Vicki Mayer is professor of communication and media. She currently works at Tulane University in New Orleans Louisiana, where she holds the Louise Riggio Chair for Social Entrepreneurship and Innovation. Mayer is an influential academic for her research on media production and consumption, specifically relating to economic and political transformations in creative industries. Her writings on production range from student publishing, community media, ethnic journalism and urban sign production, and have significantly contributed to the Communication School of Liberal Arts. Mayer's most downloaded article on the internet explores the origins and performance of ‘flashing’ in New Orleans.
Special topics
Creative Labor, Hollywood South, The Public Intellectual 2.0
Professional memberships
International Communication, Association National Communication, Association Society for Cinema and Media Studies, Latin American Studies Association
Education and academic career
Born in 1971, Mayer grew up in Kansas before pursuing an independent major at Brown College. She then studied at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD) and received a PhD for communication in the year 2000. Her research interests include, but are not limited to, media audiences, production studies and communication labor, citizenship and culture, Latin American and Latino media, and, alternative and community media. Mayer is fluent in English, Portuguese and Spanish and has written four books, her most popular being Below the Line: Producers and Production Studies in the New Television Economy. She now teaches an array of courses at Tulane University including Media Analysis, Technology Analysis, Alternative Journalism and Media Histories. In these classes, her students act as co-researchers of cultural labour and creative expression in various community-based settings. Mayer's goal as an SE professor is to develop methods of bringing student and community voices into the public sphere through collaborative research, digital preservation, and open access. For this reason, Mayer directs MediaNOLA, a project that provides public access to locally based research via internet database that annually stores the class projects generated by Tulane students.
Study of the Times Picayune
In response to an announcement that New Orleans Times-Picayune were cutting printed issues to three days a week and, shifting to a more digital model of free content, Vicki Mayer and her class of media analysis undergraduates conducted a content analysis to compare the quality of printed and digital platforms. In this study, a 2011 edition of Times-Picayune was compared with the 2013 newspaper and allied digital platforms, namely website and smartphone applications. The content analysis involved the class studying a month of news coverage three days a week for four successive weeks in October 2011 and October 2013- approximately one year before and after the digital overhaul. The class catalogued staff-bylined articles and recorded screenshots of banner stories. This data was subsequently coded into two categories; news beats (e.g. courts, cops, politics, sports) and "hard" or "soft" news. The study demonstrated that the 2013 news operation produced a higher quantity of content than did its 2011 predecessor. Furthermore, it provided solid evidence that digital platforms produce softer, less-well-sourced, poorer quality news, even when published by the same news organisation.
Published work
Mayer's collaborative research is available on MediaNOLA and has been distributed through in international publications such as Jump Cut, The Columbia Journalism Review, and Public Culture. She also edits the International Journal of Television & New Media and she has both written and edited six books about media production and production studies.