COM 107- Exam 2

News Desert

A community where residents have very limited access to credible or comprehensive local news

• National/cable news typically still available

Partisan Press

Political papers that pushed the strategy of the political group that financed the paper.

• One of 2 types of early newspapers/emergence stage

Penny Press

Inexpensive (penny) newspapers made possible through cheaper, machine-made paper.

• Led to innovations in news media

  • Separated commentary from news reporting, leading to more advertising

Wire Service

Began as commercial organizations that relayed news stories & information around the country and world using telegraph lines.

• First one: associated press

• Allowed news to travel rapidly from coast-to-coast
  

Yellow Journalism

Emphasis on sensational or overly dramatic stories & early in-depth “detective” stories.

• Lead to the creation of investigative journalism

• Named because of the conflict between two newspapers over the ownership of the character “Yellow Kid”

• Pulitzer: New York World and Hearst: New York Journal

Investigative Journalism

News stories that hunt out and expose corruption, particularly in business and government

• Watchdog role, 4th estate

Objective Journalism

Impartial news, or news that appears not to take sides.

• Championed by Adolph Ochs, former owner of the New York Times

• Satisfied all clients and increased market base

• Distinguishes factual reports from opinion columns

• Inverted-pyramid style

Inverted-pyramid style

In objective journalism, modern reports strive to maintain a neutral attitude toward the events they cover; also search out competing points of view among sources for a story

• Begin w/ the most dramatic or newsworthy info

• Then narrow down the details

Interpretive Journalism

Model of journalism that revisits the analytical function of news. Aims to explain key issues or events and place them in a broader historical or social context.

• Based on objective journalism

• Newspapers forced to embrace analysis due to broadcast radio

  • Radio broadcasts use objective print journalism to make commentary , pushing some journalists to write interpretive stories to compete

Literary Journalism

Adapted fictional techniques to non-fiction material and in-depth reporting.

• Content of objective journalism combined with subjective reality of the novel

• Often utilized when writing about cultural trends and societal issues

Citizen Journalism

Activists and concerned citizens who use the internet and social media to disseminate news and information.

Consensus-oriented Journalism

When papers, typically smaller non-daily papers, promote social and economic harmony in their communities.

• Focus on local schools, social events, town government, property crimes, and zoning issues

• Careful not to offend local advertisers

Conflict-oriented Journalism

When national and metro dailies primarily cover events, issues, or experiments that deviate from social norms in front-page news.

• Journalists see themselves as observers who monitor their city’s institutions and problems

Verticals

Niche-interest digital sites that bundle together related content.

• strategy to reinvent newspapers

Newspaper chains

A company that owns several newspapers throughout the country.

• Declined due a dip in newspaper circulation and ad sales - hedge funds and private investors take over- majorly cut staff to increase profits

7 factors for newspaper success

Local ownership

Commitment to community

Diversified business

Health of the local economy

Non-profit status

Little to no reduction of newsroom staff

No competing local media

Pulitzer

• Owned New York World and Post-Dispatch

• Yellow Journalism

• Ran stories that featured sex and sin, satirized the upper class

• Increased migrant and women reader base

• Nellie Bly, investigated inhuman conditions of a women’s asylum

  • investigative journalism

Hearst

• Owner of the New York Journal

• Focused on lurid, sensational stories

• Appealed to immigrant readers

• Faked interviews, pictures, and encouraged conflicts to create stories

• Readership soared among the working class

• Yellow Journalism

Emergence stage of Newspaper

Colonial era newspapers

• expensive, for elite class

• Partisan press

• Ad space not major source of revenue yet

Entrepreneurial Stage of newspaper

• Extremely partisan (insulting and rude)

• Commercial newspaper for businessmen and literate elites emerge

• Start of newspapers seeking advertisers

Mass Medium Stage of Newspaper

Invention of the steam powered printing press facilitates cheaper newspaper

• Penny press- allows more people to afford papers

• Yellow journalism

• Competing models of journalism

Convergence stage of journalism

Newspapers struggle

• Start to take advantage of the internet’s flexibility

• Advances have not yet paid off

  • Some papers try to establish paywall

Space Broker

Individual who purchased space in newspapers and sold it to various merchants

• First advertising agencies

• Emergence stage

N.W. Ayer & Son

The first full service ad agency

• Entrepreneurial stage

• Worked for advertisers rather than newspapers

Mega-agencies

Large ad firms that form when several agencies merge and maintain regional offices worldwide.

• Wide range of services, more impersonal

Boutique Agencies

Small agencies that devote their effort to a small number of clients.

• More personal services

Values and Lifestyles (VALS)

A market research strategy that divides consumers into types and measures psychological factors, including how consumers think and feel about products and how they achieve (or don’t achieve) the lifestyles to which they aspire.

• Market research- Advertising department

• Encourages advertisers to vary their sales strategies to find market niches

Product Placement

The paid appearance of particular goods in a narrative or scene.

Patent Medicines

Proprietary medicines often sold with false claims about their curative abilities.

• One major source of ad revenue for early ad agencies

Commercial Speech

Any print or broadcast expression for which a fee is charged to organizations and individuals buying time or space in the mass media.

• Right to circulate goods, services, and images in the marketplace of products

Association principle

A widely used persuasive technique that associates a product with a positive cultural value or image- even if it has little connection to the product.

Persuasive techniques of advertising

Famous person testimonial

Plain folks pitch

Snob-appeal approach

Bandwagon effect

Hidden-fear appeal

Major advertising departments

Account management-

Finding clients and maintaining relationships

Account planning-

Strategy development

Market research-

Assess behaviors of consumers

• VALS

Creative development-

actually making the ad

Media coordination-

• Media planners- Analyze the effectiveness of different media channels

• Media buyer- Negotiate rates and place ads

Advantages of online marketing

Targeted advertisements

• data collection through cookies and online surveys

• Predictive marketing

• precisely targeted, easily measured

Online privacy

Many websites or apps have third party applications that collect private data without consumer knowledge.

Stakeholder

In public relations, people who have an interest in what is happening regarding a particular issue, event, or occurrence.

Press release

Announcements written in the style of news reports that present new information about an individual, a company, or an organization and pitch a story to the news media.

• Can also be in video form

• News publishers often pic and choose relevant information from press releases

Propaganda

Communication strategically placed, either as advertising or publicity, to gain public support for a special issue, program, or policy, such as a nation’s war effort.

• Part of PR and Advertising

Greenwashing

Unfair or deceptive acts or practices in environmental marketing

• Making products seem more environmentally friendly than they are

• PR?

Astroturf lobbying

Phony grassroots public affairs campaigns engineered by PR firms.

• Center For Consumer Freedom funded by the restaurant, food, tobacco, and alcohol industry

Pseudo event

Any event staged for the sole purpose of generated press coverage.

• Red carpets, press conferences, etc.

• PR

Press agent

First PR practioners, those who sought to advance a client’s image through media exposure, primarily stunts staged for newpapers.

• Emergence stage

• P.T. Barnum

Principles of Effective Crisis Communication

Be First-

• The first source of information often becomes the preferred source

Be Right-

• Accuracy establishes credibility

Be Credible-

• Honesty and truthfulness should not be compromised during crises

Express Empathy-

• Suffering should be acknowledged in words. Address what people are feeling.

Promote Action-

• Giving people meaningful things to do calms anxiety, helps restore order, and promotes a restored sense of control

Show Respect-

• Respectful communication is particularly important when people feel vulnerable, promoting cooperation and rapport

P.T. Barnum

Circus owner who used gross exaggeration, fraudulent stories, and staged events to secure news coverage.

• One of the earliest known people to use the media for promotion

• Publicity

• Ex. paraded an elephant through a city

Buffalo Bill

Ran a travelling show- “Buffalo Bill’s Wild West and Congress of Rough Riders of the World.”

• Promoted show through promotional newspaper stories, magazine articles and ads, dime novels, theatre marquees, poster art, and early films

• Publicity

Ivy Ledbetter Lee

• Initially worked for the NYT

  • roots in “objective journalism”

• Believed an open, honest relationship between business and the press would lead to a more favorable public image.

  • Pennsylvania Railroad Calamity

  • First press release

• Wrote principles of public relations: Declaration of Principles

• Cleaned up the image of Rockefeller after an clash between union members and the company resulted multiple deaths.

  • photo ops

  • publicized philanthropy

Edward Bernays

• Applied psychology to PR

• Developed WW1 propaganda

• Taught the first PR class and wrote the first textbook

• Believed it was important for “experts” and leaders to control the direction of American society

  • PR as an “engineering of consent”

Doris Fleischman

• Women’s Suffragist

• Early feminist

• Played a huge role in building the Bernays empire

  • Co-owned firm, ghost wrote speeches and strategy papers delivered in her husband’s name

Flack

Derogatory slag for a press agent

• Comes from flak, protective military jacket. Symbolizes for journalists the protective barrier PR agents insert between clients and the press.

• Contradicts journalism’s dependence on PR people for story ideas, and PR’s dependence on journalists for publicity

Imagined Communities

Members of a socially constructed group rather than as individuals with only local or regional identities

• Magazines helped establish this concept

Muckrakers

Broad term for investigative journalists

• Called this because they mostly investigated companies and politicians, sorting through useless “muck” to find information

• Originally a derogatory term

Photojournalism

The use of photos to document the rhythms of daily life

• Helped popularize general interest magazines, giving them a visual advantage over radio

Pass-along readership

The total number of people who come into contact with a single copy of a magazine

• Passing one magazine from person to person

• Life magazine achieved this status through photojournalism

Supermarket tabloids

Newspapers that feature bizarre human-interest stories, gruesome murder accounts, unexplained phenomena stories, and malicious celebrity gossip.

• originally mean to “fight for the rights of man”- turned to gore formula for profit

• Many current general interest magazines adopt the tabloid style in the 80s

Branded content

Specialized print, online, or video content produced and funded by individual advertisers.

Postal Act of 1879

Lowered postal rates for magazines, reducing distribution costs. Facilitate mass communication phase of magazines.

Advertising effects on Editorial

The cozy relationship some advertisers and magazines have led to a decline in investigative reporting.

Early stages of magazines vs. early stages of newspaper

Magazines: Documented early U.S. life

Reprinted literary work from abroad

Broader appeal

Pricier than newspaper

Newspaper: Partisan press

Funded by partisan entities, read by members of those parties

Grew faster than magazines

Both were for elites, by elites. Had early advertisers.

Rise and fall of general interest magazines

Rise:

Magazines like the Saturday Evening Post, Reader’s Digest, Time, and Life grow using photojournalism, fiction pieces, condensed articles from other magazines, and human-interest pieces. (Life magazine most savvy in photojournalism, pass-along readership)

Fall:

Rising postal costs, falling ad revenues, an most importantly television contribute to the fall of general interest magazines. Magazines sold for less than the cost of production, funded by advertisers, but those advertisers move to television.

Mary Pickford

Early movie star, elevated the financial status and professional role of film actors. Founded United Artists, a more progressive studio.

Block booking

Theaters were forced to rent several “B movies” in order to gain access to “A movies"."

• Outlawed for being monopolistic

• Allowed studios to market test new actors with little financial risk and kept other smaller studios from being shown in theaters.

Genre

Different categories of media with similar conventions, characters, or themes.

Served two functions in the early studio system:

• Product standardization

  • Made product efficient and more predictable for consumers

• Product differentiation

  • Offers products distinct from competitors and targeted specific consumers

Studio system

An arrangement in which five powerful movie studios took control of multiple aspects of the film industry.

• Paramount (first to move out west)

• Warner Bros

• MGM

• 20th Century Fox (first to move out west)

• RKO Radio

Edison’s Trust

A “cartel” of film producers oversaw by Thomas Edison, attempted to control the film industry by overseeing the patents on key film technologies and signing an exclusive deal with George Eastman, who agreed to supply movie film only to Trust-approved companies.

• Studios move west to escape, being able to easily escape to Mexico if they got in legal trouble.

  • Stayed because of the year-round mild weather, cheap labor, and diverse scenery

Paramount decision

Forced film studios to gradually divest themselves of their theaters and outlawed block booking.

Nickelodeon

Nickel+theater. Affordable makeshift theaters that grew in popularity with working-class people and immigrants.

Tentpoles

Movies that studios bank on being hits to offset losses on riskier films.

• Franchise reliance

Narrative in film

Movies started off as a novelty, but became an industry when narrative was introduced.

• Voyage to the Moon one of the first narrative movies, using editing, camera tricks, and special effects to engage the audience.

Netflix disruption in the film industry

Introduces streaming- People go to theaters less and film studios start releasing films with theater and streaming releases simultaneously.

Stereo

the recording of two separate channels, or tracks, of sound that enabled more natural sound distribution

Analog recording

captures the fluctuations of sound waves and stores those signals in a record’s grooves or a tape’s continuous stream of magnetized particles

Digital recording

translates sound waves into binary on-off pulses and stores that information as numerical code.

Music oligopoly

music industry dominated by three companies, Universal, Warner, and Sony. Independents on the rise.

Royalties

Master recording royalties- The music label retains the bulk of the profits from a recording but pays the artist/band royalties (a percentage of the profits) as determined by the artist’s/band’s contract with the label.

Public Performance royalties- These are royalties paid out to songwriters and their publishers when music (live or recorded) is played publicly on radio; on television (for example, a performance on Saturday Night Live); streaming; or in stores, bars, restaurants, and even stadiums and arenas.

Mechanical royalties- These are royalties paid automatically to songwriters and publishers when music is sold or streamed, and the royalty rate is always 9.1 cents per song.

Synchronization royalties- These royalties are for the use of music in a film, TV show, or commercial. Film directors or TV producers must get permission (a “sync” license) and pay a negotiated rate before they can use the music. This royalty is split between the artist and the label (if there is one) and songwriters.

Impact of digital media on music industry

Digital media has allowed for indie record label to have a resurgence, industry no longer relies on radio airplay and retail store sales.