1989

radical or minority issue editorial cartoonists who would previously have been obscure have found large audiences on the Internet.

Editorial cartoons can be very diverse, but there is a certain established style among most of them. Most use visual metaphors and caricatures to explain complicated political situations, and thus sum up a current event with a humorous or emotional picture. Their purpose is to bring across a message to people and try to make them think the same way.

In modern political cartooning two styles have begun to emerge. The traditional style, involving symbols like Uncle Sam, the Democratic donkey and Republican elephant, visual metaphors and labels, is described as the “nast-y” style (named after Thomas Nast), and the more text heavy “altie” style that tells a linear story, usually in comic strip format. Although their style, technique or viewpoints may differ, editorial cartoonists draw attention to important social and political issues.

Although most western editorial cartoonists by necessity occupy the middle political ground, this is by no means true of all cartoonists and there is a spectrum of political commentary in cartoons which runs from the extreme right through the centre to the extreme left. Political cartoons, can be whatever would reach the chosen age target.

There is a Pulitzer Prize awarded every year for America’s top editorial cartoonist – as decided by a panel of senior media industry professionals and media academics. Other major awards given each year to editorial cartoonists include the Sigma Delta Chi Award from the Society of Professional Journalists, the Thomas Nast Award from the Overseas Press Club, and the Herblock Prize.

ANDY BURNHAM: THE BBC CAN HELP SAVE LOCAL

NEWSPAPERS

From The Times, March 30, 2009

By Philip Webster, Political Editor

The BBC should come to the aid of struggling local newspapers rather than compete against them, the Culture Secretary has told “The Times”.

As more newspapers go to the wall, and thousands of regional media jobs are lost, Andy Burnham is calling for radical measures to save a pillar of local democracy.

Rules restricting mergers of local newspapers could be eased, more government and local authority advertising could be pushed their way, and new models of ownership will be examined.

The Government will also study how the industry can modernise and become part of the digital communications age.

Ministers are looking at council-funded newspapers that are taking business away from the traditional press. Mr. Burnham has called a oneday conference of industry representatives at the Commons next month, and is planning to raise the future of the industry at Cabinet level. He told The Times: “Local newspapers have long been part of the fabric of life in our towns and rural areas. But as most MPs can see with their own eyes, they are facing very dire times.

“Some of it is cyclical because of the downturn, but some of it is structural as readers and advertisers have turned to the Internet. We cannot allow this vital source of local information to disappear.”

He said: “We have to plot a path for local papers to move into the digital age.”

Mr. Burnham suggested that rather than compete against each

work together. “We should be looking at public-private partnerships. The BBC could provide sound and images to the website of the local paper. Newspapers can provide information for BBC websites. All of them could work together providing a service under the trusted banner of the local paper. As we said in the White Paper Digital Britain, the BBC should become an enabling force in the media world.”

Mr. Burnham envisages different business models, with local papers becoming part of media trusts or mutuals, sometimes helped by the local councils. He is not in favour of government subsidies. Money is tight and his contacts with editors have suggested they are also uneasy about it, fearing that their independence could be compromised.

The Office of Fair Trading and Ofcom have begun a full consultation on local media ownership after appeals from regional groups for restrictions to be relaxed. The OFT plans to complete the review by the middle of next month, in time for the final Digital Britain report by Mr. Burnham and Lord Carter of Barnes, chairman of Sport England, which is due in early summer.

Ministers are also worried about the fall in revenue from local advertising, and are likely to raise with councils their growing practice of advertising jobs internally in their own papers rather than in the local press.

THE PARTY’S OVER AND MAGAZINES SUFFER A

CIRCULATION HANGOVER

From The Times, February 13, 2009

By Patrick Foster, Media Correspondent

Geri Halliwell has been on holiday in Mexico. Not many people know that – or care, it seems. In fact, the dearth of exciting gossip surrounding celebrities, possibly reining-in their lavish lifestyles in these straitened times, has been blamed for a plunge in the circulation of women’s weekly magazines.

Only two of them bucked the downward trend last year – Bella, published by H Bauer, up 16.9 per cent in the second half, and Hello!, owned by Eduardo Sánchez Junco, the Spanish media magnate, reporting a year-on-year rise of 7.1 per cent. The sector was down 8 per cent on the year.

Hello!, down slightly in the second half of 2008, now sells 432,649 copies a week, according to half-yearly figures from the Audit Bureau of Circulations, closing the gap on OK! Magazine, its Northern and Shell rival, whose circulation plunged by a disastrous 25.6 per cent last year.

Richard Desmond’s celebrity offering saw its circulation slide from nearly 700,000 to touching 500,000 over the 12 months, losing its slot as the second most popular women’s weekly to Bauer’s Closer.

Analysts suggested that the £2.95 cover price of OK! was causing it to lose sales in a sector where discounting has become the norm. Circulation of Heat magazine cooled rapidly, losing 11.7 per cent during 2008, but remaining stable in the second half of the year, at 470,000 copies.

Take a Break, the Bauer true-life publication, maintained its № 1 spot in the sector, but slipped below one million sales, down 3.9 per cent on the six months, to 943,000.

Its stablemate, Bella, put on 224,000 copies. Helen Lowe, the magazine’s publisher, said: “Bella has stuck to its core values by providing entertainment through true-life features, celebrity gossip, style and service elements. [It] provides thirtysomething women with somewhere to go when they have outgrown the core celebrity titles.”

At the other end of the market, the high-end titles fared better, with Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar and Vanity Fair all holding on to sales over 2008, or even marginally increasing circulation. The sector saw growth of 7.4 per cent, although that was largely driven by a 20.7 per cent rise in the distribution of Asos.com, the fashion website’s free monthly glossy magazine. Red, the fashion and beauty offering from Hachette Filipacchi, achieved record sales of 225,000 copies after grinding out a 2.1 per cent

growth in the second half of 2008, but Cosmopolitan lost 10,000 readers over the year, a fall of 2.1 per cent.

In the men’s market, there was similar pain for the downmarket titles, with FHM, Nuts, Zoo and Maxim all reporting double-digit falls in circulation for 2008. Maxim, from Dennis Publishing, took scant consolation in a 5.5 per cent growth on the period, with sales slipping by 41.4 per cent over the year, crashing through the 50,000 barrier from 78,500 to 46,000.

Loaded fell through the 100,000 barrier, dropping 21.7 per cent over the year to 90,000 copies, and Zoo was down nearly 19 per cent.

At the other end of the market, GQ powered to an 11th consecutive circulation increase to 130,000 copies. Condé Nast said the title also achieved a 15 per cent increase in subscriptions for the year, a record for the magazine.

In the music sector, Q magazine continued its lingering decline, recording a 9 per cent drop in sales for the second half of 2008, despite a much-trumpeted relaunch incorporating more lifestyle content. The Bauer monthly is now approaching the 100,000 mark, selling 103,000 copies, and could slip below the psychological benchmark at the next set of results.

Classic Rock and Metal Hammer, both from Future Publishing, were the top performers in the sector, seeing year-on-year growth of 4 per cent and 10 per cent respectively. Metal Hammer overtook New Musical Express, the industry bible, for the first time. NME, which has focused heavily on its web presence, lost nearly a quarter of its readers last year, dropping to 48,500 copies.

PART III

BROADCASTS. THEIR TYPES AND WAYS OF DISTRIBUTION

From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broadcasting

Broadcasting is a major component of the mass media in most of the world’s countries. The term “broadcast” originally referred to the sowing of seeds by scattering them over a wide field. It was adopted by early radio engineers from the Midwestern United States to refer to the analogous dissemination of radio signals.

The first regular television broadcasts began in 1937. Broadcasts can be classified as recorded or live. The former allows correcting errors, and removing superfluous or undesired material, rearranging it, applying slowmotion and repetitions, and other techniques to enhance the program. However some live events like sports telecasts can include some of the aspects including slow motion clips of important goals/hits etc. in between the live telecast.

American radio network broadcasters habitually forbade prerecorded broadcasts in the 1930s and 1940s requiring radio programs played for the Eastern and Central time zones to be repeated three hours later for the Pacific time zone. This restriction was dropped for special occasions, as in the case of the German dirigible airship Hindenburg at Lakehurst, New Jersey in 1937. During World War II, prerecorded broadcasts from war correspondents were allowed on U.S. radio. In addition, American radio programs were recorded for playback by Armed Forces Radio stations

with propaganda broadcasts from Germany in the 1940s and with Radio Moscow in the 1980s.

Many events are advertised as being live, although they are often “recorded live” (sometimes called “live-to-tape”). This is particularly

of the distinction between live and recorded media is viewed with chagrin among many music lovers. Similar situations have sometimes appeared in television (“The Cosby Show is recorded in front of a live studio audience”).

A broadcast may be distributed through several physical means. If coming directly from the studio at a single radio or TV station, it is simply sent through the air chain to the transmitter and thence from the antenna on the tower out to the world. Programming may also come through a communications satellite, played either live or recorded for later transmission. Networks of stations may simulcast the same programming at the same time, originally via microwave link, now usually by satellite.

Distribution to stations or networks may also be through physical media, such as analog or digital videotape, CD, DVD, and sometimes other formats. Usually these are included in another broadcast, such as when electronic news gathering returns a story to the station for inclusion on a news programme. As a result a news programme can present diverse information including live or recorded interviews by field reporters, expert opinions, opinion poll results, and occasional editorial content.

The final leg of broadcast distribution is how the signal gets to the listener or viewer. It may come over the air as with a radio

or directly from a network. The Internet may also bring either radio or TV to the recipient, especially with multicasting allowing the signal and bandwidth to be shared.

The term “broadcast network” is often used to distinguish networks that broadcast an over-the-air television signal that can be received using a television antenna from so-called networks that are broadcast only via cable or satellite television. The term “broadcast television” can refer to the programming of such networks.

REPORTS OF RADIO’S DEATH ARE GREATLY

EXAGGERATED

From The Times, April 1, 2009 By Chris Campling

Who would have thought, in this brave new technological world, that one of the media of the future would also be one of the oldest? As print fights for its existence against the Internet, as more television channels chase fewer advertisers, as the way we buy and listen to music shrinks from a lovely big vinyl record in a sumptuous gatefold sleeve to a digital signal on an MP3 player, dear, sweet little old radio is doing a Benjamin Button, growing bigger and stronger as it gets older.

I just checked the number of stations available through my digital TV

– 186 of them. Urban pirate radio – the modern, DIY child of the stations

celebrated in Richard Curtis’s new movie, The Boat that Rocked – continues to thrive.

We’ve gone from the cat’s whisker set that our great-grandads built from instructions in the Boy’s Own Paper, past the family wireless in the corner of the living room, past the trannie (it meant something different in those days) glued to the ear of every mod, to radio off the Internet in a downloadable podcast, even – and there’s such a sweet irony in this – radio via digital television. And the great thing about it is – it’s free. No licence required to listen to the radio. Could this be the entertainment medium of the credit-crunch Noughties?

It has to be said that I am a child of radio: I didn’t have any choice growing up in South Africa, which didn’t get TV until 1975 because Albert Herzog, the minister in charge of public broadcasting, didn’t like television. He called it “the Devil’s bioscope”. All we had was the radio. And even that wasn’t very good: music request programmes for the same records, over and over again; cop and comedy dramas with scripts appropriated from overseas (The Men From the Ministry was a national favourite).

Still, some life-shaping programmes did slip through the net: The Goon Show and Take it From Here. Oh, the happy hours my brothers and I spent huddled around the wireless, laughing at jokes written before we were born. Just a Minute was about as cutting-edge as our imported humour got. Derek Nimmo and Kenneth Williams were gods in our house.

Nearly 40 years on and I can watch all the TV I want, download any music I want, listen to any of the many CDs that I possess and watch my stacks of DVDs. But I don’t very often, because the radio is always on.

Say “radio” to most people and they will think of the national stations that are operated by the BBC and, in turn, form a mental picture of the sort

of people who listen to them. Radio 1 – young people who think that Chris Moyles is funny. Radio 2 – middle-aged people who think that Terry Wogan is funny. Radio 3 – old people who don’t like Classic FM because of all the advertisements. Radio 4 – people who own Agas. Radio 5 Live – people who think that sport is important ... and so on. On every station, a stereotype. And it’s just so unfair.

Yes, I’m a 5 Live man, but I hate football. I just listen to match commentaries when I’m driving because it helps me to concentrate.

And, yes, I’m a Radio 4 man – not only because it has given us Little Britain, Ed Reardon, the Now Show and The News Quiz, but also because, one recent Sunday morning in act of supreme serendipity, it slid out a fascinating programme about the poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti that made me want to go and read his poetry.

And yes, I’m a Radio 3 man, because when I was going through a nasty divorce there was something about lugubrious string quartets first thing in the morning that made life seem worthwhile.

And yes, I’m a Radio 2 man, because although I have never deliberately tuned into Terry Wogan’s enormously popular breakfast show, I try not to miss Jonathan Ross on Saturday mornings, directly followed by an hour of stand-up comedy.

I’m not a Radio 1 man, because I’m old, but come Glastonbury time and I might well, you know, try not to miss any of it, especially when The Boss is on.

I’ve been a listener for a while now and am thinking of going for stronger meat – local radio. Any advice?

REALITY TV

From Across Cultures By E. Sharma

In 1974, the BBC broadcast a new TV programme called The family. In 12 episodes, everyday scenes from the lives of the working-class Wilkins family in Reading were shown to the nation. Some television executives feared that it couldn’t possibly be a success – who would be interested in watching something so boring? But The family was instantly a huge hit. Known then as “fly-on-the-wall” documentaries, and now as “docusoaps” or reality TV, such programmes now dominate the TV schedules and regularly attract millions if viewers.

In the 1990s, house and garden makeover programmes such as Changing rooms were particularly popular, while docusoaps such as

Driving School made overnight stars out of likeable ordinary people such as Maureen Rees, possibly the worst driver in the world.

In the new millennium, however, reality TV programmes have tended to become more personal and humiliating. Fat Club, for example, followed the ups and downs of eight overweight people desperate to lose weight at a remote health club, and Wife Swap took the simple but explosive idea of two women swapping places in each other’s families for two weeks. For the first week they had to live according to the other woman’s rules, but for the second week they could dictate how the house was run. In 2003, reality humiliation reached a new low with How Clean Is Your House?, a surprise hit involving two women who investigate some of the dirtiest homes in the country, then return later to see if the inhabitants are still following their cleaning advice.

With reality TV also came interactive TV, starting with the mother of them all, Big Brother. Following the model of that programme, in which viewers decide each week by vote who stays and who goes, many other elimination shows quickly appeared. The most popular ones were Pop Slurs, Fame Academy and I’m a Celebrity – Get me Out of Here, where a group of celebrities attempt to survive for two weeks in the jungle together, performing various tasks along the way. Celebrities, especially those seeking to boost their careers, seem particularly keen to appear on reality shows, as successful celebrity versions of Big Brother, Driving School, Fat Club and Fame Academy have proved.

HOLLYWOOD BETTING ON AN EYE-OPENING FORMAT

From Washington Post, Friday, March 27, 2009 By Mike Musgrove

“These are dark times,” growls the voice of Kiefer Sutherland as Gen. W.R. Monger in “Monsters vs. Aliens,” the heavily hyped 3-D animated kid flick from DreamWorks Animation arriving in theaters today. “The odds are against us. We need a Hail Mary pass.”

The movie industry might not need anything quite so desperate as a Hail Mary pass – after all, box-office receipts are up this year – but Hollywood’s embrace of 3-D technology is as much a business decision as a moviemaking decision. In an effort to keep fans coming to theaters for an experience that they can’t get at home, the studios are releasing a slew of movies in 3-D this year, although they are behind schedule in a multimillion-dollar effort to equip theaters with the projectors necessary to show them.

For an extra $3 to $5, moviegoers at certain theaters will get a pair of recyclable polarized glasses that make the images pop from the screen. In “Monsters vs. Aliens,” PG-rated carnage is wrought by a likable crew of monsters, voiced by Reese Witherspoon, Seth Rogen, Will Arnett and Hugh Laurie, who scramble to save the world from a bumbling force of aliens armed with superior firepower and bad intentions.

The effects especially kick in as the Golden Gate Bridge is torn apart and Witherspoon’s character skates away at breakneck speeds down the streets of San Francisco to elude an alien robot. When the president, voiced by Stephen Colbert, consults with his aides in a war-room bunker, viewers may feel as if they are at the table.

No studio is betting more heavily on the 3-D update than DreamWorks Animation. Starting with “Monsters vs. Aliens,” every release from the studio from now on will be created with the technology – though, for the foreseeable future, these films will also be released in 2-D to accommodate the vast majority of theaters that don’t yet have the new projectors. The studio’s move will cost it an extra $15 million per film, said DreamWorks Animation Chief Executive Jeffrey Katzenberg, during a trip to Washington to show off the movie.

With the advent of high-end home theaters, Katzenberg said, Hollywood needs something extra to grab the attention of all those consumers who may otherwise be more inclined to stay home and enjoy a bag of popcorn while parked in front of their plasma-screen TVs and surround-sound stereo equipment.

The digital projector needed to display a movie in 3-D costs more than twice as much as the $30,000 of older film projectors still used in most theaters. Before the current economic crisis, studios and theaters had arrived at a deal to share the upgrade costs. At the moment, that rollout is at something of a standstill.

“The studios and the theaters have an agreement in principle, but you may have noticed that the credit markets are a little tight right now,” said Doug Creutz, an industry analyst with Cowen and Co. “It’s, literally, a matter of where the money is going to come from.”

In the meantime, analysts say they expect that studios such as DreamWorks will probably profit from expanding into the new format anyway, if modestly. The extra $15 million per picture for 3-D is a comparatively small investment, considering that the studio’s films, such as “Shrek the Third” and “Kung Fu Panda,” typically bring in hundreds of millions of dollars.