TEXTBOOK: Ch. 2: Convergence and the Reshaping of Mass communication:

The Interview

"____________________" had day-and-date release.

*audience fragmentation* *narrowcasting*; *niche marketing*; *targeting*

Audience Fragmentation: The nature of the other partner in the mass communication process is changing too. Individual segments of the audience are becoming more narrowly defined; the audience itself is less of a mass audience. This is *______________________________*. Before the advent of television, radio and magazines were national media. Big national radio networks brought news and entertainment to the entire country. Magazines such as "Life," "Look," and the "Saturday Evening Post" once offered limited text and many pictures to a national audience. But television could do these things better. It was radio with pictures; it was magazines with motion. To survive, radio and magazines were forced to find new functions. No longer able to compete on a mass scale, these media targeted smaller audiences that were alike in some important characteristic and therefore more attractive to specific advertisers. So now we have magazines such as "Psychology Today" and "Brides," and radio station formats such as "country," "Urban," and "Lithuanian". This phenomenon is known as *_________________________*, *_____________________________*, or *___________________________*.

*conglomeration* *news deserts* *economies of scale*

Changes: Concentration of Ownership and Conglomeration: Ownership of media companies is increasingly concentrated in fewer and fewer hands. Through mergers, acquisitions, buyouts, and hostile takeovers, a very small number of large conglomerates is coming to own more and more of the world's media outlets. For example, in 2015 telecommunication conglomerate AT&T acquired satellite TV provider DirecTV for $49 billion, and cable company Charter Communications acquired Time Warner Cable for $57 billion. In 2016, another telecom giant, Verizon, bought Yahoo and its many Web brands (TechCrunch, Huffington Post, Flickr, and Tumblr, to name just a few) for nearly $5 billion; Internet giant Microsoft bought LinkedIN for $26 billion; and AT&T, the country's second-largest wireless carrier, was back in the acquisition market, bidding $85 billion for the multinational media and entertainment conglomerate Time Warner and its holdings such as HBO, CNN, Bleacher Reports, DC Comics, and the Warner Bros. movie studio. Media observer Ben Bandikian reported that in 1997 the number of media corporations with "dominant power in society" was 10. Today 6 companies - Comcast, News Corp., Disney, Viacom, Time Warner, and CBS - own 90% of the media content consumed by Americans. This concentration of ownership is more than an economic issue. It is a fundamental principle of our democracy that we have a right to information from a wide diversity of viewpoints so that we can make up our own minds. Democracy - rule by the people - requires an independent media. This is the crux of Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black's eloquent defense of a vibrant media in his 1945 "Associated Press v. U.S. decision": "The First Amendment rests on the assumption that the widest possible dissemination of information from diverse and antagonistic sources is essential to the welfare of the public, that a free press is a condition of a free society." Closely related to concentration is *____________________________*, the increase in the ownership of media outlets by larger, non media companies. The threat is clear, explained Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders: "What you've got today...is about a half a dozen major media conglomerates that own and control the distribution of the information that the American people receive. This is a massive concentration of control. And what is never discussed about this is, What is the goal of these major media conglomerates? Is it to educate the American people? Is it to give the 5 sides of the issue? No. Their function as major media conglomerates, owned by very large financial interests, is to make as much money as they possibly can...This is a disaster for democracy." But the conflict of interest between profit and public service is only one presumed problem with conglomeration. The other is the dominance of a bottom-line mentality and its inevitable degradation of media content. "Variety's" Peter Bart explains that the "corporate giants" that own media companies are in a "race for consolidation [that] continues to accelerate, burying movies, magazines, books, and music under still more layers of corporate number-crunchers." Wall Street, he argues, favors risk-free companies, whether they are media outlets or supermarkets. Bart was speaking of media in general. As for journalism, former CBS anchor Dan Rather added, "The larger the entities that own and control the news operations, the more distant they become". New York University law professor Burt Neuborne warned: "The press has been subsumed into a market psychology, because they are now owned by large conglomerates, of which they are simply a piece. And they (news organizations) are expected to contribute their piece of the profit to the larger pie. You don't have people controlling the press anymore with a fervent sense of responsibility to the First Amendment. Concentrating on who's sleeping with whom, on sensationalism, is concentrating on essentially irrelevant issues." Evidence for Professor Neuborne's appraisal abounds. In 1982, 60% of American journalists said they had "almost complete freedom" in selecting the stories they would cover. Now, only 34% say they can make that claim. The number of full-time statehouse newspaper reporters fell by more than 1/3 between 2003 and 2014. Only 164 full-time newspaper journalists now report on the bills, debates, possible corruption, and politicians in the nation's 50 state capitals. Only 21 of 50 states currently have even one daily newspaper reporter assigned to Washington, DC, to cover Congress. This produces *_________________*, communities starved for news vital to their existences. There is social scientific evidence that this "impoverishment of local political news in recent years is driving down citizen engagement," producing voters who are less politically active, less knowledgable about political candidates, and less likely to vote. And in 2015, the hottest year in recorded history, a year that saw a dramatic increase in America's level of income inequality, and a year in which there were several high-profile police shootings of young African American men and a number of deadly terrorist attacks at home and across the globe, the most-reported news story on the 3 largest commercial television networks - ABC, CBS, and NBC - was winter weather, not climate change, not the economy, and not the world's refugee crisis. There are, however, positive observations on concentration and conglomeration. Many industry professionals argue that concentration and conglomeration are not only inevitable but necessary in a telecommunications environment that is increasingly fragmented and internationalized; companies must maximize their number of outlets to reach as much of the divided and far-flung audience as possible, If they do not, they will become financially insecure, and that is an even greater threat to free and effective mediated communication because advertisers and other well-monied forces will have increased influence over them. Another defense of concentration and conglomeration has to do with *__________________________*; that is, bigger can in fact sometimes be better because the relative cost of an operation's output declines as the size of that endeavor grows. For example, the cost of collecting the news or producing a television program does not increase significantly when that news report or television program is distributed over 2 outlets, 20 outlets, or 100 outlets. The additional revenues from these other points of distribution can then be plowed back into even better news and programming. In the case of conglomeration, the parallel argument is that revenues from a conglomerate's non media enterprises can be used to support quality work by its media companies.

*meme*

Developing Media Literacy Skills: Making Our Way in the Meme Culture: At the end of his 1967 book "The Selfish Gene," noted evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins introduced the term "meme." He likened them to genes, "Memes propagate themselves in the meme pool by leaping from brain to brain via a process which, in the broad sense, can be called imitation." He continued his analogy, arguing that, like genes, memes compete with each other for limited resources; memes compete for attention, because without attention they cease to be. And while he was speaking of any idea that spreads from person to person in a culture, he came to accept the Internet-based meaning of *_________*, an online idea or image that is repeatedly copied, manipulated, and shared. "The meaning is not that far away from the original. it's anything that goes viral," Dawkins said. "In the original introduction to the word "meme"...I did actually use the metaphor of a virus. So when anybody talks about something going viral on the Internet, that is exactly what a meme is." For Professor Dawkins, memes were how ideas come into being, are propagated, and (if they survive) serve their host, the culture in which they flourish. But what of Internet memes specifically? Critics of meme culture argue that the ideas most likely to be spread - go viral - are the ones most guaranteed to attract attention. So we spend (or possibly waste) time on epic fail videos and funny cat pictures with oddly spelled slogans (the I Can Has Cheezburger Meme network has hundreds of millions go page and video views each month.) But maybe we aren't wasting time. Maybe we're building community by creating, viewing, and sharing ideas. "My generation turns to memes...so that we can connect and relate," wrote millennial college student Ashley Perling. But, ask critics, what kind of meaningful community can be built around memes like My Food Looks Funny and You're Doing It Wrong? But maybe Perling is right; as we all learned in grammar school, sharing "is" caring. Still, unlike the traditional media that carry cultural ideas, bound as they are by economic and ethical considerations, memes "represent a new 'Wild West' in entertainment, where account holders, sometimes having millions of followers, can simply post whatever they want with little review or backlash...Memes succeed in condensing [ideas] into bite-size humor, for all to find acceptable and swallow without protest." After a;;, they're just jokes. So because they attract more life-sustaining attention than kindness and thoughtfulness, racist and misogynistic memes flourish. Meme culture became especially relevant during the 2016 presidential election when memes were created to attack both major candidates. Social media saw endless variations of Lock Her Up and Trump's Taco Bowl memes, as well as memes consisting of fabricated quotes and figures that sought to sway voters. The platform of then-candidate Donald-Trump largely consisted of securing the U.S. southern border, deporting illegal immigrants, and monitoring or completely halting the immigration of any Muslims into the U.S, all promises that appealed to the alt-right, a group of white nationalists who created the benign-sounding name in an attempt to normalize their agenda. They embraced Trump as their candidate and utilized meme culture to spread their messages widely, most notably with Pepe the Frog memes The Pepe the Frog cartoon, originally created in 2005 by artists Matt Furie and a hit meme subject on its own for years, was appropriated by white nationalists in 2016. Used in this racist manner, Pepe was declared a hate symbol by the Anti-Defamation League. Sufficiently dismayed by its vile use, Furie killed off Pepe from his comic series in 2017. However, the dark side of memes is that once in the culture, no one can control their use; even seemingly harmless or humorous images can spread hateful or inaccurate messages. Memes survive because "we" spread them. They attract our attention, and we send them on to attract the attention of others. But maybe this is how it should be in our new era of mass communication. We now have the opportunity to express ourselves, however seriously or frivolously, to offer our own point of view, however well-founded or off-the-wall, all without someone else vetting us, telling us we matter. This is the Internet's great gift to mass communication. But it is its greatest challenge. What do we do with this immense freedom and the power it grants each of us? As a media-literate individual, you understand and respect the power of media messages and you know that media content is a text providing insight into our culture and our lives. So the choice is yours: how will you use the Internet and social media? Memes are easy and fun; you are free to create and share them, to have a laugh, to skewer or honor. But the Internet and social media are also sites for more meaningful personal and cultural expression. You are free to undertake that more valuable, if a bit more difficult, work. What will you do? This question and some answers run throughout this text; the lessons you draw from what you read will be your own.

*hypercommercialism*

Hypercommercialism: The costs involved in acquiring numerous or large media outlets, domestic and international, and of reaching an increasingly fragmented audience must be recouped somehow. Selling more advertising on existing and new media and identifying additional ways to combine content and commercials are the 2 most common strategies. This leads to *_____________________________*. The rise in the number of commercial minutes in a typical broadcast television show is evident to most viewers, as more than 17% of a prime-time broadcast network hour is devoted to commercials. Cable channels devote 21% of their program hour to commercials, in part by speeding up the video to make more commercial time available. Hypercommericalization has hit the Internet as well, as you surely know as you try to separate the brand tweets from those of the real people you follow on Twitter and work to block the endless commercials on your Facebook news feed.

fragmented; high

The Good News for Media Industries: Indeed, what this turmoil indicates is that the challenge facing the traditional media industries today is how to capture a mass audience now __________________ into millions of niches, that is, into increasingly smaller subaudiences. What is clear is that although we are consuming media in new and different ways, our levels of consumption are at an all-time _______.

*product placement* *brand entertainment* *payola*

The sheer growth in the amount of advertising is one troublesome aspect of hyper commercialism. But for many observers, the increased mixing of commercial and noncommercial media content is even more troubling. Of course, not everyone has a problem with this practice. Angela Courtin, chief marketing officer of movie and television studio Relativity Media, explains, "We have come to an intersection of media and content where marketing is content and content is marketing." What do you think of these "intersections"? A typical prime-time unscripted program, for example "The Voice" has more than 14 minutes of product placement and more than 15 minutes of actual commercial breaks, meaning that one-half of its hour is devoted to promotion. Tinder shows up regularly on "The Mindy Project"; the vice-principal on "The Fosters" loves the new school tablets so much she calls them by their full name, "the Kindle Paperwhite e-reader." The star of "Jane the Virgin" is a regular at Target, and whenever a character on any show on the FX cable channel has a beer, it's a MillerCoors product. So ubiquitous has this *_____________________* - the integration, for a fee, of specific branded products into media content - become, that the Writers Guild of America demands additional compensation for writing what are, in effect, commercials. The producers' responses that product placement is not a commercial; rather, it represents a new form of content, *_______________________* - when brands are, in fact, part of and essential to the program. Toyota, Kraft Foods, Chase credit cards, and Cigna insurance are recurring "characters" on "Top Chef." Musical artists not only take payment to include brands in their songs; some, for example, Mariah Carey, not integrate brands into their CD booklets. Music channel Vevo retroactively inserts products into already existing music videos. Celebrities like Rihanna, Kylie Jenner, and "Teen Mom" star Chelsea Houska accept payments from brands to push their wares on Instagram. "Time" and "Sports Illustrated" magazines run ads on their covers, and many e-books come not only with products integrated into their story lines but also with links to the sponsors' websites. Sometimes hypercommericalism involves direct payments of cash in exchange for exposure rather than "mere" branding. Many television stations around the country, for example Channels 17 and 99 in Naperville, Illinois, sell entire segments of their morning news and talk shows to local businesses. Many radio stations now accept payment from record promoters to play their songs, an activity once illegal and called *____________*. It is not quite acceptable as long as the "sponsorship" is acknowledged on the air. Again, as with globalization and concentration, where critics see damage to the integrity of the media themselves and disservice to their audiences, defenders of hypercommercialism argue that it is simply the economic reality of today's media world.

*appointment consumption* *consumption on demand*

What will be the impact on the mass communication process when content producers no longer have to amass as large an audience as possible with a single, simultaneously distributed piece of content? When a producer can sell very specific, very idiosyncratic, constantly changing content to very specific, very idiosyncratic, constantly changing customers, will profitability and popularity no longer be so closely linked? What will "popular" and "profitable" messages really mean when audience members can create infinitely "alterable" messages? What will happen when the mass communication process, long dependent on *___________________________* (audience consume content at a time predetermined by the producer and distributor; for example, a movie time at a theater, your favorite television show at 9:00 on Tuesdays, news at the top of the hour, your magazine in your mailbox on the 3rd of the month), evolves more completely to *___________________________* (the ability to consume any content, anytime, anywhere)?

*Wi-Fi* digitization speed advances Concentration *synergy* audience fragmentation audience platform agnostic

You can read "The New York Times" or "Time" magazine and hundreds of other newspapers and magazines on a variety of screens. And what can "newspapers, magazines, handbooks," "radio and recordings," and "television and film" really mean (or more accurately, "really be") now that we can access digital texts, audio, and moving images virtually anyplace, anytime, via *___________* (wireless Internet) and handheld devices? This erosion of distinctions among media is called "convergence", and it has been fueled by 3 related phenomena that have overwhelmed the mass communication process all at once. First is the _______________ of almost all content, making it possible to transmit and share information across all platforms. Second is the increasing data ___________ of both wired and wireless networks, making access to that digitized content fast, easy, and seamless. Third are the remarkably fast and ongoing _____________ in communication technology that make once-unimagined ideas quite possible. The traditional lines between media are disappearing. ______________________ is one reason for this convergence. If one company owns newspapers, an online service, television stations, book publishers, a magazine or 2, and a film company, it has a strong incentive, to get the greatest use from its content, whether news, education, or entertainment, by using as many channels of delivery as possible. The industry calls this *_____________*, and it is the driving force behind several recent mergers and acquisitions in the media and telecommunications industries. In 2012 Facebook bought photo-sharing platform Instagram for $1 billion to gain access to its app-based mobile services and to make its Facebook offerings more visual, therefore increasing the site's value to advertisers. In 2014 Apple, deciding that the future of music was streaming, not downloads, paid #3.2 billion for the headphone and music streaming company Beats Music; and YouTube, wanting to bring real-time video game play to its already massive array of channels, paid more than $1 billion for the game-streaming service Twitch. In 2015, Activision paid nearly $6 billion for King Digital Entertainment in order to move its console-bound games like "Call of Duty" and "World of Warcraft" to more mobile platforms where King, with hits like "Candy Crush", was dominant. A second reason for convergence is _____________________________. A mass communication who finds it difficult to reach the whole audience can reach its component parts through various media. A third reason is the ___________________ itself. We are increasingly _______________________, having no preference for where we access our media content. Will this expression and blurring of traditional media channels confuse audience members, further tilting the balance of power in the mass communication process toward the media industries? Or will it give audiences more power - power to choose, power to reject, and power to combine information and entertainment in individual ways?

*addressable technologies* *taste publics*

But if these audience-fragmenting *______________________________* - technologies permitting the transmission of very specific content to equally specific audience members - are changing the nature of the mass media's audience, then the mass communication process itself must also change. What will happen as smaller, more specific audiences become better known to their partners in the process of making meaning? What will happen to the national culture that binds us as we become increasingly fragmented into demographically targeted *_________________* - groups of people bound by little more than an interest in a given form of media content? Will there be a narrowing of our collective cultural experience, as media's storytelling function is disrupted because we are each listening to stories we individually preselect or that are preselected for us? "Maybe one day," wonders "Creativity" magazine editor Teressa Iezzi, "you won't be able to say anything to anyone because a common language or the ability to grapple with or laugh at something outside of your comfort zone will have fallen away". National Public Radio's Michael Oreskes adds, "'Nichefication' may strengthen the business prospects of [media] companies, but it weakens their ability to serve the public." There is an alternative view, however. Audience may well be fragmenting, but the interactivity encouraged and facilitated by the digital media will reconnect and reconfigure us into more numerous, more robust, more varied communities. There is indeed a lot of conversation, curiosity, and sharing taking place on social networking sites like Twitter and Facebook; yes, it can be small and juvenile, but very often it is passionate, informative, observant, clever, subversive, and maybe even community-building.

*webisodes*

Erosion of Distinctions among Media: Convergence: Movie studios make their titles available not only on DVD and EST but for handheld video game systems as well. Cable's AMC runs a slate of *________________________*, Web-only television shows, to accompany its hit series "The Walking Dead." Satellite provider Dish Network offers interactive, TV remote-based play of classic video games. Magazines "Allure" and "Vanity Fair" maintain digital video channels and produce their own television shows. The iPod Nano music player contains an FM tuner. Video game consoles don't just let players download movies and television shows, surf the internet, check their Facebook accounts, and tune in to the Weather Channel and the BBC; they also offer streaming of tens of thousands of feature films. Ken Burns unveiled his documentary series "Prohibition" on the iPad and iPhone a week before its airing on PBS, when it was simultaneously streamed over the Internet and broadcast in advance of its availability on DVD and on iTunes. You can subscribe to "National Geographic" and play its issue-matched video game online or on a smartphone. There are tens of thousands of U.S. commercial and noncommercial and foreign radio stations delivering their broadcasts over the Web.

i *media multitasking* *electronic sell-through (EST)*

Global media consumption rose 1.4% from 2014 to 2015, driven by a 27.7% increase in mobile media usage. Across the globe, people average 177 minutes of television a day, accounting for 41% of their media engagement. The typical American spends 10 hours and 39 minutes of screen time a day. The average American teen spends more than 9 hours a day engaged simultaneously with many different screens, *_________________________* across the TV set, the computer, video games, and handheld devices. We watch 8 billion videos every day on Facebook in addition to the 5 billion a day we watch on YouTube. This does not include the 100 million hours a day of Netflix movies and TV shows streamed by its 87 million worldwide subscribers or all of the viewing by millions of people who watch on their video game consoles or any of the growing number of other video services like HBO Now, CBS All Access, Roku, Amazon Prime, Sling TV, Hulu, and a score more. And that decline in DVD sales and rentals mentioned earlier? It's being made up by *________________________________________*, the buying of digital download movies that annually bring studios more than $1.6 billion in new revenue. In fact, Americans are watching more videos, listening to more music, reading more often, playing more video games, consuming more news, and accessing the Internet more often than ever before; they are simply doing it in new and different ways. For media industries, these facts offer good news - readers, viewers, and listeners are out there in ever-increasing numbers, and they value the mass communication experience. These data also offer good news for literate media consumers - their consumption choices will shape the media landscape to come and, inevitably, the mass communication process itself.

*globalization*

Globalization: Closely related to the concentration of media ownership is *__________________________*. It is large, multinational conglomerates that are doing the lion's share of media acquisitions. The potential impact of globalization on the mass communication process speaks to the issue of diversity of expression. Will distant, anonymous, foreign corporations, each with vast holdings in a variety of non media businesses, use their power to shape news and entertainment content to suit their own ends.? Here in America the concern is that media companies, with an eye toward an expanding worldwide market for their fare, will tailor their content to the widest possible global audience, ignoring story and character in their television shows and movies in favor of car chases and explosions. Foreign audiences understand big-time action and adventure; nuance and subtlety don't translate as well. Abroad, the worry is that high-quality American media content will overwhelm local media industries and local cultures. As it is, almost every country in the world, including our friends in Canada, puts limits of some sort on the amount and type of U.S. media content they allow across their borders. There is, however, an alternative vie to these concerns. Different people from different cultures can learn from one another through the exchange of their different media. Rather than fear the sharing of the stories we tell, we should embrace them. In addition, defenders of increased globalization point to the need to reach a fragmented and widespread audience - the same factor that fuels concentration - as encouraging this trend. They also cite the growing economic clout of emerging democracies (and the need to reach the people who live in them) and the increasing intertwining of the world's economies as additional reasons globalization is necessary for the economic survival of media businesses.

*blogs* *cost of entry*

Interpreter A - The Content Producer: Traditionally, the content producer, the source, in the mass communication process is a large, hierarchically structured organization - for example, Pixar Studios, the "Philadelphia Inquirer", or CBS Television. And as we saw, the typical consequence of this organizational structure is scant room for individual vision or experimentation. But in the age of the Internet, with its proliferation of *___________* (regularly updated online journals that comment on just about everything), social networking sites such as Facebook where users post all variety of free personal content, and other websites, the distinction between content consumer and content provider disappears. Now, interpreter A can be an independent musician self-releasing her music online, a long blogger, a solitary online scrapbooker, or 2 pals who create digital videos. Traditional media outlets routinely make use of people as sources who would have once been called amateurs. For example, Forbes.com publishes the work of 1,400 contributors, and the "Dallas Morning News" maintains an unpaid network of several dozen "civilians." Fox television network stations across the country provide "citizen journalists" with an app, Fresco, that operates like a 24/7 newsroom. It assigns stories to be covered, and once the users' images and video are verified for accuracy and aired, they are paid for their work. Internet domain company Go Daddy traditionally airs a viewer-created commercial during the Super Bowl. Tens of millions of producers, big and small, distribute their video fare on the Internet. Sites like Vuze, Joost, and Blip Networks strike financial deals with producers, again big and small, for content for their own sites and for syndication to others. And what are Snapchat's 150 million and Instagram's 500 million monthly users who upload 800 million and 80 million images a day, respectively, if not producers of a huge amount of sometimes very engaging content? iIn the newly evolving model of mass communication, content providers are just as likely to be individuals who believe in something or who have something to day as they are big media companies in search of audiences and profits. Now sources themselves, they are "the people formerly known as the audience," and it is not simply technological change that has given them voice. It is the reduction of the *___________________________* for content production to nearly $0 that those digital technologies have wrought that has made them all creators. "Rates of authorship are increasing by historic orders of magnitude. Nearly universal authorship, like universal literacy before it, stands to reshape society by hastening the flow of information and making individuals more influential," wrote futurists Denis Pelli and Charles Bigelow. "As readers, we consume. As authors, we create. Our society is changing from consumers to creators."

Concentration; conglomeration Globalization *convergence* platform-agnostic

Media industries face a number of challenges that promise to alter their relationship with their audiences. _______________________ of media ownership and ___________________ can constrict the number and variety of voices available to audiences. Those audiences are becoming fragmented, potentially making it more difficult for media organizations to reach them. _____________________ not only fragments the audience even more, but it can also make it less profitable for a media company to tailor its fare for its own homeland. Hypercommercialization might allow those companies to earn more income, but at what price to an audience awash in commercials? And fueling all this change is *__________________* - the erosion of traditional distinctions among media. As we've already seen, content typically associated with one medium is quite likely to be delivered by any number of other media; we, the __________________ audience members, having no preference on which medium to consume content, seem quite content with that state of affairs.

Beasts of No Nation; day-and-date

Netflix's first feature-film, "__________________," was released worldwide _________________ on its own streaming service and in theaters on October 16, 2015.

fragmented *Zonecasting* *location-based mobile advertising*

Technology has wrought the same effect on television. Before cable television, people could choose from among the 3 commercial broadcast networks - ABD, CBS, NBC - one noncommercial public broadcasting station, and, in larger markets, maybe an independent station or 2. Now, with cable, satellite, and Internet video streaming, people have literally millions of viewing options. The television audience has been _______________. To attract advertisers, each channel now must find a more specific group of people to make up its viewership. Nickelodeon targets kids, for example; TV Land appeals to baby boomers; Spike aims at young men; and Bravo seeks upper-income older people. The new digital technologies promise even more audience fragmentation, almost to the point of audience of one. For example, cable companies have the ability to send very specific commercials not only to specific neighborhoods but even to individual homes. Television network NBC does the same in its on-demand programming. And if you've ever used an Internet search engine, you know that the ads you see are specific to you based on the history of your overall Internet use. So, too, are the search results you're offered. *____________________* technology allows radio stations to deliver different commercials to specific neighborhoods, and *_________________________________*, as you no doubt know well, lets marketers directly send ads targeted at you wherever you are in that moment.

*RSS*; *really simple syndication*

The Message: The message in the traditional mass communication model is typically mechanically produced, simultaneously sent, inflexible, and unalterable. Once AMC airs tonight's episode of "The Walking Dead," it has aired tonight's episode of "The Walking Dead." The consequence? Audiences either like it or don't like it. The program either succeeds or fails. But we've already seen that different commercial spots can be inserted into programs sent into specific homes. You can buy only 4 tracks of an artists's latest CD, add 3 more from an earlier release, and listen to a completely unique, personally created album. Every music-streaming service now available allows you to create your own personalized "radio station" or playlist. *________*, or *_________________________________*, feeds are aggregators that allow Web users to create their own content assembled from the internet's limitless supply of material. Some of the most popular are Bloglines, Sitrion, and Digg Reader. Users tell the aggregator what sites to collect, or their topics of interest, or even their favorite writers. As soon as any new content in their preselected categories appears online, it is automatically brought to their RSS file. The Breaking News app, for example, brings aggregated news on more than 90,000 topics to people and news organizations alike. As such, these aggregated "messages" are infinitely alterable, completely unique, and thoroughly idiosyncratic. Alternate-ending DVDs permitting viewers to "re-edit" an existing movie at home are old hat by now. But what do you think of director Steven Soderbergh's vision for a digital movie future? Some time ago he said that when theaters convert from film to digital projection, he would plan to exhibit multiple, different versions of the same film. "I think it would be very interesting to have a movie out in release," he said, "and then, just a weeks later say, 'Here's version 2.0, recut, rescored.' The other version is still out there - people can see either or both." Well, it's more than 10 years later and digital projection is a reality. But alternate-ending movies haven't hit the big screen yet. Is it because the movie industry is content to stay with its mechanically produced, simultaneously sent, inflexible, unalterable films, or is it because we aren't ready for them yet?

*oligopoly*

The potential impact of this *________________________* - a concentration of media industries into an even smaller number of companies - on the mass communication process is enormous. What becomes of shared meaning when the people running communication companies are more committed to the financial demands of their corporate offices than they are to their audiences, who are supposedly their partners in the communication process? What becomes of the process itself when media companies grow more removed from those with whom they communicate? And what becomes of the culture that is dependent on that process when concentration and conglomeration limit the diversity of perspective and information? Or are the critics making too much of the issue? Is this unnamed manager of newspaper chain 10/30 Communications correct when he says, "Many companies in our industry have wrongly divided their focus among many customer groups. We do not. Our customer is the advertiser. Readers are our customers' customers."

consumers; industries

Traditional Media Industries in Transition: The way we interact with the mass media is indeed changing. While this shift is good news for media ___________________, it has not necessarily been beneficial for the established media _______________. Just how much pain has been produced by this "perfect storm" of rapid technological change and our shifting consumption behavior? -Although Americans spend over $11 billion a year at the movies, they continue to buy fewer tickets per person every year than they did in the 1920s. -Only 11% of Americans go to the movies once a month or more. -The number of music CDs sold fell 13.9% between 2014 and 2015, producing a 17% drop in the dollar value of those sales. -15 years ago, the 4 major broadcast networks commanded 61% of all television viewing. -Today their share hovers around 30%. -The top-rated program in 1980 was "Dallas," viewed in more than 34% of all homes with a television; in 1990 it was "Cheers," watched by 21% of all TV homes; today it is "Sunday Night Football," drawing about 13%. -The rate of decline in DVD sales increased from 10.9% in 2014 to 12% in 2015, costing the movie studios an $800 million dollar loss in their primary source of home entertainment income. -American newspaper industry revenues declined 4.4% from 2015 to 2016, and 45% over the previous 10 years. -The U.S. magazine industry saw a 3.2% drop in advertising and circulation revenue from 2015 to 2016. -Listenership to American commercial AM and FM radio has called from 96% of Americans 12 years old and over in 2001 to 91% today, and sale of on-air advertising fell 3% between 2014 and 2015.