Is commercial media really that wrong?

Back to the normal lecture room with power points and, commercial media it is! The difference between public media and commercial media always confused me, which was clarified through the lecture. First of all, what is commercial media?

Commercial media is;

l  - Profit-driven media production

l  - Not government funded (or license funded)

l  - It survives or fails on business success

l  - Its business is generating ‘audiences’

l  - Create audiences to generate profit through selling advertising to them

Through the lecture, the importance of advertisement in commercial media was discussed. On issue within this was that commercial media were now concentrating on the ‘money’ instead of the ‘quality.’ It was told that The question is, ‘is this bad?’

In the olden days, running a commercial media was not this hard, because you only had to focus on newspapers, televisions and radio. Then, however, the money came in and everything started to get difficult. Through this, commercial media started to lose its quality. Below is from the lecture power point about the changes in the commercial media.

Loss of revenue =

Less investment =

 Less money for quality production =

More bought-in content (Less original) =

More repeats of US sitcoms, more reality TV.

One statement out of many is very memorable and that was that ““Audiences want and will pay for quality …” I believe this is true and I would pay for quality, however, the cost of a quality production would be huge. This means that there would be more money invested into the production and what would happen if production costs more than the sell? Since the government doesn’t fund the company, the organisation has to work from their own money. Also, many people won’t pay for certain things, such as the online newspapers, then how are they going to earn money? Asking for a quality production with a limited amount of money seems a bit unfair. Thus, I believe that the fault of the loss of quality isn’t solely on the commercial media organisation, however also on the audience. If we stop believing that we are entitled to various commercial media, we would be able to earn ‘quality’ from them.

I, however, believe that commercial media is a fundamental part of the “media world” and that it will somehow develop through the future. Quality is important however, I hope many people would also consider the situation and support the commercial media. I strongly believe that the supports of many audiences would help commercial media to gain its ‘quality’ again.