"[This book] gathers essays from twenty-seven leading figures in book publishing about their work. Representing both large houses and small, and encompassing trade, textbook, academic, and children's publishing, the contributors make the case for why editing remains a vital function to writers–and
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readers–everywhere. Ironically for an industry built on words, there has been a scarcity of written guidance on how to actually approach the work of editing. This book will serve as a compendium of professional advice and will be a resource both for those entering the profession (or already in it) and for those outside publishing who seek an understanding of it. It sheds light on how editors acquire books, what constitutes a strong author-editor relationship, and the editor's vital role at each stage of the publishing process–a role that extends far beyond marking up the author's text. This collection treats editing as both art and craft, and also as a career. It explores how editors balance passion against the economic realities of publishing." (Publisher description)
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Presenting the challenges in meeting the information needs of the people of South Sudan, this report highlights a need for long-term and harmonised efforts to support media.
"By assessing edutainment as a space of cultural translation, Drama for Development advances an often neglected perspective in this topics' research. It focuses on what happens when various goals, worldviews and needs from donors, producers and the audiences come together in the production and meani
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ng construction of soap operas. The perspective is illustrated by examples from the largely South Asian experiences of the BBC World Service Trust, itself seen as a cross-cultural contact zone. Tensions between western scientific paradigm and local researcher in the audience research process (chapter 3), the cosmopolitan competencies of the production team in harmonizing the urge for authenticity, cultural sensitivity and development objectives (chapter 6) and the construction of social realism as an interplay of the observed realities of the audiences and the neo-liberal themes of donors (e.g., opium in ch.6 and forced marriage in chapter 11) exemplify some of the processes taking place in that zone. The epistemological position of the book is complementary to the more technical perspective of the existing body of literature, which sometimes fails to capture the complex processes of meaning construction and link it to the wider social context." (commbox)
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