Reaction - Chapter 4 - Media Organizations and Professionals

The fourth chapter of Croteau and Hoynes’s “Media Society: Industries, Images, and Audiences” (2012) deals with media organizations and professionals, specifically the production of media content and the dynamics of the world of media professionals, and how media gets created despite different constraints (p.121).

The first subject breached is the economic constraints that media professionals have to overcome in order to create content. Creators have to always think about profit when producing content. This means that they have to create content that is likely to sell (p.122-123).

The chapter also mentions the political constraints, including government regulations, and how media organizations can overcome these constraints using legal, political, or other strategies (p.123-124).

The next subject breached is the organization of the media industry. The question is that, given the amount of people often required to produce a single media content, how do they all coordinate and reach effective cooperation? The chapter offers several explanations, with one theory being that their actions are coordinated according to the needs of the organization, while another theory links cooperation with good negotiation tactics (p.124-126).

Another aspect of media organizations is news routines, which basically indicates how news organizations choose what is considered « news » or not and what content to share with the public in what order of importance. One technique that organizations use to gather news information is the journalistic routine of the net to catch the big fish, basically the « big news » (p.126-131).

Other subjects that were brought up in the chapter were the notions of objectivity (p.131); the different divisions of labor included in media organization (p.135); and the new norms of the internet which are different from traditional media organizations since there is no « established professional culture » or a clear « code of conduct », which frees people from the obligations of traditional media (p.149).

An interesting concept in this chapter was the idea that creators are limited by economic factors, and indeed I think media organizations have fallen victim to their economic constraints. Nowadays, original content is rarely produced, and when it is, it is usually badly received by the audience. This is because the audience massively consumes what is considered as mainstream media and commercial content, which conditions them to reject any other form of content. Seeing this, media organizations stop producing alternative types of content, thus encouraging the conditioning of the audience and avoiding the production of content that does not fit the mainstream criteria. It is a vicious circle.

But commercial content is pretty limited, which has given life to trends of imitation especially when it comes to broadcasting TV and the film industry. Often, a lot of this type of content end up being adaptations of books and other printed media that have already found success. This is clear today seeing that almost all new releases are remakes of older content, an example being the new Baywatch movie, or different movies from the same genre, such as superhero movies.  

Nevertheless, chances can be taken and good original ideas can end up being hugely successful, but this does not happen often enough to consider the media industry of today as an innovative or a risk-taking business.           

References

Croteau, D., & Hoynes, W. (2012). Media/Society: Industries, Images, and Audiences. London: Sage Publications Ltd.