This paper outlines a new, more focused object for learning when developing interaction among TV (television) production partners. Discussion programmes have been considered to be precursors to improve audience-participation in society, but at the same time, hardly any research has been conducted of interaction inside the TV production process. The data are from a Finnish weekly studio-based TV talk show broadcast from 2004 to 2006 o Channel Teema, Finnish Broadcasting Company. The case study was based on interactive ethnography focusing on both TV workers’ talk and aims, and the end products: TV talk shows. Stimulated recall interviews were used when studying the tacit knowledge of the visual team. There was also an analysis of disturbances or gaps between the journalistic content and the visual multi-camera form in the TV studio from the discourse of the end products. The journalistic team wanted to promote free interaction, but it was inconvenienced by the mass production, like working practices used in cheap, weekly TV series in the multi-camera studio. The gaps in discourse converged with the larger imbalance among the workers’ aims to develop their work and many historically built infrastructures as well as the practices of TV work. According to the results, co-operation in TV production work seems to require a much greater range of interaction between the content and the form. When making high-quality activating TV talk shows, the working practices between professionals in journalistic and visual storytelling need to be responsive and enriching and based on the dialogical construction of meaning. To conclude, special learning environments should be established for inventing and practicing dialogical meaning construction. A focused place for experiments and learning is also needed when TV production practices are developed towards an audience-centered working style called co-configuration.
　　Keywords: interaction research, interactive ethnography, learning environments, TV (television) production research
　　 Introduction
　　As a vivid form of the mass media, TV (television) has been described as perhaps the most powerful medium affecting the way we view our world. At the same time, TV can also be seen as one of the most transformational and adaptive forms of traditional mass media, one that is not losing its power but increasing it in the digital age. The mode of expression that combines talk with moving images is also said to play a very important role in the newly converged media landscape in the age of social media and the Internet. To conclude, there are still important learning challenges related to TV production work.
　　In a situation where more interactive media modes are increasing, TV production work appears to be heading towards new kinds of collaborative practices in order to achieve all the detailed qualifications of customer-oriented co-configuration. As a new style of working, co-configuration is often defined as a new and sophisticated multi-expertise way of working by collaborating and interacting with customers for the development of products and services that cater to the needs and habits of users. This new generation of expert work is significant, because a new challenge is created for widening the scope of meaning construction in TV work. Co-configuration presumes permanent structures that ensure an ongoing interactive relationship among the producer, the product or the service in question and the customer (Victor & Boynton, 1998, pp. 195-196).
　　On the other hand, there is hardly anything new about applying the principles of co-configuration to TV work. Since its beginning, TV productions have been designed to reach their audiences and they have always used collective teamwork that is based on the collaborative construction of meaning between content and form. TV production practices have been quite a neglected area in the field of media research as well. The conditions as well as the effects of collaboration between journalistic and visual storytelling have usually been based on tacit knowledge and as such they have been invisible for the professionals employing these techniques as well. Closer consideration of the imperative conditions of organizational culture, complicated teamwork as well as artistic co-operation reveal the crucial need for further research on special type of TV productions. In order to study the prerequisites of collaborative learning in the context of studio-based TV talk show production, it is important to understand how the collective process of meaning construction can be directed and coordinated more flexibly and in an enriching way.
　　There are many simultaneous trends in the new digital media landscape that are influencing current way of working. The TV production process makes use of several historical forms of work simultaneously. According to Victor and Boynton (1998), the oldest and original historical form of work was craftwork. As an artistic, audiovisual way of working that is based on meaning construction, TV work has to take advantage of the many different craftwork-related qualifications of work. By definition, craftwork is needed when we are creating products with a unique form and content that are meant to induce strong and unique impressions in customers. It is always used when new products are modified to suit the new needs of new customer groups. Craftwork has survived within all the later developmental stages of work. Within mass production, its emphasis was weak, but in process of enhancement and mass customization, there was an increasing need for learning and variation. In the circumstances of co-configuration, craftwork skills will again become the most important (Victor & Boynton, 1998, pp. 19-28).
　　However, the opposite is also true. As one part of the cultural industry, TV work has always tried to produce its programmes in the most cost-effective way, by making the best use of practices and production environments taken from mass production. The journalistic production process is often organized and heavy equipment is used to foster timesaving working practices so as to resemble work on a conveyor belt. For example, in multi-camera work, the expensive and heavy studio resources and production timetables are often designed in such a way so as to make the production process as quick and cheap as possible by using repeatable and constant elements. Often, this means that there are only a few permanent workers in the visual team, such as the TV director, and that the crew is interchangeable and works in shifts. It is not difficult to see that working practices pose quite a challenge for artistic co-operation and learning.
　　 The Circumstances of TV Production Work
　　This research focused on investigating the kinds of qualifications that are needed for work that takes place also in new digital TV production environments (Caldwell, 1995). What is needed is research where the collaborative working practices which are based on interaction and cooperation among the different production partners, such as the editorial office and TV-studio involved in the process, are investigated. Far too little ethnographic data has been collected about the multi-expertise way of working in TV journalism. There has been hardly any research that focuses on the link between content and form in the journalistic headquarters, in the multi-camera studio and the control room.
　　TV production has always taken advantage of many blended visual and journalistic meaning systems which enrich and complement one another. The way TV tells stories has been hybrid and postmodern since its beginnings, being based on deposits of meanings that originate from the history of TV. Previous media research has focused on examining how the development of new media technologies can offer new ways of acting in and looking at society (Winston, 2003). In the research, the visual storytellers in TV are above all considered to be actors in the dialogical construction of meaning. The central issue in question is to uncover how their relationship to the journalistic content of the programme has been organized.
　　Engestr?m (2008) has referred to two basic historical trends from the general history. During the span of decades, the ways in which work is done have become more and more community-based and they demand more flexible ways of coordination. The working skills of the last generation, referred to as co-configuration skills, are needed when workers are creating self-adaptive products or processes of serving that are designed to meet the changing needs of the customer. In developmental work research, the shift towards co-configuration is seen as a desirable phase of evolution and as one that improves the quality of working life. The emergence of co-configuration means that participation, as well as the collaborative construction of meaning and collaborative learning, become essential parts of the production process.
　　But, at the same time, there is also an opposite, much more negative direction of development going on in working life due to the reverse side of flexibility; a compulsion to work in temporarily structured teams is spreading rapidly as well. Temporarily arranged compositions of experts working on a particular project by creating products or services within a fixed time are called “knots”, and this splintered way of working project by project in a network society is called knotworking (Engestr?m, 2008).
　　In the journalistic production process, the situation is slightly different, because in journalism, it has always been customary to use temporary sources of information or organize temporary team meetings. Examples of that are the multilateral TV conversations where the invited participants meet each other and discuss specific issues with the host (Heritage & Clayman, 2002). These kinds of entrenched journalistic practices can also be referred to as the bounding of temporary “knots” in the working process.
　　In addition, it should be mentioned that project-based work that uses a flexible workforce without stable production structures has become the prevailing way of organizing work in the American TV industry during the last decade (Caldwell, 2008). The distributed production process, which involves many co-producers, has also spread into strong European TV countries with established public media. In Finland, we have a wide selection of small and specialized commercial companies that create co-productions with large broadcasting companies (Sarpakunnas, Halonen, & Miettinen, 2008).
　　Nowadays, knotworking in TV work is often recommended, because it guarantees quality by gathering together the best, most suitable and experienced talents into emporarily arranged production teams (Küng, 2008). From the point of view of learning, this can be shortsighted and hamper cultural contexts. Organizing work in this way still increases the splintered nature of journalistic work and disintegrates long-established journalistic working communities. The position of small companies can also become very conflicted. They may have an interest in engaging in a new kind of journalism as well as to utilize alternative working practices, but they often lack the resources and tools needed for interaction and collaborative learning among participants, which are needed to cross the boundaries among incompatible working styles within the production process. Small co-producers often have to accept strict limitations when buying studio staff, equipment and production time from the other companies.
　　 Audience Relationship and Interactive TV Genres
　　According to previous research, it is a fact that media has become increasingly interactional throughout the years. While the hours of programming in TV have multiplied, the number of small interviews called sound bites has grown to make programmes more energetic and lively. This growth has occurred in journalism in general as well as in news programmes (Ekstr?m, Kroon, & Nylund, 2006). In the study, the focus is on talk shows as the original interactive genre of TV. The amount of different kind of talk shows and discussion programmes in TV has multiplied as well. Nowadays, ordinary people are increasingly used as the participants of TV discussions (Livingstone & Lunt, 1994). To sum up, in media history, there is only a quite short step from the “original” TV, which was full of more traditional interactive genres like TV conversations or ask-the-audience programmes, to today’s landscape where digital TV and the Internet converge.
　　Since the new audiovisual form of mass media was born, TV channels have had to keep the customer dependent on the constant use and purchase of TV products and the services provided by their channels. TV programmes and TV programming have always been organized in a certain way to facilitate the promotion of different programmes. TV companies introduced “TV programme concepts”, which include the premise story or the plot, as well as a description of the main characters (Gitlin, 1994, pp. 143-156). The international trade of TV formats is rooted in these kinds of promotion practices taken from the movie industry. Since the beginning, TV channels also had to have constant audience-oriented elements in their repertoires. Familiar continuity announcers, talk show hosts and their direct relations with the audience were necessary for integrating the audience with the programme.
　　Shortly after this phase, the prevailing form of TV became the programme flow. The audiovisual TV medium was integrated even more deeply into the viewing patterns and lifestyles of its audiences. In the flow of programmes, news, sports and popular TV series were gathered into blocks that were sent to viewers week after week and which continuously repeated the dramatic patterns intended for hooking the target audiences(Ellis, 2002).
　　The main reason for the increase in interaction in TV productions could be the growing amount of programmes needed to fill all the multiplied routes of distribution. In this situation, media companies have declared themselves to be friends of interactivity and emphasize that the customer relationship has always been regarded as having the highest value for the cultural industry. In the digital age, the development of new and more interactive media technology and audience expectations have fed off and collaborated with each other(Winston, 2003).
　　A much greater critical emphasis has been placed on understanding the latitude of the media audience in the theory of the public sphere. It has been said that the customer relationship in mass media has often turned out to be a hollow shell without real and democratic interaction with the audience. Journalistic practices have often given the audience very trivial opportunities to participate and they have also prevented the audience from growing into a discussing and participative public (Livingstone, 2005). The interaction that takes place, e.g., on
　　 the TV studio stage, is usually conducted under strict journalistic control (Nuolij?rvi & Tiittula, 2000). The present situation may continue unaltered in the new circumstances of a converged media landscape. Many so-called interactive modes can be designed to be quasi-interactive or produced only for entertainment (Holmes, 2005; Thompson, 1995).
　　 The Case Study
　　In the case study, the author focused on the most traditional and complicated form of interaction in TV: multilateral conversations. The author worked for three years with a new kind of TV production team that tried to use open interaction and intense teamwork to revise TV production practices while starting a new digital channel in Finnish TV. The data is from a cultural talk show The Club T that was originally designed for digital TV. The transmitting channel was Channel Teema in the Finnish Broadcasting Company, which is a new Finnish public service channel centred on culture, education and science.
　　The show consisted of a permanent host and three changing guests who were supposed to be thoroughly covering the topic of conversation in the 50-minute episodes. There were usually three video inserts per episode. The Club T was a co-production made in co-operation between the content team from a small commercial production company “Tarinatalo” and the visual team from the Finnish Broadcasting Company. The production was taped weekly in Studio Three in the same way as a direct recording. The content team included the permanent researcher, the scriptwriter and the host, all of whom had a weekly production timetable in the small production company. However, the visual team, consisting of the permanent multi-camera director and the changing camera crew, the editor and the studio and control room, only took part in the recordings.
　　Developmental work research investigates historically emerging activities that organize into different kinds of activity systems. The special aim is carrying out participatory interventions and collectively developing working practices through expansive learning (Engestr?m, 1987). In this study, the interactive ethnography is used to study TV work that is based on tacit knowledge and dialogical meaning construction. The research focused on the artistic co-operation between content and form. The control room is a strategic place where one can observe how the different styles and generations of work are grouped together to make the end product. In these situated actions (Suchman, 1987), the boundaries of work are becoming visible.
　　The main methods employed in the study are derived from interaction research. According to Mihail Bakhtin’s (1982; 1986) dialogism, TV workers are considered actors in dialogical meaning construction who are co-operatively building referential objects through work-related talk (Engestr?m, 1995). These referential objects of speech are simultaneously the possible future objects of the workers’ collaborative work. The workers’ task-related speech can be seen as producing acts of learning. In the case study, the author observed and analysed workers’ future orientation and suggestions on how to develop the TV talk show programme as they appeared in speech during a single fleeting moment.
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