Lecture 7: Commercial Media

This week's lecture focused on Commercial Media, whose channels I watch quite regularly. I learnt many new things and have now realised I really should watch more channels by Public media.

The Australian Media Landscape includes both Commercial Media and Public Media. Commercial Media includes TV channels: Nine, Seven, Ten, Go!, 7Mate, etc. Public media includes TV channels such as: ABC, SBS, ABC2, SBS2, etc. Having not watched either ABC or SBS for an extended period, I can see from here that commercial media does influence me.

T.V channels in Australia, including commercial and public media.
Source: http://www.throng.com.au/digital-tv/full-digital-tv-service-regional-and-remote-australia

Commercial Media exists because it can make money through advertising. It is made to produce profits and it not government funded. It relies on it success as a business to survive, hence it strives to meet the audience's needs for this.

Fairfax Media is a form of digital commercial news.
Source: http://www.eurekastreet.com.au/article.aspx?aeid=8767

Commercial media includes:

• newspapers
• cable TV
• film
• magazines
• books 
• sports
• digital media
• free to air TV
• events
• radio
• tele-comms

Commercial media comes in 3 different forms: subscription, sponsored and subsidised. Its function is to be: commercial, propaganda, social. However, commercial media does have a responsibility towards society and must fulfill certain criteria.

Do you think commercial media achieves this? Are they providing us what is best for our society?

In my honest opinion, I think commercial media has steered away from this and more towards profit driving. Their increasing number of advertisements shows this. However, I must say that the lengths of ads on our tvs are much less than other countries. It has becoming more about keeping the audience than keeping the audience informed about the important stuff. However, there are government controls over commercial media, who first evaluate the content.

Ten News is commercial media.
Source: http://jmaced.net/2010/10/up-to-a-point-lord-packer/

Results of this type of media has shown:

• dumbing down
• tabloidisation
• "desire to please"
• "Mickey Mouse" news

Yet there is hope. For commercial media to continue it needs to introduce: better quality, more competition, more customers to digital forms and paywalls. Ahh... Paywalls again - I do think that although we will be reluctant at first, it will help keep Journalism alive.

From this weeks reading, "Commercial free-to-air" I learnt that the news values for commercial media differ to public media. It seems that the audience is more interested in locality, transport, community and education. These things are stuff that are personally relevant to them. International affairs must sometimes be looked over to give more time to these "turn ons". It was also interesting to note that the average news bulletin is only 19 minutes, after all the advirtisements.

TV advertisements, they are everywhere.
Source: http://www.webdragon.com.au/main-site/welcome/
waxaway-takes-television-commercial-online;storyId,6259

This raises a few questions. Should the audience drive the news or the new drive the audience? For commercial media to survive, I believe it has to be the audience. I just hope that the audience will be more willing to listen to more global issues.