The Media Industry Of Capturing A Mass Audience - 1865 Words

The mass media system has weathered repeated significant change with the coming of increasingly sophisticated technologies—from the penny press newspaper to mass marketed books and mass circulated magazines, motion pictures, sound recordings, radio, television with the combination of news and entertainment, moving images, and sound—all for free. Furthermore, the internet, World Wide Web, and mobile technologies emerged causing all media industries to face overwhelming alterations in how they are structured and do business, the nature of their content, and how they interact with and respond to their audience. â€Å"Fifteen years ago the four major broadcast networks commanded 61% of all television viewing. Today their share hovers around 30%.†¦show more content†¦Concentration of media ownership refers to the process where progressively fewer individuals or organizations control increasing shares of the mass media, further impacting the consumers of media becau se a lack of people in control of what is consumed every day leads to a lack of diversity in the opinions consumers are forced to believe. Without a diversity of viewpoints, the public will not be able to make up their own minds. This causes a loss of citizen access to information and the downfall of political and social participation. In relation to the concentration of media ownership is globalization, the process of multinational conglomerates performing the lion’s share of media acquisitions, potentially leading to a bias and misplaced priorities. The last of the forces is hypercommercialism, the rise in the number of commercial minutes in a typical broadcast or cable show used to recoup the costs involved in acquiring numerous media outlets, domestic and international, and of reaching an increasingly fragmented audience; the selling of advertisements on existing and new media and identifying additional ways to combine content and commercials are the two most common strat egies. This not only leads to consumers complaining that there are too many digital ads, but also leads to the obvious overuse of product placement and brand entertainment,