Local Media Mapping in Media and Communications Studies: The Brisbane Media Map

This paper attends to two key policy issues in the media and communications sector, and focuses on an innovative case study through which both are being addressed. The case study here is the Brisbane Media Map (http://bmm.qut.edu.au), a student-produced online directory of the Brisbane area’s media and communications industry and services. The Brisbane Media Map (BMM), now in its sixth year, is a response to two related policy problems in the media and communications sector particularly, as well as in the creative industries sector more broadly. The first problem arises from shifts in tertiary education policy in a knowledge economy environment: how can curriculum and learning design successfully prepare students for work in the rapidly-evolving media and communications sector? The second problem relates to the visibility and development of the creative industries sector. What are the industry development requirements of a range of industries that have been hitherto overlooked in policy making for the knowledge-based economy, and how can these industries be made empirically visible? How can the significance of the highly productive media and communications sub-sector be made visible – to policymakers and funding allocators, as well as to industry members themselves - when existing economic activity measures are not yet calibrated to empirically account for the value and presence of creative industries? This paper focuses on two media and communications problems, and on a project which is successfully responding to both.