be more and more important, and the intellectual activities of people become the basis of the economy in whole. First of all, let’s give a brief definition of what cultural and creative industries are and how they appeared. The term “creative industries” first appeared in early 2000s referring to the cultural industries in Europe (Hesmondhalph, 2002, p. 14) or to the creative economy in whole (Howkins, 2001). The creative economy includes such areas of creativity as art, architecture, advertising, film, music, fashion, publishing, video games, craft, design, performing arts, etc. The cultural industries, as distinct from creative, are mostly referred to cultural tourism and heritage, libraries, museums, sports and outdoor activities; in other words, they are focused mostly on delivering of non-monetary kinds of value – social and cultural wealth. In the modern world, the creative industries are increasingly important to economic well being, and their role grows rapidly together with the growth of value of knowledge and intellectual creations of people. An important aspect of cultural and creative industries is its subjectivity. Creative products are “experience goods” that cannot be judged in advance, and their judgement in whole is very subjective also. Neither consumers nor producers can estimate the quality of the product before its entry into the market or just ostentation. For example, regarding new drugs and vaccines created by scientists against one or another disease, the complete results, its effectiveness and impact can be established not only due to longstanding studies and experiments required for prominent investments but also through time after its presentation to public. In other words, investments to the creative industries are always accompanied by a great risk; even if the idea is brilliant, its realization can face serious problems and will not be completed, or will not succeed among the public, what is especially central for creative products as films, books, theatrical performances, paintings, and another pieces of art. The investments cannot be retrieved before the product will be finished, and together with the opportunity of earning more money the investor can face their loss in essence. The growth of importance of the cultural and creative industries together with positive opinions faces a lot of critique. The bright example of subjectivity towards art, its roots and manifestations can be seen in Suely Rolnik’s work “The Geopolitics of Pimping.” The author says that art is the production of thought, and its specificity lies in embodiment of the changes of the sensible texture in artistic action; the artist always presences in his creation, even lives inside it (Rauning, 2011, p. 24). In other words, the piece of art transforms the world and aligns it with the artist’s vision that need not agree with the vision of spectators. And, if art is a way of thinking, which is not a secret, than the politics of subjectivity is in crisis. According to the author, one of the main problems artistic practices face is anaesthesia of vulnerability (Rauning, 2011, p. 25). Nowadays, people can easily judge each other only due to social, economic, or racial conditions, and without accepting each other the way they really are people cannot open-mindedly accept results of creative activities of others. Another problem is flexible subjectivity, which means that apprehension of one or another creative activity depends not only on people but on the environment also (Rauning, 2011, p. 27). In other words, art is timely, and if it do not answer the requirements of the world and society, and is not acceptable because of different religious, political, or social reasons, very likely it will not gain public backing, these times at least. History knows a lot of such examples; most painters and writers, who are famous nowadays, met with recognition from the public only after death. Except personal suffering of these creative thinkers, such non-permanence and subjectivity of society is also a great risk for investors and their money. Investments should generate profits, and before putting money every person wants to be sure this is safe and pay-your-way. Regarding art, which constitutes a significant part of the creative industries, this can hardly be guaranteed. Creativity is a discursive term, and, hence, creative industries are unstable. According to Marion von Osten, creativity is “the reflected constitution of the modern form of subjectivity that plays such a central role in capitalist societies” (Rauning, 2011, p. 134). The mass production of goods directly encourages to loss of capacity and blunting. As it was mentioned above, the question of subjectivity and answering of themes of cultural and creative industries to economic, social, and political processes is the main subject of debates considering cultural and creative industries in whole. Von Osten states that this problem makes him doubt creative industries are real sectors of economic activity and really exist (Rauning, 2011, p. 134). However, the debates and the international will to make them real will definitely produce some results. Cultural and creative industries bring a new conception of the subject of labour and make it a possibility for future industrial treatment. Technically, the artist is an “exceptional creator of innovations in modes of production, notions of authorship and forms of living circulates today in various discourses of social transformation” (Rauning, 2011, p. 136). In political debates, being an artist means combining of unlimited amount of ideas, creativity, and smart self-marketing. However, the debates and discussions themselves are the main causes of subjectivity (Rauning, 2011, p. 135). It is worth remembering that opinions always differ, and every person looks at one or another situation through his or her own lens. The subjectivity is created not only by the inward man but under the influence of environment also, and waves of discussions affect the environment and public moods. Marion von Osten writes, “the subjectivity of non-recognition is integrated into the self-representations of immaterial labourers at large” (Rauning, 2011, p. 138). The artist self-represents new flexible labour force, and this representation can be found in some business branches, such as the media and the IT field. Von Osten writes about contingent subjectivities in terms of a study of T-Mobile Germany (Rauning, 2011, p. 139). According to the study, low or unstable wages seemed to employees as a transition, difficult times that will be overcome soon and are only a hindrance on the way to desirable job. Said differently, failures in the free market can be understood as heavy, but positive individual experiences, and changes in social, politic, and economic spheres of life can be comprehended as personal challenges. Self-organization and self-understanding, in such a manner, become productive and suitable for economic processes and keeping the economy afloat in whole. Another side of subjectivity is the process of creating itself. Not only the perception of the ultimate product is subjective, but the ideas and vision of artists also. According to Ray, the creative process is “all about moods, fantasies and libidinal investments” (Rauning, 2011, p. 167). Some people can find freedom in places and situations, where the others just simply cannot see it, and the same can be said about finding truth or changing lifestyle. Being connected with the reaction of society, the subjectivism of the artist clashes with the dominating objectivity, which, in fact, is rather subjective also. Dominating objectivity is just a prevailed subjectivity, and, together with the last, waves under the influence of times and state of the environment. Talking about operation procedures regarding the aspect of subjectivity, one of the main means of risk decrease is market research and opinion surveys. As it was said before, creative products should answer the requirements of the time and be on the wave of society. This concerns both arts and crafts, and technological and scientific activities. The full researches of country’s situation and processes in different life spheres allow better understanding of needs and obtaining knowledge, lack of which, as it is well known, is one of the main factors causing higher risk probabilities. Knowledge and full substantiations of actual continuity of one or another idea are the basis, in virtue of which investors render decisions should they risk and devote their money to the project or not. Another way of subjectivity control is advertising. As it was mentioned above, subjectivity, in particular, forms under the impact of the environment. In the twenty first century we live in, advertising becomes a very strong instrument of influence. The modern society is the society of consumers, and the desire of obtaining one or another thing here is natural. Highly publicized innovations get much more attention, and, hence, could bring their creators more money. This is particularly true for technological industries, but betimes for arts, crafts, tradeshows, films, and theatres also. For example, a film with a worldwide famous actor or actress in the lead role will attract more viewers than a film with young cast of characters just because the subjective thought that he or she would never screen in a film with a bad scenario. Technically, this thought is not true and does not have any background; it is just a product of advertising and self-perception elaborated under the influence of the environment. Cultural and creative industries have been an essential part of the world economy and from day to day integrate into it more and more. They form a basis of micro-economies and small businesses, which, in turn, support macro-economies in whole. According to McRobbie, in the United Kingdom micro-economies of culture and creativity are especially timely among young people of working and middle classes (Rauning, 2011, p. 119). Experiments in creative self-employment are very popular and allow revealing human potential, even if not always successful. Great Britain is the world leader in cultural and creative industries, but nowadays this practice enlarges upon another countries. With every passing day, the amount of small businesses and the scale of micro-economies increase bringing innovations and varying of production in people’s lives. The place of cultural and creative industries and the role of human creativity in economy in whole significantly increased from year to year. In the twenty first century, human creativity becomes a powerful economic resource able to generate significant profits. However, intellectual activity is always a risk for investments. Cultural and creative industries have different specific aspects, and one of them is subjectivity. Subjectivity has several forms. One of them is subjectivity of perception of ultimate products, which is especially challenging for pieces of art, films, and books. Another subjectivity manifests in perception of processes, such as problems with work or artist’s block. Subjectivity is also a thing of the great current interest of rise of creative concepts itself. It is an essential part of creativity and production of ideas, a thing that help people to perceive the world in their own way, and, hence, to invent something the world have never seen before. However, for cultural and creative industries subjectivity brings higher risk probabilities, and should be well studied and investigated before the investments. Knowledge increases assurance in payback and obtaining a profit every investor is waiting for. The knowing of the world situation and proper advertising essential for the capitalist society we live in raise firmness in products human intellectual labour and give rise to cultural and creative industries in whole.

Hesmondhalgh, D., 2002. The Cultural Industries. New York, NY: SAGE Publications Ltd. Howkins, J., 2001. The Creative Economy: How People Make Money From Ideas. New York, NY: Penguin. Rauning, G., 2011. Critique of Creativity: Precarity, Subjectivity and Resistance in the 'Creative Industries.' MayFlyBooks/Ephemera.

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A survey of 3,000 global executives suggests that it’s not strategic thinking that sets them apart. It’s their inclination to move quickly.

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Research shows that towns that have lost sources of local news tend to suffer from lower voter turnout, less civic engagement and more government corruption. Journalists are essential just as nurses and firefighters and doctors are essential.

And to continue to have journalists, we need to make their journalism education free.

This might sound counterintuitive given the state of the industry. Shrinking revenue and decreasing subscription figures have led to a record number of newsroom jobs lost. Much of the local news industry has fallen into the hands of hedge funds focused on squeezing the last drops of revenue out of operations by decimating them. Billionaires who appeared as saviors just a few years ago have grown tired of losing money on the media organizations they bought. Public trust in the value of news is at historical lows, while a growing percentage of people are avoiding the news altogether.

Generative artificial intelligence, which is on the verge of reshaping almost everything around us, is bringing yet another technological disruption to the industry. Against this grim backdrop, authoritarian leaders are increasingly targeting journalists as political enemies both at home and abroad.

And yet there are still tens of thousands of jobs in news media in America, with exceptional journalism being produced every day. Some major organizations have even found ways to thrive in the digital age. Prominent foundation leaders have started an effort to pour hundreds of millions of philanthropic dollars into local journalism, and a movement has formed to push for federal and local legislation to direct public funding to news. An initiative to replant local news has founded dozens of nonprofit newsrooms in cities around the country. And a small but growing number of organizations are redefining the way news agendas are set, focusing on rebuilding public trust within small communities.

No matter how the news industry evolves, we will continue to need journalists. Successful business models for media are necessary, but the most crucial element for strong, independent journalism is the people who make it. Given the present stakes in the industry, our society and the world, we need mission-driven, imaginative news leaders who are not bound by the models of the past, who have the motivation and freedom to reimagine the field, and the empathy and commitment to serve the public interest, undaunted by attacks and threats.

We must also move beyond the lack of economic and demographic diversity that has long been a problem in the industry. News has too often been reported by predominantly middle-class, white, male journalists, resulting in coverage that has repeatedly missed the issues that are most important to the people receiving the news, contributing to the public’s lack of trust in the media.

In a resource-starved industry, few newsrooms can offer the type of mentoring, guidance and time that it takes to shape a great journalist. This is now primarily the responsibility of journalism schools. It is the civic duty of these schools to find and train reporters and news leaders, instill in them an ethical foundation, help develop their critical thinking skills, allow them to try and fail in a safe environment, open doors and provide a support network. (Journalism schools should also contribute research in a variety of areas, from the impact of A.I. to new business models to identifying and responding to emerging threats.)

But the cost of a journalism education has become an insurmountable barrier for exactly the kind of people we need the most. And those who, with great effort, manage to overcome that barrier, carry a weight that could limit their professional options.

Reporters burdened with debt are less likely to take professional risks and more likely to abandon the field. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the median reporter salary in America is less than $56,000 a year, or about $27 per hour. In low-income areas, where news deserts are more prevalent, annual salaries can be as low as $20,000. A Wall Street Journal report about the debt-to-income ratio of alumni of 16 journalism masters programs found that many graduates leave with debts that exceed their postgraduate income.

As the dean of the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at the City University of New York, I can tell you that half measures won’t solve this quandary. My school was founded in 2006 as a public alternative to elite journalism schools in the city and it remains one of the most affordable in the nation.

Our in-state students pay about a quarter of the cost of an equivalent degree from top-tier schools with which we successfully compete. This year alone, 90 percent of our students are on scholarships, and a record 25 percent are attending tuition-free. We also waived the $75 application fee this admission cycle and saw an increase of more than 40 percent in our applicant pool.

Thanks to these policies, we have succeeded where the media industry keeps failing. Over 50 percent of our students are people of color and from underserved communities. Many couldn’t have attended our school if we hadn’t offered significant scholarship support. But that’s not enough. Though we rank as one of the journalism schools with higher-medium-income and lower-median-debt alumni, our students still don’t graduate fully debt-free.

This is why this year, we began a campaign to go fully tuition-free by 2027. While other schools might face different financial challenges, we hope that many more will follow us.

We need journalists whose only obligations are to the facts and the society they serve, not to lenders; who are concerned with the public interest, not with interest rates; who can make risky decisions and take the difficult path if that’s what the mission requires, free of financial burden. Journalism schools can help achieve that. In tough times, it is natural to mourn the past or lament the present, but what we really need is bold action.

Graciela Mochkofsky is the dean at CUNY’s Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism. She is the author, most recently, of “ The Prophet of the Andes: An Unlikely Journey to the Promised Land .”

The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips . And here’s our email: [email protected] .

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Entertainment

How Beyoncé Changed the Music Industry

O n Friday, Beyoncé will release Cowboy Carter , the much anticipated album that signals the beginning of the second part of a three-act project, following Renaissance , a sparkling celebration of house and dance music . When the country album was announced during Beyoncé’s appearance in a Verizon Super Bowl commercial back in February, accompanied by two country singles, “Texas Hold ‘Em” and “16 Carriages,” it declared a new era for the artist. And it’s one that positions her, rather boldly, in a genre that has been less than welcoming to her. (See, for starters, the reception to a country song included on her 2016 album, Lemonade , and her performance of it alongside the Chicks at the CMAs later that year.) With Cowboy Carter , Beyoncé reinforces a truth that has embodied her career: she defies easy definition.

Over the course of her three-decade career, the musical superstar has challenged industry conventions and superficial assumptions about her art by doing things on her terms—and in doing so, she has changed the way we think about music and the artists who make it. Hallmarks of the world of music as we know it now, like the visual album or rollout methods like the surprise release, Friday release, or a fully digital drop, were pioneered by Beyoncé. If she didn’t invent them, her influence helped to make them industry standard.

Read more : Beyoncé Has Always Been Country

There may be no other artist of her generation who has personified music industry changes quite like Beyoncé, whose career moves have helped to rewrite the playbook for artists. Though many of the changes that have shaped the past decade in music were inevitable, from the decline of radio’s influence amid the rise of streaming to the importance of social media, Beyoncé has remained relevant because of her willingness to evolve alongside them. Her embrace of new ideas and practices have set her apart as a leader in the industry and a veritable trendsetter.

For Rawiya Kameir, a music critic and journalism professor at Syracuse University who teaches a class on the politics of Beyoncé, the superstar’s impact stems from the excellence of her craft and her commitment to her creative vision. To Kameir, Beyoncé’s innovation is an extension of the work she puts in behind the scenes to produce her art, from production to research.

“Not only does she do things her own way, she does things really well. The extent to which she's able to pull this stuff off relies on not just the ideas, but the fact that the execution is still top-notch: the Virgo ethos of it all, her attention to detail, the depths of the research—all of that is really important because you can't pull off these impactful changes without having the art to back it up.”

Beyoncé changes the album release

Like she raps on the 2014 track “Feeling Myself,” there’s no denying that Beyoncé “changed the game with that digital drop.” The biggest example of Beyoncé’s impacts on the business are encapsulated by 2013’s Beyoncé , the pivotal visual album that Kameir calls an “inflection point.” The album was a marked departure from industry norms, from its surprise release with no advance promotion to its early Friday morning drop, which flouted the usual Tuesday album release date convention. (Albums for decades had typically been released on Tuesdays in the U.S. largely because the Billboard charts were published on Wednesday, and because this allowed distributors to get their stock to retailers, who had a week to prepare it for sales ahead of the weekend).

Leaks of physical albums spurred Beyoncé’s decision to initially do a digital-only drop of the album, but the move also foreshadowed the obsolescence of radio and physical copies to come. With a wholly digital drop, Beyoncé had no need to observe a Tuesday release date to accommodate stocking physical copies. Her decision to release the album on Friday was symbolic on multiple levels; first, it showed that she was confident enough in her art to release it later, despite having only four days, as opposed to seven, to accumulate album sales for her first week. Second, having a Friday release meant that all fans, no matter where they lived, got to experience music at the same time (other countries released on different days from Tuesday, which meant that there was a greater chance of pirating and leaks). And finally, a Friday release also felt celebratory—new music on a Friday felt like an invitation for fans to fully let loose, go out and enjoy the album (and themselves) in its totality.

Read more : Everything We Know About Beyoncé’s New Album Cowboy Carter

Her decision more than paid off— Beyoncé debuted at No. 1 on the Billboard 200, still holds the Guinness World Record for the fastest-selling album on iTunes , and has been RIAA certified platinum five times . Other artists, from Drake to Taylor Swift, also turned to the surprise drop in the years following Beyoncé’s self-titled album, finding similar success on the charts . And perhaps most significantly, the record industry made a collective decision in 2015 to release albums worldwide on Fridays, to have more uniform distribution and to crack down on piracy, a decision that almost certainly was spurred by Beyoncé’s release.

“I didn't want to release my music the way I've done it (before). I'm bored with that," Beyoncé said in a statement following the album’s surprise release. "I feel like I'm able to speak directly to my fans. There's so much that gets between the music, the artist and the fans. I felt like I didn't want anybody to give the message when my record is coming out. I just want this to come out when it's ready and (for it to be) from me to my fans."

Beyoncé pioneers the visual album

The decision to create a visual album that had to be purchased in full was key to the album’s success. Although there were clear predecessors to visual albums, like Prince’s 1984 film Purple Rain which incorporated all of the songs from the album of the same name, and even Beyoncé’s own 2006 album B’Day which included visuals to accompany every song, her decision to release the album with no singles and no option to purchase songs individually made the album more like a narrative feature and compelled fans to listen to it in full.

“It wasn’t the first time that she had released a video for every song on an album, but so many things happened that year culturally both in terms of technology and politically,” Kameir says. “What made it feel like a particular pivot point was that everything about it was different—the surprise drop, the fact that you could only buy it, you couldn't stream individual songs, the music videos for each song making a built-in narrative. And ever since then, pretty much everything she's done again has felt like an extension of that particular moment.”

The wisdom of longevity

Kameir believes Beyoncé’s outsize influence on the music industry is also due to her longevity. Beyoncé’s experience over 30 years has made her uniquely attuned to not only the logistics of the industry, but also its evolution. Beyoncé’s innovative decisions were the result of someone who was carefully observing and studying the changes of an industry she more or less grew up in from the time she was a young girl.

“She was around during the days when radio promotions were super important, but she also is young enough to see the impact of the various digital media, so she has this advantage to respond to or get ahead of trends without losing her own sense of self and control,” Kameir says. “A lot of the innovations that she's made that have taken off aren't just random experiments—they’re part of the legacy of an artist who really believed in the full album experience, during the pre-Internet era. She’s finding ways to tie the things that she cares about as an artist in the industry, to various evolving trends.”

Read more : Beyoncé’s Album of the Year Snub Fits Into the Grammys’ Long History of Overlooking Black Women

Kinitra Brooks, an English professor at Michigan State University who co-edited The Lemonade Reader and the forthcoming The Renaissance Reader , echoes this sentiment. “She spent years paying her dues as a part of Destiny’s Child and she’s been in the business since she was a girl,” Brooks said. “We have to give credit for the longevity of being a veteran in the business. She knows where the pitfalls are and has survived the pitfalls of many of her contemporaries.”

Marrying business and creative decision-making

Brooks points to Beyoncé’s evolution not just as a veteran artist but as an insightful businesswoman, with her business decisions and creative choices working in tandem. She points to moves like starting Parkwood Entertainment, which mostly keeps her business and creative processes in-house, affording her ample creative control when it comes to trying things like the visual album that a label might veto due to cost or deviation from standard practice.

“Beyoncé is a very shrewd businesswoman who’s learned to hire people who keep her business close, who have worked with her for a very long time,” Brooks tells TIME.

She also points to her ability to tap into the zeitgeist and engage with the current discourse. Like Kameir, Brooks says that while some of the industry-shifting practices weren’t created by Beyoncé, the innovation lies within her ability to pinpoint a trend or a moment and amplify it.

Read more : In Her Renaissance Tour Movie, Beyoncé Chooses Freedom Over Perfection

“One of her great talents is being able to see the cultural zeitgeist coming and being able to catch that wave by putting her twist on it in a way that’s interesting,” Brooks says. “A lot of times what Beyoncé does is open up and expose people to new things that they never would have been exposed to and there are politics involved in that because Beyoncé is bringing something to the fore.”

An independent ethos

For Kameir, one of the most impactful ways that Beyoncé has shaped the music industry is the example she’s set for artists to stay true to their creative instincts. “For a lot of artists, she has demonstrated that there is possibility in terms of building a lane for yourself,” says Kameir. “Even though she's very much a product of the major label system, there is a kind of independent ethos to her that I think artists can borrow from and her greatest impact is in demonstrating this potential.”

A throughline of Beyoncé’s career over the years has been reinvention. From girl group member to her stylized Sasha Fierce alter ego to her Renaissance disco queen persona, she’s no stranger to transformation and no friend to easy categorization. (This was amply apparent at the 2023 Grammys, where she was nominated in both the Dance/Electronic and R&B categories.) Brooks points to her current foray into country music with Cowboy Carter , which Beyoncé described on Instagram as being born out of a “deeper dive into the history of Country music” and the Black musical archive, as proof of her dedication to her vision and a rejection of a system that could never imagine an artist like her.

“It’s this idea that, ‘I don’t have to play the game this way,” Brooks says. “Like, ‘Why did I fight so hard to get to the top if I’m not going to change some rules?’”

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Nana Mouskouri, straight hair past her shoulders and wearing glasses and a wide-sleeved dress, holds a microphone to her mouth as she sings and holds the cord with her other hand

Wall-to-wall bouzouki? Greece plans quota of local music to be played in hotel lobbies and other public spaces

Tourist and creative industries react angrily to ‘curb on freedom of expression’

Greek music in hotel lobbies, Greek tunes in lifts, Greek melodies in casinos, shopping malls, airport lounges and ports.

If the Athens culture ministry has its way, tourists from around the world should prepare for a holiday soundtrack that is decidedly Hellenic in tone.

With the country once again gearing up for record numbers of visitors, the centre-right government has ruled it is time to take action. Under draft legislation already put to public consultation, more than 45% of all music heard on local radio or in public spaces will in future have to be Greek, says culture minister Lina Mendoni.

“In a globalised environment, English-language music has almost been imposed [on us],” she said in defence of the bill. “The spread of Greek-language music is limited. Statistics show that Greek music amounts to 30% of what is heard; 70% is foreign music. We … have a duty, under the constitution, to protect art.”

Lina Mendoni, with blunt-edge shoulder-length hair and wearing a button-down shirt and large watch, with her hands on a counter next to a bust of a carved head

In exchange for featuring more Greek tunes, radio stations, she stressed, would be given more time to air commercials. “They won’t lose anything. We’re giving incentives,” Mendoni added.

Drawn up in the spirit of not only promoting and protecting indigenous music but also ensuring “the diffusion of the Greek language”, the law will be even more draconian in the case of state-funded films and audiovisual content. In both the music quota rises to 70%.

The development is music to the ears of Greek singers, lyricists and composers.

Few were hit as badly by Covid lockdowns as those in the country’s cultural sector. With performers struggling on “poverty wages” and little state support, the draft law has been welcomed “as a ray of light and hope after the difficult and gloomy years of the pandemic”.

But for many the bill is seen as far-fetched and ultimately unenforceable.

Hoteliers are outraged at the prospect of having to give airtime to the likes of Zorba the Greek – a soundtrack almost as famous as Anthony Quinn’s role as the film’s titular hero –in the lifts and lobbies of resorts.

Denouncing the move, the Panhellenic Federation of Hoteliers warned that “enterprises would prefer to remove music from common areas altogether” than apply the diktat. Private radio stations have called for the bill’s withdrawal, saying it makes no sense to enforce more commercials on listeners, while the leftist opposition decried the measure as something out of the playbook of the rightwing colonels’ regime, which banned the Beatles and the miniskirt within days of seizing power in 1967.

The Greek film industry – currently in the spotlight with the Athenian director Yorgos Lanthimos’s Poor Things winning four Oscars – said the law was a curb on freedom of expression and amounted to censorship.

“It’s been drafted with great sloppiness by a government that sees everything through the prism of business,” said Kyriaki Malama, a film and theatre director before being elected for the main opposition Syriza party , for which she is shadow culture minister.

Antony Quinn, left, and Alan Bates in the classic 1964 film Zorba the Greek.

“That film-makers should be forced to include Greek-language songs in movies or risk forfeiting government grants – for that is what this law implies – is absurd. Like so much that this government does, it takes us back to dark epochs [in our history].”

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Even worse, she insisted, was the sheer number of those excluded from a bill meant to help the industry: composers whose pieces were purely orchestral, younger songwriters whose lyrics were often in English, and performers who concentrate on jazz, rock and alternative music. After all, the best-selling Nana Mouskouri became an international star after singing in French, English and German.

But Mendoni has her supporters. The need for help is urgent and it’s now or never, they say, at a time when music rights are big business, digital music streaming services are becoming ever more prolific and even a small music market such as Greece’s – estimated to be worth about €24m a year – is predicted to see profits double.

“This is the first time we are trying to do something to empower Greek-language songs,” said the culture minister, adding that, unlike the nation’s film and theatre industry, the Greek music scene had been overlooked by the state.

For Louka Katseli, a socialist former economy minister who is now director general of Edem, the collective management organisation that protects intellectual property rights on musical works, the backlash is a storm in a teacup.

Greece is only doing what other countries did decades ago, she says.

“The bottom line is that unless you protect Grecophone repertoire and national music creators, they’ll become endangered,” she told the Observer . “They won’t exist in 10 years because of globalisation and the fact that international platforms increasingly promote English-language repertoires. Yes, there may be different ways of going about it, but the law is definitely going in the right direction. France did what we are doing years ago and was much tougher.”

Edem, she said, had pushed hard for young, innovative Greek musicians to be given more exposure at a time when radios tend to play the same songs most of the time.

“There needs to be an increase in the mix of music on the Greek radio,” Katseli said. “We need to create incentives for younger composers who are not known to the public so they can continue being creative.”

To placate critics, Mendoni has vowed that opposing voices will be taken into account before the law is put to the vote in the coming weeks. “We will listen to the comments and public debate [before] we shape the final plan,” she said. “We have excellent contemporary creators [in Greece] who produce really great music.”

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Christopher Nolan, Emma Thomas and Ted Sarandos Honored by King Charles III

By Selena Kuznikov

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Christopher Nolan, Emma Thomas and Ted Sarandos

Fresh from their triumph at the Oscars earlier this month with “Oppenheimer,” Christopher Nolan and his wife, producer Emma Thomas , will receive a knighthood and damehood respectively for their services to film. The honor was personally approved by Britain’s King Charles III.

Co-chief executive officer of Netflix Ted Sarandos will also be honored as a Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) for his services to the creative industries. The honor is one of the highest that can be awarded in the U.K.

Traditionally, the honors are awarded in person by a senior member of the Royal Family during an investiture ceremony.

Nolan and Thomas have collaborated on all of the director’s major films, including “Inception,” “Interstellar,” “The Dark Knight,” “Batman Begins” and “Tenet.” They also co-founded and run their production company Syncopy.

Sarandos joined Netflix in 2000 and has been responsible for content operations since, greenlighting shows including Emmy award winning series “The Crown.” He was appointed as co-chief executive officer in 2020, sharing the position with Greg Peters, who was formerly chief operating officer and chief product officer.

“The U.K.’s creative brilliance, quality craftsmanship and best in class production facilities make it an extraordinary place to invest,” Sarandos said in a statement. “We couldn’t be more excited to be part of the creative community here and this is a real honor.”

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March 25, 2024

Accenture and Adobe to Co-Develop Industry-Specific Generative AI Solutions to Accelerate Marketing Transformation

Collaboration will help organizations move from generative ai experimentation to adoption at scale.

LAS VEGAS; Mar. 25, 2024 – Through a strategic expansion of its relationship of more than 20 years, Accenture (NYSE: ACN) has been selected by Adobe (Nasdaq: ADBE) to co-develop industry-specific solutions using Adobe Firefly, Adobe’s family of creative generative AI models, to help organizations create personalized content at scale and accelerate the transformation of their content supply chains.

Accenture will integrate Adobe Firefly Custom Models into marketing services offered by Accenture Song, to provide clients with the industry-specific insights required to train bespoke models on their proprietary data and brand guidelines. Firefly, which is designed to be safe for commercial use, is also accessible via APIs through Firefly Services, as well as through Adobe Creative Cloud and Experience Cloud applications. By generating content that aligns with their brand style and design language, marketers can build templatized campaigns that can be continually refined based on performance data and impact. This iterative approach streamlines the content creation process and reduces the need for manual adjustments.

With an initial focus on the retail and consumer goods, automotive, financial services and health industries, the new solutions will leverage Accenture’s extensive data and AI engineering capabilities and systematic approach to responsible AI, coupled with its approach to driving unified brand experiences. By integrating the solutions with Adobe’s broader suite of generative AI-powered solutions and client systems, organizations can realize value faster with content that is globally consistent, locally relevant and industry specific. Additionally, Accenture engineers will be trained to be specialists in Adobe Firefly, allowing them to provide support for clients deploying generative AI campaigns.

“Brands today are looking for ways to go beyond experimenting with generative AI to achieve real impact,” said David Droga, chief executive officer, Accenture Song. “Whether it’s consumer goods companies scaling their product data and images in e-marketplaces worldwide, or healthcare providers ensuring brand standards for patient safety, the demand for scalable generative AI solutions is increasing. By bringing together Adobe technology with Accenture Song’s tech-powered creativity, we can help democratize the ability for teams to develop creative assets and accelerate content supply chain transformation.”

According to Accenture research , business leaders are positive about the potential of generative AI—97% expect generative AI to be transformative for their company and their industry, yet only 31% of organizations say they have started investing “significantly” in generative AI initiatives. Accenture is committed to providing solutions for clients that help them navigate the reinvention of work, transformation of their organization and responsible adoption of AI.

“Businesses have an unprecedented opportunity to leverage generative AI to deliver truly personalized experiences that connect with their customers,” said David Wadhwani, president, Digital Media Business, Adobe. "Firefly is an enterprise grade solution that powers a full suite of generative capabilities - from content generation to editing to assembly - through our industry-leading applications and enterprise automation APIs. We are excited to partner with Accenture to define and implement solutions that empower organizations around the world to harness the power of AI."

Jim LaLonde, lead of the Accenture Adobe Business Group, added, “In recognition of our technology and industry experience and decades-long relationship , Adobe has selected Accenture to help develop and deliver industry-specific generative AI capabilities that will give organizations the tools they need to unlock new value. Together with Adobe, we’re continuing to invest in the talent and technology needed to drive next generation experiences for our clients.”

Accenture’s use of Adobe Firefly within its marketing organization As part of the collaboration, Accenture will leverage Adobe Firefly within its own marketing organization to empower its people to produce creative content faster and enhance their creativity. Using a Firefly Custom Model focused on its own brand style and design language, Accenture can customize content across each of the 19 industries it serves.

“Organizations, including Accenture, are moving from generative AI experimentation to implementation and value realization,” said Jill Kramer, chief marketing and communications officer, Accenture. “For us, that means using generative AI tools that allow our marketing professionals to generate content using our brand assets in a safe and closed environment. This will allow us to confidently accelerate the development of production-ready materials.”

Today’s announcement builds on Accenture and Adobe’s content supply chain collaboration, which is focused on helping marketers more effectively create and deliver content that provides personalized customer experiences at scale. The generative AI collaboration is part of Accenture’s broader $3 billion investment in data and AI and expands on recent activities to support the customer agenda, including its investment in Writer.com and the launch of a network of generative AI studios across the world, along with specialized services , to help clients build their own large language models that are tailored to meet their specific business needs.

About Accenture Accenture is a leading global professional services company that helps the world’s leading businesses, governments and other organizations build their digital core, optimize their operations, accelerate revenue growth and enhance citizen services—creating tangible value at speed and scale. We are a talent- and innovation-led company with approximately 742,000 people serving clients in more than 120 countries. Technology is at the core of change today, and we are one of the world’s leaders in helping drive that change, with strong ecosystem relationships. We combine our strength in technology and leadership in cloud, data and AI with unmatched industry experience, functional expertise and global delivery capability. We are uniquely able to deliver tangible outcomes because of our broad range of services, solutions and assets across Strategy & Consulting, Technology, Operations, Industry X and Song. These capabilities, together with our culture of shared success and commitment to creating 360° value, enable us to help our clients reinvent and build trusted, lasting relationships. We measure our success by the 360° value we create for our clients, each other, our shareholders, partners and communities. Visit us at www.accenture.com .

Accenture Song accelerates growth and value for our clients through sustained customer relevance. Our capabilities span ideation to execution: growth, product and experience design; technology and experience platforms; creative, media and marketing strategy; and campaign, commerce transformation content and channel orchestration. With strong client relationships and deep industry expertise, we help our clients operate at the speed of life through the unlimited potential of imagination, technology and intelligence.

About Adobe Adobe is changing the world through digital experiences. For more information, visit www.adobe.com .

Contacts: Hannah Unkefer Accenture +1 206 839 2172 [email protected] Julian McBride Accenture +1 917 237 6826 [email protected]

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COMMENTS

Creativity and Creative Industries
The creative industries may include design, architecture, writing and publishing, music, photography, and performing arts. The screen production such as in the television is inclusive. Hence, creative industries are economic activities that concentrate on the generation of knowledge and ideas.
Creative Industries Essay
According to the Creative Industries Council official figures, in 2018 the creative industries were worth £111 in the UK economy alone. As a major part of what makes up the creative economies, the "creative industry" is a broad term that is not a unified category and there are numerous definitions.
What is the creative economy?
The creative economy has a cultural and social impact that is likely to grow. In a time of rapid globalisation, many countries recognise that the combination of culture and commerce that the creative industries represents is a powerful way of providing a distinctive image of a country or a city, helping it to stand out from its competitors.
Rethinking creativity: creative industries, AI and everyday creativity
The creative industries discourse assumes unrestricted economic growth that is driven by the abundance of productive human creativity; however, the reality of cultural economy is more complicated. Artistic and cultural production - singing, acting, drawing, writing, etc. - tends to be labour-intensive.
Go on then … what are the creative industries?
We bundled fashion, design, advertising, architecture, publishing, software, movies, television and similar enterprises into their own sector. They became a lobby. In major economies, creative ...
Impact investing in the creative economy today
The creative industries account for 3 per cent of global GDP. 6 But that's changing quickly as the global creative economy grows at 9 per cent annually, and 12 per cent in the developing world. 7 The value of the global market for creative goods doubled from US$208 billion in 2002 to US$509 billion in 2015, an increase in export growth rates ...
Cultural and Creative Industries
Much of the literature on cultural and creative industries fits into Graham Murdock's ( 2003) taxonomy for research and theorizing, which includes work on: 1. Analyses of the ways shifts in the political economy impact industrial organizations and the ways culture is produced; 2.
Creative Essay: Topics, Examples, Tips, Outline
How to Write a Creative Essay: Breaking Down a Creative Essay Outline. Apart from the tips above, you might need a step-by-step guide demonstrating essential writing steps. While creative essays adhere to an outline much like other types of essays, such as book review format, they use a slightly different framework known as the 3-Point ...
Creative industries careers: shifting aspirations and pathways from
Creative careers are responding rapidly to new creative practices, new audiences, emerging digital platforms and technologies. These careers are well paid, resistant to automation and permeate all aspects of society. Yet students' and teachers' perceptions and attitudes are not in alignment with the reality of a job in Australia's Creative Industries. Research exploring the perceptions ...
Essay On Creative Industries
Essay On Creative Industries. Creative industries as an art have their origin in individual creativity, skill and talent.They have the potential to create wealth and jobs through the generation and use of intellectual property.The Creative industries can include music, performing arts, radio, television, film, advertising, games and interactive ...
The And The Creative Industry Essay
The And The Creative Industry Essay. In today 's era of regular internet downloads and the easy access to illegal films and music, the creative industry has struggled, (BBC.co.uk, 2016). Due to this, money has increased for live performances and cinema to try and ensure money is still being made by the industry, (MakeUseOf, 2016).
PDF The Creative Economy: Key Concepts and Literature Review Highlights
In the years since the Creative Industries Taskforce was launched in Britain in 1998, the relationships between the arts, the culture sector and the newly defined creative industries have been subject to much debate. Some of the more simplistic models above, such as Howkins and the early DCMS definitions, have provoked a flurry of other models ...
Free Essay On Creative Industries
Driven by service, knowledge and culture, a creative industry is characterized by intensive utilization of innovative capacities in order to deliver value to one or more economic activities. In so doing, jobs are created by launching new projects, services and/or start-ups employing people in areas beyond conventional job market offerings.
Creative Industry Essay Examples
Creative Industry Essays. Discussing the Factors That Influence Consumption Practices for Cultural Subjects in the Creative Industries. Introduction While cultural indulgence and appreciation tend to cut across social class inequalities, the general conception is that people of a higher social class are exposed to platforms that enable them to ...
Creative Industries And The Creative Industry
1073 Words. 5 Pages. Open Document. As an ever-evolving concept, the creative industries as as hard to define as creativity itself. Academia is struggling to keep up with the growing global interest in these ideas. (De Beukelaer, 2015) A creative industry is defined as 'unpredictability, rapid shift in trends and fashions' (Lee, 2015, p. 141).
Creative Industries Essay Examples
Creative Industries Essays. Global Creative Industries. Introduction Today, creative industries have a big impact on the economics and culture of many countries worldwide. Asia has seen a significant increase in the creative industry sector because several industries, including Bollywood, anime, and K-Pop, gaining international fame. This essay ...
The State of Creativity
The State of Creativity reflects on creative industry policy over the last 10 years and asks where next for the creative sector. It includes contributions from 24 creative industry thinkers from seven UK universities and across the creative sector. In the report, researchers highlight the priority areas for creative industries policy, and research.
Essay On Cultural And Creative Industries
Cultural and creative industries are based on an intellectual activity of people. Innovations help to reduce cost of productions and to design new highly developed goods. They are the engine for progress and development of human thoughts. Nowadays, the role of cultural and creative industries start to be more and more important, and the ...
Difference between Culture Industry and Creative Industry
When used distinctively, creative products and services are only meant for commercial purposes, but they need creativity to be produced. This may include fashion designs and software creation. In contrast to culture industries, creative industries are mainly big or middle size companies.
Film Industry : Creative Industry
Employment in the creative industries (including fashion, software design, publishing, architecture and antique dealing) has topped 525,000 and is still rising, compared to a mere 322,000 and falling in financial services.". Film Industry. The creation and showing of motion films became a source of income almost as soon as the process was ...
Opinion
The music industry's revenues recently hit a new high, with major labels raking in record earnings, while the streaming platforms' models mean that the fractions of pennies that trickle ...
Why Some Companies Grow Amid Uncertainty
Amid all this, there is a group of companies doing very well: about one in five said their companies lead their industry in revenue growth. In this article, the authors dig into that 2024 data to ...
Opinion
Guest Essay. One Way to Help a Journalism Industry in Crisis: Make J-School Free. March 18, 2024. ... Given the present stakes in the industry, our society and the world, we need mission-driven ...
How Beyoncé Changed the Music Industry
For Kameir, one of the most impactful ways that Beyoncé has shaped the music industry is the example she's set for artists to stay true to their creative instincts.
Wall-to-wall bouzouki? Greece plans quota of local music to be played
Tourist and creative industries react angrily to 'curb on freedom of expression' Helena Smith in Athens. Sat 30 Mar 2024 09.04 EDT Last modified on Sat 30 Mar 2024 16.16 EDT. Share.
Ted Sarandos, Christopher Nolan Honored by King Charles III
Ted Sarandos, Christopher Nolan and Emma Thomas are among those honored by King Charles III for their services to the U.K.'s creative industries. × Plus Icon Click to expand the Mega Menu
Accenture and Adobe to Co-Develop Industry-Specific Generative AI
Through a strategic expansion of its relationship of more than 20 years, Accenture has been selected by Adobe to co-develop industry-specific solutions using Adobe Firefly, Adobe's family of creative generative AI models, to help organizations create personalized content at scale and accelerate the transformation of their content supply chains.