Media Management: Audio-visual Media

Published by Emil Abraham,


Journalism is the activity or profession of writing for newspapers, magazines or of broadcasting news on radio or television.
 It is that act of gathering, processing, and dissemination of news, and information related to news, to an audience.

What is media?
Modern media comes in many different formats, including print media (books, magazines, newspapers), television, movies, video games, music, cell phones, various kinds of software, and the Internet. Each type of media involves both content, and also a device or object through which that content is delivered.

Types of media
The oldest media forms are newspapers, magazines, journals, newsletters, and other printed material. These publications are collectively known as the print media. Although print media readership has declined in the last few decades, many Americans still read a newspaper every day or a newsmagazine on a regular basis. The influence of print media is therefore significant. Regular readers of print media tend to be more likely to be politically active.
Broadcast media are news reports broadcast via radio and television. Television news is hugely important around the world as more and more people get their news from television broadcasts than from any other source. With the advent of Internet, new ways and platforms for the gathering and dissemination of news surfaced, which is commonly referred to as New Media.

Objective of media
  1. To entertain people
  2. To educate people
  3. To persuade people


What is Management?
The act or skill of controlling and making decisions about a business, department, sports team, etc.
Management Functions:

The 4 basic management functions that make up the management process are described in the following sections:
Planning: Planning involves choosing tasks that must be performed to attain organizational goals, outlining how the tasks must be performed, and indicating when they should be performed. Planning activity focuses on attaining goals. Managers outline exactly what organizations should do to be successful. Planning is concerned with the success of the organization in the short term as well as in the long term.

Organising: 
Organizing can be thought of as assigning the tasks developed in the planning stages, to various individuals or groups within the organization. Organizing is to create a mechanism to put plans into action.
People within the organization are given work assignments that contribute to the company’s goals. Tasks are organized so that the output of each individual contributes to the success of departments, which, in turn, contributes to the success of divisions, which ultimately contributes to the success of the organization.
Influencing: Influencing is also referred to as motivating, leading or directing. Influencing can be defined as guiding the activities of organization members in the direction that helps the organization move towards the fulfillment of the goals.
The purpose of influencing is to increase productivity. Human-oriented work situations usually generate higher levels of production over the long term than do task oriented work situations because people find the latter type distasteful.

Controlling: 
Controlling is the following roles played by the manager:
Gather information that measures performance.
Compare present performance to pre-established performance norms.
Determine the next action plan and modifications for meeting the desired performance parameters. Controlling is an ongoing process.

Media Management
Media management is seen as a business administration discipline that identifies and describes strategic and operational phenomena and problems in the leadership of media enterprises. Media management contains the functions strategic management, procurement management, production management, organisational management and marketing of media enterprises.

Media companies are profit-making businesses. Those who commission and plan programmes or decide newspaper or magazine content, usually play safe by excluding anything that might offend or upset readers or viewers. No media company would like to lose revenue and profit by losing readers, or viewers, because they were offended by ‘extreme’ views.

While the production and manufacturing oriented business is focuses on production and tries to sell products. The customer oriented business focuses on the need of the customer and produces accordingly, being aware of the marketability of the services or product sold.

The basic concept of business and marketing is to reach out with the customer with the product he might be interested in. Mass manufacturing is an important aspect of this concept. Historically, the concept of marketing- implicitly or explicitly- was not in existence. When goods were barely produced by machineries, people were dependent on agricultural production, domestic animals and understood barter system. However, the growth of civilization and discovery of sea routes in search of newer lands and markets, followed by the machine era came to change this. The discovery of new lands by sailors made people aware of new products and things. Upon using these products, they developed special interest in these products and the demand rose.
However with the machines becoming sophisticated, production went up and there was surplus of goods. The basic problem shifted from that of production to distribution. Hence the business developed a new channel of distribution to reach-out the people with their goods. This happened during the period of early 20th century. It was the era of distribution.
Due to mass production, mass distribution took place. And the problem slowly shifted to convince people to buy products, i.e. to create a market. This problem aroused as more and more products started flooding the market due to heavy production but the distribution mechanism was non-existent, the onus was to convince people to buy a product. Thus, the world entered the era of selling. Here, demand was created. To augment this, the producers also resorted to advertising.
By the middle of the 20th century, when mass production and mass selling were in place, the consumers were the centre of attraction. Buyers started to weigh their choices and were asking for goods of their choice and not what the manufacturer wanted to sell. This created "marketers" and slowly led the path for manufacturers reaches to their target market with their products.
With the advent of marketing, media too grew by multifold. Media is the carrier of advertising and communicating the target market. When industrialisation and modernisation spread all across the globe the media industry also grew, and thus many other businesses came under the umbrella of media business which was traditionally, press, then radio and then TV broadcasting.

Income sources
Television
Paid subscription: Almost all news channels including the public broadcaster Doordarshan now run on the paid subscription mode. Like newspapers, the subscription revenue is very less as compared to that of the cost involved in the production of various programmes aired by the television channels. The shortfall of the cost is filled up by advertising generates profit.
Television advertising could be classified into several segments like,
    1. Television Commercials
    2. Direct selling advertising
    3. PoliticalAdvertising
Television commercials are short films that vary from 15 to 120 seconds and in some cases even more. Unlike newspapers where advertising ‘space’ is measured by square centimeter or column centimeter, in television, the ‘space’ is measured by seconds. There is another factor though considered for pricing slot like the timing of the commercial i.e. prime time, news hour, morning space, evening space etc. Rate of the commercial advertisement varies on the basis of timing as well as the length of the commercial. These advertisements are termed as "commercials" as they generally intend to promote a product or service so that its commercial interest in fulfilled.
Direct selling is a new concept of advertising on television. Through this, companies do direct selling by advertising their products over television. They generally book spots on specific television channel for a particular time and for a particular duration. The difference between television commercials and direct selling advertisement is that the latter did not have a middle agent in their business. The content advertised directly reaches the customer.
Broadcast mediums earn through political advertising like they would from any commercial advertising. It is difficult to categorise this under commercials because they are basically promotional and no real buying or selling of product takes place. But image building and publicity takes place on behest of ads.

Radio
The major source of revenue for a radio station is advertisements. Almost all radio programmes in India are free on-air, the listener need not have to pay any fees/ subscription charge for radio station services. However, radio stations recover their cost of production of various programmes through advertisements. Like television, Radio commercials are also measured in seconds and the price varies from time to time like price of a 15-min radio advertisement may cost more during morning or evening hours than that of during the day. Listening to a radio does not require any special attention like engaging with other forms of mass media might demand. One can hear radio while at work or while on drive.
Magazines
Like newspapers, major source of income for magazines comes from circulation and advertisements. A fraction of the cost is recovered by Magazines from the subscription and single-copy sales or news-stand sales. However the major revenue is generated via ad space. Magazine sale their ‘space’ in terms of pages or fraction of it, in form of full page or half page or quarter page advertisements. Since magazines are periodicals and are meant to stay with the reader for a longer duration its quality of production, print is better than that of the newspapers. Magazine advertisements are comparatively expensive in terms of newspaper ad space.
Yellow Pages
Yellow Pages are directories containing information about a particular segment like telephone numbers of all the telephone subscribers of a city or details of important vendors, shops, malls, hospitals and other places of public utilities, including addresses of individuals and other professional service providers in a town or city. This unique feature made yellow pages a good advertising tool. Given the fact that yellow pages are published once in a year, advertising space is purchased for a year at a time. As yellow pages are referred during the year and beyond, pricing of yellow pages are generally competitive and advertisers strive for a better space and font size.
Internet
This is the new medium which has become a major trend in the recent times. Thanks to the spread of on-line marketing concepts and ‘smart phones’, internet advertising has grown by multifolds. In fact, company like Google, the behemoth online search engine is the topmost grosser of online advertising revenue. Today Google offers a wide variety of services like online search engine, email, weather forecast, navigation services, news and tons of other online services for various platforms. As people are increasingly glued to these services, Google is earning huge advertising revenue by placing advertisements in its content & applications. What appears true for Google is true for other internet players also. But the differentiating factor is the number of users. It is a number game where more the number of users a particular website has the better is the advertisement revenue. A website offering user-friendly features would certainly attract more users and thereby generate more revenue. By 2019 the market size is estimated to be worth $220 billion globally.