Media Industries and Audiences

Newspapers and technological change:

Who owns the Daily Mail: Lord Rothermere
Who owns the Telegraph: The Barclay Brothers

Print media is in decline , the extent of that change is reflected in the growth of on-line versions as indicated below

	Total readership	Print sales	PC readership	Mobile readership
The sun	31,859	10,123 (31%)	2780 (9%)	18,956       (60%)
The Daily Mirror	27,910	5,731 (21%)	4,948 (18%)	17,231 (61%)
The Telegraph	26,348	3,848 (15%)	7,340 (28%)	15,160 (57%)

Print news: Historically news paper production was expensive.

• The production of the News was in the hands of newspaper journalists editors and printers
• Distribution of the news occurred when newspapers sent their newspapers to Newsagents via organisations who had some control over which publications were published, but had no control over content
• Newsagents and retailers sold the newspapers to the public (circulation)
• Producers control news content – this is an important issue as journalists and news editors are expected to adhere to professional standards.

Online:  

• Distribution and circulation are combined via websites or social media
• News shelf life’s with the onset of Online are now short. With news exclusives being used (in Print media) to sell  news.   They are now less valuable as the news cycle has shortened with Online News, where an exclusive can be picked up by the competition and recycled instantly.  
• News Organisations now rely on formats such as gossip, lifestyle journalism and sports journalism to minimise risk.

   Telegraph Online Today:

Daily Mail Today:

   The significance of issues of ownership and economic factors, including the range of each newspaper’s print and online content:

Media theory Curran and Seaton:  Argue that media industries follow a capitalist pattern of increasing concentration of ownership in fewer and fewer hands.  

     This leads to a narrowing of the range of opinions represented in the pursuit of profit at the expense of quality and creativity. 

     Curran and Seaton’s theory relates to Profit and Power: 

•     With the concentration of newspaper’s in fewer hands (oligarchies) enables Newspapers to increase profits through increased readership.
•      With the narrowing of choice to few Newspaper groups the owners of the Press groups the Press Barons (see below) or Elites have the opportunity to represent their political perspectives.
•     This applies to the narrow range of political opinions expressed by British Newspapers with a bias to Pro capitalism
•     The reason why Press barons own Newspapers is to achieve status and to wield political power.

     Who Are The Press Barons?
     Almost 78 per cent of our press is owned by a handful of mostly foreign-based billionaires.

•     Over a quarter (27.3 per cent) of the press is owned by Lord Rothermere (Daily Mail)
•     24.9 per cent by Rupert Murdoch  (News International, The Sun, The Times) – between them these two men have over 50 per cent of the printed press.

    Telegraph is the Telegraph Group of whom the major shareholder is The Barclay Brothers (multi-millionaires/press barons).

    Economic factors:
    
    Print Media:

•      Historically Print media had a strong editorial heritage with professional standards leading to serious journalism.  
•     This was funded through the cost of the newspaper.

    Online media:

•     With the decline in Newspaper sales there has been a decline in the quality of journalism where serious journalism such as international news and investigative reporting have been reduced for cost reasons
•     Advertising revenue from print journalism has moved to Online media such as Google and Facebook. Today Daily Mail advertised a car brand and Cancer Research and Telegraph advertised a cruise holiday. 
•     There has been a rise in cheaper journalism in the form of opinion, celebrity reporting, lifestyle journalism and sport

The use of online monetization features such as paywalls, subscriptions and games. 

Papers like the Guardian use paywalls to get readers to subscribe in order to read full articles and they offer a free 30 day trial to encourage readers to give it a go. 

      News Industries funding:

•     Newspapers relied on circulation and advertising for revenue, Tabloid Newspapers had a larger circulation but their working class audiences were less attractive to advertisers so the Tabloids relied more on cover price.
•     Broadsheet Newspapers had smaller circulations and an attractive upmarket audience and relied more on advertising.

   Newspapers now have a wide range of funding sources:

•     The Daily Mail has a cover price of £ 0.65 which is relatively low in order to boost its circulation.
•     Some Newspapers rely entirely on advertising as they are given away (to boost circulation and attract advertising) for Free such as the Metro
•     The Daily Telegraph retails for £1.40 and applies a Paywall £3.00 per week to generate income
•     The Guardian retails for £2.20 and relies on voluntary donations for online news and now has 800,000 paying supporters
•     Some newspapers gain revenue from advertising space where Print was traditionally more lucrative than online advertising, however with the decline in print sales online is increasingly more important especially as Online has a global audience.

The content and appeal of each of the set products and how this is used to target,

reach and address different audiences:

Broadsheet newspapers	The Guardian, Telegraph and Times newspapers have markedly upmarket audiences and more London based readers
Redtop tabloids	The Sun and the Mirror have markedly down-market audiences and the fewest London Based readers
Daily Mail	Daily Mail has the most female and oldest audience of all newspapers and the most evenly spread readership in terms of social class.
Daily Telegraph	Has the oldest audience of the broadsheets.

  

    Daily Mail Demographic: 45% readers are 65+ and the majority (52.5%) of readers are female. Telegraph is 56% men.

    The content of the newspapers will reflect the social make-up of their audiences.  The Daily Mail for example has sections which reflect the lifestyle of its audience. The Femail section on Thursdays has a tab in the Mail – Online and addressees its female audience with topics similar to lifestyle magazines such as health food,, fashion and beauty. The newspaper reflects its social class by including sensationalist celebrity coverage and a fairly detailed business section.

     The Mail online addresses audiences quite differently to its print sister as the style is targeted towards a younger audience and the contentment covers more celebrity gossip and international stories as its audience is much more global.

     The Telegraph addresses their audience in a way that focuses more on international news and serious politics as is reflected by its Broadsheet heritage
      
     There's a lot of celebrity gossip on the Daily Mail, such as break ups and celeb outfits which could be seen as targeted towards women. Papers like the telegraph and guardian focus more on politics and as the elderly focus on it.

     how audience may interpret the same media in different ways

                                                                                                                                                        S. Hall’s Reception theory

The theory suggests that: When a producer constructs a text it is encoded with a meaning or message that the producer wishes to convey to the audience

•  In some instances audiences will correctly decode the message or meaning and understand what the producer was trying to say
•  In some instances the audience will either reject or fail to correctly understand the message

media producers encode ‘preferred meanings’ into texts, but these texts may be ‘read’ by their audiences in a number of different ways:

• The dominant position: a ‘preferred reading’ that accepts the text’s messages and the ideological assumptions behind the messages

•  The negotiated position: the reader accepts the text’s ideological assumptions, but disagrees with aspects of the messages, so negotiates the meaning to fit with their ‘lived experience’

•  The oppositional reading: the reader rejects both the overt message and its underlying ideological assumptions.

  the impact of the regulatory framework on the newspaper industry and the impact of online news and social and participatory media on regulation. 

The Print Press is regulated by the Independent Press Standards Organisation (IPSO)
The Press in principle is self-regulated by this body however some organisations are not affiliated (Guardian)

Newspapers can in principle be sued through Britain’s libel laws where journalists have to prove that what they have written is true to win cases.

Online news is not regulated at all  (unless online newspapers choose to sign up to a regulator such as IPSO.

This has provided many online news providers a loop=hole that they can publish untruths with impunity (can’t be sued)

The issue of an unregulated Press is a key issue following the proven Russian interference in the 2016 Presidential elections.

Following an enquiry Facebook has acknowledged the need to employ content reviewers in order to prevent the release of fake news.