Media Essentials: A Brief Introduction

Media Essentials focuses on the fundamentals of mass communication, helping students keep pace with today's rapidly evolving and converging media. Best-selling authors Richard Campbell, Christopher R. Martin, and Bettina Fabos distill the essential information on media industries and major concepts, incorporate their accessible critical approach, and give students all the study tools they need to succeed in the course and be savvy media consumers. For the second edition of Media Essentials, the authors have added and enriched coverage of media topics instructors asked for, including videogames, convergence, media literacy, streaming music, online journalism, and more. This all comes together in a brief, attractive format — for a very attractive price, about 50% less than competing texts.

Richard Campbell directs the Journalism Program at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio. He is also interim chair of the Department of Communication. He is the author of 60 Minutes and the News: A Mythology for Middle America and coauthor of Cracked Coverage: Television News, the Anti-Cocaine Crusade and the Reagan Legacy. Campbell has written for both academic and popular trade journals, including Columbia Journalism Review, Journal of Communication, Critical Studies in Media Communication, and Television Quarterly. Campbell earned his PhD in Radio-Television-Film from Northwestern University, where he was a Danforth Fellow. He has previously taught at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, Mount Mary College, Middle Tennessee State University, and the University of Michigan. He has also worked as print reporter and TV and radio news writer in Milwaukee.

Bettina Fabos, an award-winning video maker and former print reporter, is an assistant professor of Visual Communication and interactive media studies at University of Northern Iowa. She is the author of Wrong Turn on the Information Superhighway: Education and the Commercialized Internet (2003). Her areas of expertise include critical media literacy, Internet commercialization, the role of the Internet in education, and media representations of popular culture.