- Title
- Creative industries in the Newcastle LGA: are they reliant on social media?
- Creator
- McIntyre, Phillip; Balnaves, Mark; Kerrigan, Susan; Williams, Claire; King, Evelyn
- Relation
- 2014 ANZCA Conference: The Digital and the Social: Communication for Inclusion and Exchange. ANZCA Conference Proceedings 2014 (Melbourne, Vic 9-11 July, 2014) p. 1-24
- Relation
- ARC.Linkage Project Grant
- Relation
- http://www.anzca.net/conferences/past-conferences/2014-conf/p2.html
- Publisher
- Australian & New Zealand Communication Association (ANZCA
- Resource Type
- conference paper
- Date
- 2014
- Description
- The creative industries, encompassing a number of sectors, are seen to be engaged in the generation and exploitation of intellectual property with an increasing reliance on digital technologies (Flew 2012, 2014). Critically, these industries cannot be readily understood in precisely the same way as those industries that preceded them. To appreciate this, as the Creative Industries Innovation Centre (CIIC) argues, one must understand the nature of the creative workforce, which is characterised by "a combination of employment within creative industries and creative occupations" (CIIC 2013, pp. 7-8). Furthermore, "while creative industries are often micro businesses or small to medium sized enterprises that focus on local markets, they can develop into powerful economic clusters, helping to drive economic growth" (ibid, p. 7). Given this set of conditions a recent report from the NSW Department of Trade and Investment (NSWDTI) argued that there are "very high concentrations of digital and other media publishing, advertising services, screen production, post-production, and broadcasting services" ( NSWDTI 2013, p. 6) in the Sydney metropolitan area. In addition the Northern Rivers, Blue Mountains, Port Macquarie, Coffs Harbour, and a south-eastern belt located around the Illawarra and Yass Valleys, have "higher concentrations of creative industries activity than the majority of regional NSW" (ibid). However, there is little data available about creative industries in the Hunter Valley. After the closure of the BHP Steelworks in 1999 the overall unemployment rate in Newcastle rose by 11%, while, following this closure, the arts sector grew by 43% in Newcastle over 2001-2011 (Wilkinson 2011, p. 11). This paper presents preliminary research about the present state of the creative industries in the central Local Government Area (LGA) in the Hunter Valley, Newcastle. It concludes that all sectors are well represented in the Newcastle LGA with the creative industry players in Newcastle ranging from traditional institutional ones through to innovative start-ups. There appears to be one exception: that of electronic games. What is common to each sector is an increasingly necessary presence on social media with some businesses operating solely online and others using a mix of traditional and more innovative entrepreneurial approaches. The preliminary research this paper presents has been enabled by an ARC Linkage project grant entitled: Creativity and Cultural Production in the Hunter: An Applied Ethnographic Study of New Entrepreneurial Systems in the Creative Industries.
- Subject
- creative industries; Newcastle
- Identifier
- http://hdl.handle.net/1959.13/1293544
- Identifier
- uon:18632
- Identifier
- ISSN:1448-4331
- Language
- eng
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