Blog #7

·       What are the limitations of a press that serves only partisan interests? Why did the earliest papers appeal mainly to more privileged readers?

Newspapers had two general types: political or commercial. The Partisan Press was a pushed plan of the particular political group that subsidized the paper. The commercial press served business leaders, who were interested in economic issues. The partisan press gave us the editorial pages, while the early commercial press was the forerunner of the business section. Between the early 1700s and the early 1800s, even the largest of these papers rarely reached a circulation of fifteen hundred. Readership was primarily confined to educated or wealthy men who controlled local politics and commerce.

·       How did newspapers emerge as a mass medium during the penny press era?

Newspapers had emerged as a mass medium during the penny press era. In the 1830s, the Industrial Revolution made possible the replacement of expensive handmade paper with cheaper machine-made paper. The rise of the middle class spurred the growth of literacy, setting the stage for a more popular and inclusive press. Steam-powered presses replacing mechanical presses were the breakthroughs in technology, and it permitted publishers to produce as many as four thousand newspapers an hour, which lowered the cost of newspapers. Penny papers soon began competing with six-cent papers. Subscriptions remained the preferred sales tool of many penny papers; they began relying increasingly on daily street sales of individual copies.

·       What are the two main features of yellow journalism?

Yellow Journalism emphasized profitable papers that carried exciting human-interest stories, crime news, large headlines, and more readable copy in the late 1800s. There were two main features of yellow journalism. The first one was the overly dramatic or sensational stories about crimes, celebrities, disasters, scandals and intrigue. The second one, and sometimes forgotten, was the legacy and roots that the yellow press provided for investigative journalism: news reports that hunt out and expose corruption, particularly in business and government. The reporting increasingly became a crusading force for common people, with the press assuming a watchdog role on their behalf.

·       What major challenges does new technology pose to the newspaper industry?

There were major challenges that new technology pose to the newspaper industry. Publishers and journalists today face worrisome issues, such as the decline in newspaper readership and the failure of many papers to attract younger readers. During the Great Depression, the decline in daily newspaper readership began with the rise of radio. From the late 1960s and 1970s, another circulation crisis occurred with the rise in network television viewing and greater competition from the suburban weeklies. Also with an increasing number of women working full-time outside the home, newspapers could no longer consistently count on one of their core readership groups. U.S. newspaper circulation dropped again, this time by more than 25 percent throughout the first decade of the 2000s.

·       What is the current state of citizen journalism?

Citizen journalism has led to the combination of the online new surge and traditional newsroom cutbacks. Citizen journalism refers to people-activist amateurs and concerned citizens, not professional journalists-who use the Internet and blogs to disseminate news and information. With steep declines in newsroom staffs, many professional news media organizations like CNN’s iReport and many regional newspapers are increasingly trying to corral citizen journalists as an inexpensive way to make up for journalists lost to newsroom “downsizing.”

·       What are the challenges that new online news sites face?

A study in 2008, The Institute for Interactive Journalism reported that more than one thousand community-based Web sites were in operation, posting citizen stories about local government, police, and city development. This represented twice the number of community sites from a year earlier. The study found that a number of these sites individually revealed some impressive work, the funding and resources to provide these services at the same level of full news operations, day-in and day-out, do not exist, at least as of now. Many sites that were not very transparent about funding and daily operations, and policies no more likely to encourage citizen postings than traditional commercial news media sites. While many of these sites do not yet have the resources to provide the kind of regional news coverage that local newspapers once provided, there is still a lot of hope for community journalism moving forward. These sites provide an outlet for people to voice their stories and opinions.

·       What is a newspaper's role in a democracy?

Newspaper’s plays a major role in a democracy. Newspapers have played the leading role in sustaining democracy and championing freedom. Newspapers have fought heroic battles in places that had little tolerance for differing points of view. From 1992 through August 2012, 962 reporters from around the world were killed while doing their jobs according to the Committee to Protect Journalists. Our nation is dependent on journalists who are willing to do this very dangerous reporting in order to keep us informed about what is going on around the world. Aside from the physical danger, newsroom cutbacks, and the closing of foreign bureaus, a number of smaller concerns remain as we consider the future of newspapers. For example, some charge that newspapers have become so formulaic in their design and reporting styles that they may actually discourage new approaches to telling stories and reporting news. A criticism is that in many one-newspaper cities, only issues and events of interest to middle and upper middle class readers are covered, resulting in the underreporting of the experiences and events that affect poorer and working class citizens. Also given the rise of newspaper chains, the likelihood of including new opinions, ideas and information in mainstream daily papers may be diminishing. Chain ownership tends to discourage watch-dog journalism and the crusading traditions of newspapers.

·       What role did magazines play in social reform at the turn of the twentieth century?

The role that magazines played in social reform at the turn of the twentieth century was that there was better distribution and lower costs had attracted readers, but to maintain sales, magazines had to change content as well. One way to maintain circulation was printing the fiction and essays of the best writers of the day. The rise in magazine circulation coincided with rapid social changes in America. Hundreds of thousands of Americans moved from the country to the city in search of industrial jobs, millions of new immigrants also poured in. The nations that journalists had long written about had grown increasingly complex by the turn of the century. Many newspaper reporters became dissatisfied with the simplistic and conventional style of newspaper journalism and turned to magazines, where they were able to write at greater length and in greater depth about broader issues, they wrote about such topics as corruption in big business and government, urban problems faced by immigrants, labor conflicts and race relations.

·       What are the advantages of magazines moving to digital formats?

Some of the advantages of magazines moving to digital formats is that the Internet has become a place where print magazines like Time and Entertainment Weekly can extend their reach, where some magazines like FHM and Elle Girl can survive when their print version ends, or where online magazines like Salon, Slate, and Wonderwall can exist exclusively. Since the costs of paper, printing, and postage, creating magazine companion Web sites is a popular method for expanding the reach of consumer magazines. For example, like Wired magazine has a print circulation of about 830,000. The Web also gives magazines unlimited space, which is at a premium in their printed versions, and the opportunity to do things that print can’t do. Many online magazines now include blogs, original video and audio podcasts, social networks, games, virtual fitting rooms, and other interactive components that could never work in print. Other magazines offer printable coupons on their sites or like Redbook and GQ, offer “snap” advertising coupons, in which the reader snaps a photo of a designated image in the print edition with his or her cell phone and sends the photo to the magazine for a coupon or promotional sample.

·       What triggered the move toward magazine specialization?

What triggered the move toward magazine specialization was the general trend away from mass market publications and toward specialty magazines coincided with radio’s move to specialized formats in the 1950s. Including the rise of television, magazines ultimately reacted the same way radio and movies did, they adapted. Radio had developed formats for older and younger audiences, for rock fans and classical fans. Filmmakers, at the movies, focused on more adult subject matter that was off-limits to television’s image as a family medium. Magazines traded their mass audience for smaller, discrete audiences that could be guaranteed to advertisers. Magazines are now divided by advertiser type, consumer magazines, which carry a host of general consumer products and services for various occupational groups and farm magazines, which contain ads for agricultural products and farming lifestyles.

·       How does advertising affect what gets published in the editorial side of magazines?

Advertising affects what gets published in the editorial side of magazines from the advertising and sales department of a magazine secures, clients, arranges promotions, and places ads. Just like radio stations, network television stations, and basic cable television stations, consumer magazines are heavily reliant on advertising revenue. The more successful the magazine, the more it can charge for advertisement space. Magazines provide their advertisers with rate cards, which indicate how much they charge for a certain amount of advertising space on a page. The traditional display ad has been the staple of magazine advertising for more than a century. As magazines move to table, editions, the options for ad formats has grown immensely. Advertisers and companies have canceled ads when a magazine featured an unflattering or critical article about a company or an industry; this practice has put enormous pressure on editors not to offend advertisers.

Blog #6

·       Why were early silent films popular?

The early silent films had to offer what books achieved, the suspension of disbelief, they had to create narrative worlds that engaged an audience’s imagination. The shift to the mass medium stage for movies occurred with the introduction of narrative films: movies that tell stories. Georges Melies was a French magician and inventor who opened the first public movie theater in France in 1896. Melies was the first director to realize that a movie was not simply a means of recording reality. Melies understood that a movie could be artificially planned and controlled like a staged play. He began producing short fantasy and fairy tale films like Cinderella (1899) by increasingly using editing and existing camera tricks and techniques, such as slow motion and cartoon animation, that became key ingredients in future narrative filmmaking.

·       What contributions did nickelodeons make to film history?

Nickelodeons are a form of movie theater whose name combines the admission price with the Greek word for “theater.” It is the screening of news, documentary, comedy, fantasy, and dramatic shorts lasted about one hour. A piano player added live music, and theater operators used sound effects to simulate gunshots or loud crashes. This was because they showed silent films that transcend language barriers, nickelodeons flourished during the great European immigrations at the turn of the twentieth century. The theaters filled a need for many newly arrived people struggling to learn English and seeking an inexpensive escape from the hard life of the city. Nickelodeons required a minimal investment, a secondhand projector and a large white sheet. The number if nickelodeons grew from five thousand to ten thousand between 1907 and 1909. By 1910, the craze peaked, when the entrepreneurs began to seek more affluent spectators, attracting them with larger and more lavish movie theaters.

·       Why did Hollywood end up as the center of film production?

         Thomas Edison formed the Motion Picture Patents Company known as the Trust in 1908. The company pooled patents in an effort to control film’s major technology, acquired most major film distributorships, and signed an exclusive deal with George Eastman, who agreed to supply movie film only to Trust-approved companies. Some independent producers refused to bow to the Trust’s terms; there was too much demand for films, too much money to be made, and too many ways to avoid the Trust’s scrutiny. Hollywood became the film capital of the world because some producers began to relocate from the centers of film production in New York, New Jersey to Cuba and Florida. Southern California offered cheap labor, diverse scenery for outdoor shooting, and a mild climate suitable for year-round production. Independent producers in Hollywood could also easily slip over the border into Mexico to escape legal prosecution brought by the Trust for patent violations. Many emerging studios in Hollywood had their own ideas on how to control exhibition, after the collapse of the Trust.

·       What political and cultural forces changed the Hollywood system in the 1950s?

There are several political and cultural forces changed the Hollywood system in the 1950s. The film industry introduced a host of technological improvements to get Americans away from their TV sets. Wide-screen images, multiple synchronized projectors and stereophonic sound arrived in movie theaters. Technicolor was used in movies more often to draw people away from their black and white TVs. Panavision and 3-D were the main purpose that failed to address the problem, middle class flight to the suburbs, away from downtown theaters. Also there were communist witch-hunts in Hollywood. Aggressive witch-hunts for political radicals in the film industry by the House Un-American Activities Committee led to the famous Hollywood Ten hearing and subsequent trails. Home entertainment has made most people prefer the convenience of watching movies at home. About 30 percent of domestic revenue for Hollywood studios comes from DVD/Blu-ray rentals and sales as well as Internet downloads and streaming.

·       What are the various ways in which major movie studios make money from the film business?

There are six various major sources were studios make money on movies. The first way is the studios get a portion of the theater box office revenue, about 40% of the box office take. The box office receipts provide studios with approximately 20% of a movie’s domestic revenue. Studios have found out that they often reel in bigger box-office receipts for 3-D films and their higher ticket prices. An example is, admission to the 2-D version of a film costs $14 at a New York City multiplex, while the 3-D version costs $18 at the same theater.

         The second way is about four months after the theatrical release come the DVD sales and rentals and digital downloads and streaming. This has been declining since 2004 as DVD sales falter and this “window” accounts for about 30 percent of all domestic-film income for major studios. Redbox, discount rental kiosk companies, must wait twenty-eight days after DVDs go on sale before they can rent them, and Netflix has entered into a similar agreement with movie studios in exchange for more video streaming content-a concession to Hollywood’s preference for the greater profits in selling DVDs rather than renting them.

         The third way is the next “windows” of release for a film; pay-per-view, premium cable, then network and basic cable,, and the syndicated TV market. What the prices are that these cable and television outlets pay to the studios is negotiated on a film-by-film basis, although digital services like Netflix and premium channels also negotiate agreements with studios to gain access to a library of films.

         The fourth way is that studios earn revenue from distributing films in foreign markets, in fact, at $22.4 billion in 2011, international box-office gross revenues are more than double the U.S. and Canadian box-office receipts, and they continue to climb annually, even as other countries produce more of their own films.

         The fifth way is that studios make money by distributing the work of independent producers and filmmakers who hire the studios to gain wider circulation. Independents pay the studios between 30 and 50 percent of the box-office and video rental money they make from movies.

         The sixth way is that revenue is earned from merchandise licensing and product placements in movies. Characters generally used generic products, or product labels weren’t highlighted in shots in the early days of television and film. An example can be that Bette Davis’s and Humphrey Bogart’s cigarette packs were rarely seen in their movies. A product placements are adding extra revenues while lending an element of authenticity to the staging but with soaring film productions.

·       How do a few large film studios manage to control more than 90 percent of the commercial industry?

There are six companies that the current Hollywood commercial film business is ruled: Warner Brothers, Paramount, Twentieth Century Fox, Universal, Columbia Pictures and Disney. The six major studios account for more than 90% of the revenue generated by commercial films and they also control more than half the movie market in Europe and Asia. DreamWorks could not sustain the high costs of an independent studio, and in 2009 it struck a six-year distribution deal with Disney. To offset losses, in the 80s, which resulted from box-office failures, the movie industry began to diversify, expanding into other product lines and other mass media. This expansion included television programming, print media, sound recordings, and home videos/DVDs, as well as cable and computers, electronic hardware and software, retail stores, and theme parks such as Universal Studios. Management strategies today rely on both heavy advance promotion, to maintain the industry’s economic stability, and synergy, the promotion and sale of a product throughout the various subsidiaries of the media conglomerate. Companies promote not only the new movie itself but also its book form, soundtrack, calendars, T-shirts, Web site, and toy action figures, as well as “the-making-of” story on television, home video, and the Internet. This synergy has been a key characteristic in the film industry and an important element in the flood of the corporate mergers that have made today’s Big Six even bigger, in the 1950s. The biggest corporate mergers have involved the internationalization of the American film business. Investment in American popular culture by the International electronics industry is particularly significant. It represents a new, high-tech kind of vertical integration-an attempt to control both the production of electronic equipment that consumers buy for their homes and the production/distribution of the content that runs on that equipment.

·       How is the movie industry adapting to the Internet?

The most difficult and biggest challenge the movie industry faces is the Internet. Internet services connects more households, movie fans are increasingly getting movies from the Web. The movie industry has more quickly embraced the Internet for movie distribution. Apple’s iTunes store began selling digital downloads of a limited selection of movies in 2006, and 2008 iTunes began renting new movies from all the major studios for just $3.99. Netflix’s popularity of streaming service opened the door to other similar services. Hulu, News Corp. and Disney, was created as the studios’ attempt to divert attention from YouTube and get viewers to watch free, ad-supported streaming movies and television shows online or subscribe to Hulu Plus, Hulu’s premium service. Movies are increasingly available to stream or download on mobile phones and tablets. In 2012, marked a turning point: for the first time, movie fans accessed more movies through digital online media than physical copies, like DVD and Blu-ray. There are two long-term paths for Hollywood, one path is that studios and theaters will lean even more heavily toward making and showing big-budget blockbuster film franchises with a lot of special effects, since people will want to watch those on the big screen for the full-effect and they are easy to export for international audiences. The other path features inexpensive digital distribution for lower-budget documentaries and independent films.

·       What is the impact of inexpensive digital technology on filmmaking?

Digital video is a shift from celluloid film; it allows filmmakers to replace expensive and bulky 16-mm and 35-mm film cameras with less expensive, lightweight digital video cameras, which is substantially cheaper and more accessible than standard film equipment. Digital video also means seeing camera work instantly instead of waiting for film to be developed and being able to capture additional footage without concern for the high cost of film stock and processing. The greatest impact of digital technology is on independent filmmakers, low-cost digital videos opens up the creative process to countless new artists. Digital video camera equipment and computer-based desktop editors, movies can now be made for just a few thousand dollars, a fraction of what the cost would be on film. For example, Paranormal Activity was made for about $15,000 with digital equipment and went on to be a top box-office feature. Digital cameras are now the norm for independent filmmakers, and many directors at venues like the Sundance Film Festival have upgraded to high-definition digital cameras.

Blog #5

·       What were the major technical standards established for television in the 1940s? What happened to analog television?

Only one percent of Americans households, in 1948, had a TV set then by 1953 more than 50 percent had one, and since early 1960s, more than 90 percent of all homes have TV. The rise in television created many fears and competition for radio, books, magazines, and movies because they believed that all of those items would become irrelevant and unnecessary but both radio and print media adapted. TV was trying to be figured out how to be pushed as a business and elevate it to a mass medium meant creating a coherent set of technical standards for product manufacturers. In the late 1930s, the National Television Systems Committee, which was a group representing major electronics firms, began outlining industry-wide manufacturing practices and compromising on technical standards. In 1941, the Federal Communications Commission adopted an analog standard for all U.S. TV sets. Up until 2009, the United States continued to use analog signals when they were replaced by digital signals. They translate TV images and sounds into binary codes and allow for increased channel capacity and improved image quality and sound.

·       How did the sponsorship of network programs change during the 1950s?

The broadcast networks became increasingly unhappy with the lack of creative control in this arrangement in the early 1950s. The growing popularity and growing cost, luckily, of television offered opportunities to alter this financial setup. The introduction of two new types of programs, the magazine format and the TV spectacular, greatly helped the networks gain control over content. The magazine program featured multiple segments like news, talk, comedy, and music that are similar to the content variety found in general interest or news magazine of the day.

·       How have computers and mobile devices challenges the TV and cable industries?

In a 2010 Nielson survey found out that in a one-month period, an average viewer spent three and a half hours using a computer and television at the same time. It was also estimated that 60 percent of viewers are online at least once a month while they are watching television. Multitasking has further accelerated with new fourth-screen technologies like smart-phones, iPods, iPads, and mobile TV devices. These devices are forcing major changes in consumer viewing habits and media content creation. Cable and DBS operators are capitalizing on this trend, that Cablevision, Time Warner, and DISH Network released iPad apps in 2011, allowing their subscribers to watch live TV on their iPads at no additional charge, in the hopes of deterring their customers from cutting their subscriptions.

·       What rules and regulations did the government impose to restrict the networks' power?

In the late 1960s, a progressive and active FCC had passed a series of regulations that began undercutting their power. The first, Prime Time Access Rule, introduced in April 1970, reduced the networks’ control of prime-time programming from four to three hours. The move was an effort to encourage more local news and public-affairs programs. In 1970, the FCC created the Financial Interest and Syndication Rules-called fin-syn, which “constituted the most damaging attack against the network TV monopoly in FCC history. This network demanded as much as 50% of the profits that TV producers earned from airing older shows as reruns in local TV markets. In 1975, the Department of Justice instituted a third Policy, reacting to a number of legal claims against monopolistic practices, the Justice Department limited the networks production of non-news shows, requiring them to seek most of their programming from independent production companies and film studios.

·       How did the Telecommunications Act of 1996 change the economic shape and future of the television and cable industries?

The Telecommunications Act of 1996 changed the economic shape and future of the television and cable industries. Congress finally rewrote the nation’s communications laws in the act, which brought cable fully under the federal rules that had long governed the telephone, radio, and TV industries. Congress used the act to knock down regulatory barriers, allowing regional phone companies, long-distance carriers, and cable companies to enter one another’s markets. The Telecommunications Act allows cable companies to offer telephone services, and it permits phone companies to offer Internet services and buy or construct cable systems in communities with fewer than fifty thousand residents. Owners, for the first time, could operate TV or radio stations in the same market where they owned a cable system. The act has had mixed impact on cable customers, the cable companies argued that it would lead to more competition and innovations in programming, services, and technology. The cable industry delivered on some of its technology promises, investing nearly $150 billion in technological infrastructure between 1996 and 2009- mostly installing high-speed fiber-optic wires to carry TV and phone services.

·       Why has television's roles as a national cultural center changed over the years? What are the programmers doing to retain some of their influence?

Televisions roles as a national cultural center changed over the years. Televisions appearance significantly changed the media landscape, particularly the radio and magazine industries, both of which had to cultivate specialized audiences and markets to survive. The development of cable, VCRs and DVD players, DVRs, the Internet and smartphone services have fragmented television’s audience by appealing to viewers’ individual and special needs. Altering televisions former role as a national unifying cultural force, potentially de-emphasizing the idea that we are all citizens who are part of a larger nation and world by providing more specialized and individual choices. Ipods, iPads, smartphones, and Internet services that now offer or create our favorite “TV” programs are breaking down the distinctions between mobile devices and TV screens. Television provides a gathering place for friends and family at the same time that it provides access anywhere to a favorite show, that is the bottom line for TV.