Mass Media

 

1. Introduction

The story of journalism is one of the great stories of human history. It started in England as a tool for reporting on events in the countryside. It spread to America, France and Germany, where it was seen as a way for people to be informed about what was happening in their own cities. It penetrated into other countries, like India and China.

In the modern world we now use it to report on news and events around the world.

But there are differences between us and them: our tools are different; their language is different; they have different institutions that regulate how they do their work; they even have different names for the same things (e.g., journalists vs newspapers vs magazines).

For example, we don’t call ourselves “news organizations” or “media organizations” when we speak to each other. We talk about “newshounds” or “reporters” or just “journalists” or “media people” to each other. We call them by their names (as opposed to ours), but we don’t actually use theirs — only ours.

This isn’t because we are superior — it is just because we know what they do better than they do themselves . . . and so can be trusted more than they can be trusted themselves.

2. The mass media of the modern world

There is a common misconception that the mass media of the modern world have gone far away from distribution outlets (print, TV, radio etc.) and are now in the hands of a small number of corporations. This is not really true. In fact, there are only four or five companies (Facebook, Google, Yahoo! and Amazon) that dominate digital mass media distribution worldwide.

Mass media refers to all kinds of content produced by a wide variety of media publishers: newspapers, magazines, radio and TV broadcasters. This includes video streaming services such as Netflix or Hulu (which have grown very rapidly in recent years), online video players like YouTube or Vimeo or live streaming services like Twitch.tv or Periscope.

The common denominator throughout these entities is that they are aggregators which provide access to content from other publishers which can then be consumed in one form or another by people who use different devices for different purposes (e.g., games on mobile devices vs watching videos on tablets vs playing on a PC). That’s why it’s extremely important to understand how these companies operate and why they do what they do.

For example, if you want to buy an Amazon Prime membership for $99/year, you need to know about the subscription service itself – its features and pricing structure – but also about its competitors within the market: Amazon’s competitors include Walmart or Best Buy (which doesn’t provide Prime memberships), Apple’s rivals include Android phones makers such as Samsung Electronics; while Apple has larger rivals in Microsoft who also provide similar services through their respective online stores like Windows Store or iTunes Store.

Similarly, if you have a desire to watch TV online it's mainly because you want access to all three forms of mass media platforms: cable TV providers AT&T (which owns DirecTV), Time Warner Cable etc., satellite TV operator Dish Network and then there are various internet providers like Comcast and Verizon (who offer high speed internet). Of course there are also standalone internet providers like Virgin Mobile USA – who offer free unlimited data plans with a large selection of apps – but those aren't focused on providing mass media portals for people who want access to web-based content instead of traditional cable TV channels.

From this perspective it's clear that advertising depends largely on reaching consumers through their preferred medium – whether it's magazines advertising cars in The Wall Street Journal or newspaper ads for hiking vacations on The New York Times website. Not surprisingly some

3. The mass media and society

I’m not sure if all mass media is the same, but I’ve always imagined that it consisted of one main type of mass media: a magazine. I remember reading one in high school, which came with a string going down to my mother’s house. If we had a movie or TV show coming out, and didn’t have the money to buy it, I would pull out this string and hand it to my parents to take home.

This has been an ongoing theme on the blog for several years now (and I’d like to thank Daniel for that), and when I was at a company called InVision for two years (and yes, there were other media types as well), we were still thinking about how we managed our “magazine” department.

Our initial thoughts were pretty straightforward:

• We want our magazine to look great.

• We want it to be able to read well on mobile devices.

• We want people to be able to find it easily with its nice design and decent content.

The reason why these three things matter so much is that they are structurally different from other forms of media: their primary motivation is trying to sell something. That is why they are very different from newspapers or magazines: the former focuses on content while the latter focuses on advertising space. What separates The Verge Magazine from The New York Times? It is their respective focus on covering news in a fun way — which means they have different business models than publications that exist solely as advertising spaces (think NYTimes vs NYTimes Magazine). This results in completely different ways of structuring your company’s relationship with your audience: what product do you have? How much do you pay for? Which audience do you cater towards? It also results in quite different ways of structuring your business model around distribution channels: how do you get people into your product? How do you get them around your app (or its equivalent)? How do you go about getting them back into your product once they have left it? In short, there are many ways of structuring distribution channels — but only one way of structuring news! Hence what distinguishes mass media from other forms of mass communication is not the medium but rather its purpose — which is selling something!

Thus we need three things:

1) We must make our product attractive enough so that people will buy it; otherwise, consumers will

4. Mass media history

Mass media is what has traditionally been called “entertainment”. It is a collective term for forms of entertainment which are aimed at large groups of patrons and are designed to be consumed in public places. As a result, they have a democratic feel, which precludes the purchase of tickets and means that they can be freely enjoyed by many people who do not share the same tastes.

Before we get into it, I should point out that all of these terms come from author and journalist John Berger, who wrote two classic books on mass media:

Media (1972)

A History of Broadcasting (1980)

When I was growing up, however, "mass media" was actually a fairly specific phenomenon. It was set up to cover news and information for broad groups of people. So when I was growing up in the 70s, the term "mass media" meant radio or TV — like you'd see on TV or read in magazines or newspapers — but never as things you could use to promote your own ideas or products .  For example, there's no evidence that anyone in my family ever used anything with the "mass media" label to sell anything — except maybe a few ads for their cars — so there's no way we were supposed to be using any mass media at all! If you look back at how we were raised, then you might find some sort of justification for us using something with that label; but if you look back at how we were raised then you will probably find no justification at all.  So that pretty much covers what people meant when they said "mass media."

The other two types are usually called “news” and “advertising”. They don't quite fit as neatly together as I've described them here; but they do overlap somewhat because they both serve different purposes within traditional mass culture:

News is what gets delivered to your door every day by someone other than you. Advertising is aimed at getting your attention so that it will deliver more news to you some other time (as opposed to delivery).  In both cases though there is often no connection between where the news comes from and where it goes after it has been delivered; so neither form is really "news" in any meaningful way except perhaps when someone does choose to pursue an idea based on an advertorial rather than his own research (or when he chooses not to take part in any advertising whatsoever).

News also tends not to be

5. Mass media today

I have written in the past about “mass media”, and as a result of that, I’ve heard many different definitions and uses of the term. The one that comes closest to what I mean is this: mass media is any form of communication which reaches a large number of people. A digital product might be mass media, for example.

I always find it helpful to think about mass media in terms of the way it impacts on everyday life. If you have friends who are scattered all over the world, but don’t know each other very well because they live in different time zones, or have never met or spoken to them at all (or if they are in other countries), then your social network can become an important part of your life. If you watch TV or read a newspaper every single day (or if you work for one), then TV and newspaper consumption can become integral parts of your life and be deeply ingrained into how you see the world around you.

iOS is now the most popular mobile operating system in the world; But there are many more than just Apple users out there! Tens of millions, probably hundreds of millions! This year alone we saw over 4 billion people having their first phone call made by their mobile phone, thanks to both mobile networks and smartphones themselves (many from low-income countries).

There are many different ways that mobile phones can be used for mass communication: texting, emailing, chatting about news topics on Facebook etc., but generally speaking a big chunk of mobile messaging takes place between groups on social networks such as Facebook and WhatsApp (and sometimes even Twitter). And as we’ve seen recently with WhatsApp’s “floodgate” fiasco (which has been portrayed as an embarrassment to Facebook), it is often not too difficult for competing services to get users to sign up; they just need to act like they are trying hard enough!

And although there seems to be a lot more competition than ever before on social platforms such as WhatsApp (and arguably Facebook) — given that these companies control 90%+ market share — this is still not enough. Many other companies want access to your contacts beyond their own services: when you send a photo or WhatsApp message with your friend’s profile picture attached — including Snapchat (which does not allow attachments on its service) — that photo gets uploaded into everyone else’s storage space. And when you talk about people with whom you may not have