Industries: Ownership and control

 Media conglomerate research

1) Type up your research notes from the lesson - what did you find out about your allocated media conglomerate? Selection of companies: Alphabet, The Walt Disney Company, National Amusements, Meta, News Corp, Time Warner, Comcast. If you were absent or didn't have time in the lesson to make these notes, research any one of the companies above and find examples of all the terminology outlined in the notes at the start of this blogpost.

I researched about National Amusements and learned that the  conglomerate owns Paramount, CBS and MTV. They showcase cinemas and have a distribution with Nickelodeon. 

2) Do you agree that governments should prevent media conglomerates from becoming too dominant? Write an argument that looks at both sides of this debate.

I agree that governments should prevent media conglomerates from becoming too dominant because the conglomerate that controls most of the media could lead to limited perspectives and ideas, leading to a biased view on topics ang ignoring other side of the point. The idea of having excessive dominance over subsidiaries could lead to risks such as not being diverse and could lead to losing talents and employees due to criticisms.

Media Magazine reading and questions

Media Magazine 52 has a good feature on the changing relationship between audiences and institutions in the digital age. Go to our Media Magazine archive, click on MM52 and scroll to page 9 to read the article 'Two Key Concepts: The Relationship Between Audience and Institution'.

1) Briefly describe the production, promotion and distribution process for media companies.

The production process provides audiences with the media products they want. 

The promotion process researches and identifies the target audience for the product, and uses advertising and marketing strategies to inform and persuade them of the value of the media product. 

The distribution process uses the most appropriate methods for getting the product to the audience and making it as easy as possible for them to access it.

2) What are the different funding models for media institutions?

The different models for media institutions are BBC, ITV, Sky One, The Mail One and Sony.

3) The article gives a lot of examples of major media brands and companies. Choose three examples from the article and summarise what the writer is saying about each of them. 

• ITV relies on income generally by advertisers. This mean that appeal to a large audience are seen as more valuable than ones with smaller niche audience.
• Disney is a family-friendly brand that focuses on children's entertainment. It has built on its original reputation for animation created in the early 20th century. They also constructed merchandising and branded products, including Disneyland and Disney princess franchise. This allowed parents to feel reassured as Disney keeps on producing media products to keep their child entertained.
• Marvel is associated with a superhero genre which was developed from a popular original comic book. The Marvel superhero films contain violence but also provides the mainstream audience the values around duty and personal responsibility.

4) What examples are provided of the new business models media companies have had to adopt due to changes in technology and distribution?

• Movie industry has invested enormous sums of money into 3D technology, in order to encourage audiences into cinemas.
• The BBC is reconsidering its funding structure now on-demand viewing is becoming more popular.
• Some online newspapers now require audiences to subscribe to access their content or provide premium content to those who pay for mobile apps.
• Advertisers find it harder to target audiences via traditional media (TV and magazines, for example) and alternative strategies are employed, for instance, using targeted marketing based on social media data-mining (see Nick Lacey’s article in this issue), or sponsoring YouTube stars to include their products in their lifestyle blogs.

5) Re-read the section on 'The Future'. What examples are discussed of technology companies becoming major media institutions?

• Google now owns YouTube, and has revolutionised the way we access music and moving-image entertainment and information.
• Amazon, Netflix and Yahoo now create, produce and ‘broadcast’ their own TV shows, such as Transparent, Orange is the New Black and Community.
• Facebook has bought the virtual reality technology Oculus Rift (see MM51); one potential benefit for audiences is that it allows users to ‘attend’ and ‘experience’ events without leaving their own homes.

6) Do you agree with the view that traditional media institutions are struggling to survive?

Yes, I agree that the traditional media institutions are struggling to survive because younger audiences are dominating the media and they would prefer for the media institutions to be more modern and something that they would understand. This leads the traditional media institutions to struggle as there's more change in the generation and less older audiences who would be interested in the traditional media are not using the social media platform. They have struggles in understanding how the media works or they are used to using newspapers and magazines.

7) How might diversification or vertical integration help companies to survive and thrive in a rapidly changing media landscape? 

The diversification or vertical integration helps companies to survive and thrive in a rapidly changing media landscape by giving the larger media a range of diverse media production and building financial resilience. They also mitigate the risks of the landscape by reducing their dependence on a single conglomerate, making them less vulnerable to market fluctuations or the dominance of tech giants.

8) How do YOU see the relationship between audience and institution in the future? Will audiences gain increasing power or will the major global media conglomerates maintain their control?

The relationship between audiences and institution would change significantly, shifting the producers ideas about media products to depend and be based on what the audiences' psychographics are. This allows audiences to gain power over media conglomerates because these conglomerates gain their profit from producing media products that audiences would want to use.