III(2)_Unit_5_MassMedia_ST

Unit 5: Student’s Book

A wide variety of newspapers ispublished in Britain, and newspaper readers are generally loyal to the newspaper of their choice, to buy the same newspaper every day. The papers themselves vary from dailies and Sunday papers distributed nationwide to regional, evening and weekly papers for the needs of people in a particular geographical area.

The papers with the highest are the national tabloids which try to maintain their by publishing sensational stories and the private lives of people in the public eye. Readership of the tabloids is concentrated among less affluent social groups, and is an important aspect of newspaper choice in this sector. such as competitions with spectacular prizes are a common means of attempting to sales.

For more extensive news readers may turn to the broadsheets, where in the

Answer the following questions.

best cases there is an attempt at

analysis of the current situation both at home and abroad. As in the case of tabloids, the editor has an important role to play in determining how a story is , but more and more frequently the views of the newspaper have a role to play.

Both tabloids and broadsheets provide articles and of current books, films, plays and so forth. Sport also receives substantial coverage. Many newspapers now advice on how to handle personal

finances, as well as a more traditional business section.

Advertising revenue is an essential element in a newspaper's , and advertisers take

account of the social characteristics of a particular newspaper's when determining at

which group to a particular sales promotion. advertising is also a valuable source of income.

Unit 5: Student’s Book

instincts to draw us in. When politics enter the newsroom, papers often use common affiliations to solicit to large, generic groups of people. Journalism should be a neutral platform to which everyone can subscribe unequivocally, not just those onthe insideof theslant.

Reason7: Reason: It’s Impracticaland Inconvenient. This is the reason a lot of retro-technology is pushed

aside so quickly for the next flashy thing. Vinyl records became immediately more bulky and involved as soon as CD’s came about, as convenience is always preferred to quality or substance. Accordingly, it’s completely impractical to dig through a compost pile of newspapers to ascertain a news story from last year; whereas with the internet, archives exist, and virtually nothing is out of reach with a single laptop or handheld smartphone with internet access. Then there’s the matter of paper waste, the very reasonhardcoregreen-heads don’t read thepaper.

Reason6: Reason: It Costs Money.

As the old adage goes, why pay for something that’s free? This is the very ideology that devastates the music industry and paper industry alike. Like pirated music, news is very much available for free on the internet, largely from websites pertaining to major city newspapers. With that being the case, news being readily accessible, and streamed to your homepage even, it seems redundant to pay a monthly subscription to hear the same thing from a pile of carbon (or digital equivalent). And that is the central problem with thenewspaper, it really offers nothing new.

Reason5: It Requires Literacy.

Simply put, most Americans don’t like to read, recreationally or otherwise. Newspapers endorse literacy implicitly on a daily basis. Granted, the industry is aimed at the least educated-types for a reason, as people don’t often have the attention span to sit down and absorb a single thing without being simultaneously stimulated by 18 others. Truth be told, if the paper didn’t have so many fullpage pictures, or a funnies section, it would’ve died a long time ago (some people get all their news from Doonesbury alone).

Reason4: WastefulOverhead.

Between large headquarters, lofty offices, salaried employees and warehouses containing cumbersome printing presses which use (i.e. waste) all sorts of ink and paper every day, a lot of money goes into the daily newspaper that shows up at your door step every morning. All that money is exactly what keeps the industry from garnering any viable or growth-enabling profit margins, when online-based newspapers (like AOL’s Patch) are accountable for virtually no overhead (operating mostly out of coffee shops and a host website, in lieu of a physical headquarters) and make all their money through ad revenue. This is the Age of DIY, digital music, E-books and reality TV: less materialequals moreroom forprofits.

Reason3: BigBusiness Pretensions.

Again, the newspaper industry still thinks it’s on the same page as Wall Street, Big Oil and Big Tobacco, and can maintain that Tony Montana business ethos of wasteful expenditures and general impetuosity. It’s almost foolish to think you can keep up a business full of highly-demanding, not to mention overpaid, staff members, providing benefits and the kinds of perks that are usually found in the fluffiest regions of the corporate world. But when starving journalists fresh out of grad school are willing to do the exact same work for a lot less, and with a lot more zeal for the trade as an art form, it becomes a million times more practical to take on a body of freelancers who cut overhead into a fractional value. But if you insist on guaranteeing each employee gets a new jet ski or swimming pool full of caviarfora Christmas bonus, so beit.

Reason2: CableNews.

With cable news, reading is obsolete. This is exciting for people uninterested in maintaining the acuteness of their wits. For those who like doing no work and reaping all the benefits, including a dash of enlightenment, it’s a sheer delight to be able to watch television and effortlessly absorb all the necessary points a newspaper requires you to sift for. This is huge competition for such a literacydependent medium as the newspaper. Not only that, the paper only comes once a day, meaning that anything that happens thereafter can’t be reported until the very next day. Cable news on the other hand can report a story on the minute and as it happens, even before it happens; for instance, when the news of Osama BinLaden’s death hadn’t yet been made official, CNN was there to break it as it was being relayed from various sources and inside informants, who were alluding to some “important announcement” to be made by the President. The paper “broke” this news the following morning.

Reason1: TheInternet.

Theinternet is responsiblefora lot of deaths. Primary, thedeath of humanity. Throughit, peopleno longer need interact faceto faceorleavetheirhouses to buy things or evenwork (insomecases). Whennews canbebrokenthe second it happens, orat least as long as it takes fora witness to typeit and publish it online(with Twitteror Facebook, that is only seconds), it’s a remarkablething. That is unless yourbusiness modelstilloperates ona once/day basis. Inthatcase, you comeoffas perpetually slow to thepunch, nothing morethana recapof what’s already beensaid/revealed. It is forthat reasonthat the newspaperis no longera practicalway to receive information, that iswhenit comes to thevery topical. Since most papers don’t dig much furtherthanthetopical, it is not introducing a new element and hardly a fresh perspective. Thereis a lot to say fora tangibleproduct, but theproduct injournalism really comes downto a single abstraction: knowledge. That iswhat needs to besold effectively. Sadly, there’s nothing effectiveabout a newspaperanymore.

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Unit 5: Student’s Book

Choose one of the advertising methods in the photos and make a list of its

advantages and disadvantages. Try to think of three advantages and three disadvantages.

Read these paragraphs from a book about advertising and decide which advertising medium (a-f) each paragraph (1-4) describes. There are more media than you need.

1.This form of advertising can reach a large number of homes. Consumers can take their time over the message so it can contain details like phone numbers or website addresses. However, adverts here have a short lifespan as most people throw them away after one day.

2.With this marketing technique, you can direct your message to the people who are most likely to buy your product or service. You can focus on a particular area of a city or on previous customers. However, it can be difficult to get your audience’s attention as some people throw these away without even looking at them.

3.This medium allows you to reach a large number of people in a short space of time. Perhaps its main advantage is that you can get your message across with both visual images and sound. The problem for many businesses is that it is expensive. You need to have plenty of money to pay for the cost of producingthe ad and to pay for a suitable time to show it.

4.This type of advertising certainly reaches its audience because people can’t switch it off or throw it away. However, consumers are usually moving at the time, so they only see the ad for about two or three seconds. It is normally used to remind consumers of messages which other media have already communicated to them.

Of course, some techniques that advertisers use are not always completely

honest and may even be illegal. Read the following two situations and discuss them with your partner. Do you think theyare acceptable practice or not?

A pizza restaurant advertised pizzas at half price for a week. However, when customers were

inside the restaurant, they were told that to get the half price pizza, they had to buy a dessert as well.

The marketing team for a brand of household detergent decided to target the “Green” consumer. They put the detergent in a newly designed bottle with a pattern of green leaves and added the words “no polluting phosphates”. However, their detergent never contained phosphates in the past and neither did any of their competitors’ brands.

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Unit 5: Student’s Book