1 | Page The question will be on one of the ideas below: media ownership cross media convergence and synergy new media technologies the proliferation in hardware and content technological convergence the targeting of British audiences by international institutions Remember in any question you will be expected to write about institution and audience. They may make the question look more challenging by using terms like production, distribution and marketing. Don’t be put off by these: Production: How the Guardian is now a converged multi-media product. Distribution: On every platform, smartphones, tablets etc as well as in print Marketing: Integration with social networks, advertising, sponsorship. OCR Media Studies Section B- Audiences and institutions Case study- the Guardian
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1 | P a g e
The question will be on one of the ideas below:
media ownership
cross media convergence and synergy
new media technologies
the proliferation in hardware and content
technological convergence
the targeting of British audiences by international institutions
Remember in any question you will be expected to write about
institution and audience.
They may make the question look more challenging by using terms like
production, distribution and marketing.
Don’t be put off by these:
Production: How the Guardian is now a converged multi-media product.
Distribution: On every platform, smartphones, tablets etc as well as in print
Marketing: Integration with social networks, advertising, sponsorship.
OCR Media Studies
Section B- Audiences and institutions
Case study- the Guardian
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Production
The print edition of the paper is in trouble. Costs are high and advertising
revenues are low. Fewer national newspapers are being sold today than at any
time during the past 60 years. The Guardian sales have dropped 50% in the
past ten years.
So… the Guardian’s policy is now ‘digital first’.
The Guardian is now an online news provider. Its product is media-rich,
interactive and available on all platforms.
Production is now synergetic. The same stories are produced for print, the
website, for mobile, for the digital edition, for the audio edition.
The Guardian online has many interactive features. The Comment is Free
section of the website allows readers to comment on any story. This content is
called ‘below the line’. Blogs are hosted by Guardian journalists and citizen
journalists. Disposable blogs are used to report on one-off events like football
matches. Videos are uploaded from mobile devices. Twitter feeds appear on
the site.
This interactivity means that news is now, as Dan Gillmor says, a
‘conversation’.
Citizen journalism - Consumers -can become producers of the news through
blogs, social networks, email, and smartphones. David Gauntlett calls this
group ‘Prosumers’.
The Guardian website is what Gauntlett would describe as a Web 2.0 site which means users can add value and content to the site. This means a high
level of interactivity. One term for this is networked journalism.
Journalists source stories using social networking sites like Twitter.
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Distribution
News is distributed for free by the Guardian online and in apps with
some in-ad purchases available.
The print edition now reaches fewer than 200,000 readers a day, mainly
in the UK. This has dropped from 302,285 in 2010.
Online the paper is viewed by more than 90 million unique users. A third
of these are in the US. The Guardian is in the process of launching their
new Beta site that changes the distribution across the product.
Paywalls – Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation introduced a Paywall
but the Guardian’s editor Alan Rusbridger stated that The Guardian
wouldn’t…
The Guardian expects their current printing presses to be the last they buy
due to the decline in print sales.
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Marketing
More important than any other marketing strategy is the Guardian brand. This means the character/identity of the paper. It is seen as trustworthy,
honest, reliable, liberal. This brand identity means it is attractive to
readers who expect these values from their news provider.
Digital Natives (Marc Prensky) are attracted to the Guardian because it
offers a converged, content-rich, interactive product.
We own the Weekend. One recent advertising campaign pushed the
Saturday Guardian and its sister paper, The Observer. Look at the Shed’s
on fire” ad.
The Three Little Pigs campaign reinforced the Guardian’s liberal brand.
The Guardian also promotes itself by sponsoring events such as
Glastonbury and the Edinburgh Television Festival.
Opening a coffee shop is also a way of marketing the Guardian brand.