Encoding the Olympics ─ The Beijing Olympic Games and the Communication Impact Worldwide

Encoding the Olympics assembles a uniquely representative international team of media experts to provide a comprehensive review of the global impact of media and cultural communications associated with the Beijing 2008 Olympics. Commissioned by the IOC, this pioneering comparative study – the largest in Olympic Games research –provides a ground-breaking, panoramic, cross-cultural perspective on media responses to the leading sports event of the modern world. The representative team that undertook the study includes media commentators and political analysts, sport and media journalists, Sinologists and observers of the Asian Pacific Rim, academics in Olympic Studies and media and communication studies, scholars of the cultural and sociology studies of sport and festival and events managers.

Encoding the Olympics provides a unique, encyclopaedic study that will serve as a versatile resource at several levels – as a textbook or source reference for academic institutions, media public relations agencies that facilitate the work of inter-cultural exchange organisations, and international communication departments of multinational enterprises and international NGOs. This volume analyses global media responses to a mega-sport event on a scale never before attempted.

This book was previously published as a special issue of the International Journal of the History of Sport.

Luo Qing is General Secretary of the MLeague Secretariat (International League of Higher Education of in Media and Communication), Associate Professor in Communication University of China; Visiting Professor at the University of Lugano and Comundus-Erasmus Programme of European Union.

Giuseppe Richeri is Professor at the Faculty of Communication Sciences, and the director of the Chinese Media Observatory, University of Lugano, Switzerland.