![handle is hein.journals/cmctre3 and id is 1 raw text is:
EDITORIAL
C C
It's the image that matters: Style, substance and
critical scholarship
CHRIS GREER, City University, UK
JEFF FERRELL, Texas Christian University, USA
YVONNE JEWKES, The Open University, UK
Much has happened at Crime, Media, Culture since our last editorial at the beginning of
Volume 2. As we launch Volume 3, we can report that CMC has recently been awarded a
major international publishing prize and has continued, we hope, to promote the best in
critical scholarship at the intersections of crime, media and culture.
As is to be expected after two years, our Associate and International Editorial Boards
have undergone some restructuring. While the changes to the latter are too numerous
to list in detail here, we would like to extend our sincerest thanks to all the Editorial
Board members who have worked with us over the past two volumes, and to offer a
warm welcome to those new members who have come on board. It is also a pleasure
to welcome Katja Franko Aas, Mark Hamm, Maggy Lee, Meda Chesney-Lind and Russell
Smith as Associate Editors, and to confirm that Alexandra Campbell and Majid Yar have
joined us as Review Editors. In addition, we have created a new editorial position - Visual
Arts Editor - which will be filled by Cecile Van de Voorde. Reflecting our scholarly interest
in the visual, we believe this new role will further cement CMC's distinctive and innovative
approach to visual issues. In this context it is the visual, and its significance for explorations
of crime, media and culture, that we wish to address briefly in this editorial.
Today, the visual constitutes perhaps the central medium through which the meanings
and emotions of crime are captured and conveyed to audiences. Indeed, we would suggest
that it is the visual that increasingly shapes our engagement with, and understanding of,
key issues of crime, control and social order. The proliferation of news and entertainment
media has generated growing competition for audience attention, a sort of inflationary
spiral of shock and enticement. Producing a visually arresting product which can 'feed the
mind and move the heart', as Rupert Murdoch (2006) recently put it, has become one of the
major challenges for media practitioners seeking to maintain their commercial buoyancy.
In the midst of rapidly developing production technologies across a 24/7 mediascape, and
multiplying screens and surfaces, the visual becomes paramount. However, while there is
no escaping the 'politics of representation' (Hall, 1993), a scholarly engagement
CRIME MEDIA CULTURE © 2007 SAGE Publications, Los Angeles, London, New Delhi and Singapore,
www.sagepublications.com, ISSN 1741-6590, Vol 3(1): 5-10 [DOI: 10.1177/1741659007074442]](ViewImageLocal?handle=hein.journals/cmctre3&div=1&collection=&method=preview&ext=.png&size=3)
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