Media Industries

History, Theory, and Method

Jennifer Holt, Alisa Perren, Jennifer Holt, Alisa Perren

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9781444360233
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Communication Studies
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Media Industries: History, Theory and Method is among the first texts to explore the evolving field of media industry studies and offer an innovative blueprint for future study and analysis.

• capitalizes on the current social and cultural environment of unprecedented technical change, convergence, and globalization across a range of textual, institutional and theoretical perspectives
• brings together newly commissioned essays by leading scholars in film, media, communications and cultural studies
• includes case studies of film, television and digital media to vividly illustrate the dynamic transformations taking place across national, regional and international contexts

Part I

History

Editors’ Introduction

The essays in this section serve two main purposes: to present readers with background on the history of different media industries and explore historio-graphical considerations in relation to their study. While the rest of this book focuses primarily on present-day media and thus conceptualizes these industries as integrated and interrelated, the emphasis in this section is largely on their individual and unique histories. We believe this background is important because historically, they have operated relatively independently of one another in terms of business models, modes of production, constructions of audiences, and narrative strategies. The essays in this section underscore the fact that – despite various points of intersection in the past and convergence in the present – these histories are quite distinct. They also illustrate how industry scholarship has tended to be medium-specific, with a handful of notable exceptions. Providing perspective on contemporary industry discourse, the essays here discuss media separately and historicize their forms, businesses, and industrial traditions. Further, they establish a foundation for future scholarship, while offering provocative ideas and innovative avenues for such endeavors.

Michele Hilmes begins the book by tracing how and why industry histories developed in the manner they did. She identifies prominent ways in which humanities-based scholars have made sense of the expansive subject that is “media industry studies.” She discusses how media industries scholarship has tended to be structured partly on the basis of manageability and partly according to categories familiar to scholars coming out of the humanities. This often has meant an emphasis on texts, genres, and authors, despite the fact that the serialized character of many texts and the collaborative nature of industrial production complicate these organizational schemes. Hilmes also indicates three prominent tropes – object, nation, and quality – that are productive arenas for more extensive exploration.

Speaking from her vantage point as director of the Texas Archive of the Moving Image, Caroline Frick argues for the vital yet under-examined role that archivists play in relation to media industry history. In addition to illustrating how archivists are a component of the media industries themselves, she shows how they have had an increasingly prominent role in shaping our understanding of media history. Frick explains that a number of economic, cultural, and organizational factors have led preservationists to emphasize Hollywood’s history over other more local or regionally based histories both inside and outside the US. She illustrates how decisions made about preservation or access might factor into the emergence of alternative industry histories in the future. Ultimately, she calls for archivists to more aggressively favor open access policies for the public.

Whereas Frick indicates the alternative media industry histories yet to be written, Thomas Schatz supplies a fresh perspective on the oft-explored topic of Hollywood history. Presenting a model for what he describes as a “film industry studies approach,” Schatz offers a way for historians to more fully address the convergences and divergences between film and other media industries at both macro- and micro-industrial levels. Schatz’s model addresses concerns that have long been of interest to film studies scholars, including matters of style, authorship, and mode of production. In addition, his survey of Hollywood past and present gives readers direction for how such an approach to media industry studies might be conducted.

Victoria E. Johnson turns our attention to American television with a nuanced discussion of how broadcast and cable have been historicized. She sees the media industries as sites of struggle and encourages readers to think about broadcast and cable history as a series of clashes between national and local interests, varying regulatory frameworks, and divergent notions of the public. In order to assess television’s place in a conglomerated media landscape, Johnson argues that scholars must investigate TV as a cultural practice, which she does through an examination of cable and the concept of “niche.” Her case study on ESPN and its appropriation of hip hop yields a rich analysis of the simultaneous separation and interdependence of the broadcast and cable industries. Through the lens of television sports, she examines the television industry’s valuations of the audience and corporate branding strategies as well as the competing dynamics of broadcasting and narrowcasting at work.

Johnson’s discussion of the industry’s shift from mass to niche audiences intersects with Cynthia B. Meyers’ chronicle of the history of advertising and sponsorship in electronic media. In her essay, Meyers surveys the complex web of relationships between broadcasters, networks, and the advertising industry from early radio through the digital era. Her resistance to conventional categorizations is one of many essays in this book advocating more integrated discussions of media industries. Meyers argues for a historicization of the advertising industry that is both informed by and explored alongside histories of other media. This perspective complicates our understanding of the historical dynamics of culture and commerce at work. Addressing various transitions throughout radio and TV history, Meyers explains just how imbricated advertising is in television’s forms. The links she makes between early sponsorship models and present-day television-Internet branding practices reinforce the value of a historically informed perspective in media industry studies.

P. David Marshall picks up where Meyers leaves off in her discussion of new media, asking precisely what is “new” about it. The rise of the Internet and other contemporary digital technologies has affected both the media industries as well as culture at large. Not only are existing business models in transition, but the industry’s construction of – and interaction with – audience-users is fundamentally changing as well. Marshall outlines an emerging industry ethos centered on specific modes of interactivity and asks whether these new media forms signal the increased blurring between media (industries) and communication (industries). His essay reflects the challenges facing those trying to place the contemporary moment in historical context. In spite of such challenges, he demonstrates how worthwhile the act oflooking at “old” media through the lens of new media can be as a means of questioning our assumptions about the practices and products of media industries.

1 Nailing Mercury The Problem of Media Industry Historiography

Michele Hilmes

Terminology is important, but like mercury, it’s slippery. The term “media industry” covers a huge slice of territory ranging over print, sound, screen, and digital bits in space, in venues as various as corporate communications, advertising, websites, novels, films, recordings, and music being shared person to person on the Internet. Its academic sites of study are just as various; media industry scholars can be found in departments of journalism, mass communications, film, English, art, theater, business, law, cultural studies, area and ethnic studies, music, anthropology, and many more. But, in the United States, the most extended and well-established body of work examining the function of the media industry in its most popular and widely disseminated forms has arisen around the “sound and screen” media: radio, television, and film, now extending to new digital venues such as the web, DVDs, and digital production.¹ This is a relatively new and indeterminate field marked more by what it excludes (or by what has been excluded) than by grounded inclusions. Typically it refers to those texts and practices that are not included in the study of literature, art, music, and drama as they have been structured in the academy over the last hundred years or so: namely, the Johnny-come-lately communicative arts, until recently tainted by an association with both machines and the masses, which by the humanities standards of an earlier time disqualified such pursuits as debased and anti-individual, fodder for sociologists rather than critics or historians.²

Over the last half of the twentieth century, however, the admission of these technologically driven, industrially based, mass-produced expressive forms to the purviews of academic study has called into being a radically different conception of the entire process of creative production and reception. Scholarly study of media industries required a re-theorization of the task of the humanities scholar and a rethinking of the ways that we understand and analyze culture more generally in the postmodern world. A media industries focus points directly to those aspects of cultural production in the twentieth century and beyond that most trouble the humanities-oriented categories of coherence and analysis so central to our understanding of culture itself: the author, the text, the reader. These categories, exploded by Foucault and other postmodern theorists some 30 years ago, linger on in our modes of analysis even as we recognize their extreme fragility in the way that culture is produced and consumed. The media of radio, popular music, television, and film refuse to conform to comfortable analytical paradigms. They refute essentialization, require many components and participants, blur creative lines, stretch the boundaries of expressive forms, transgress aesthetic standards, cross over cultural borders, break down disciplined reception, muddy meanings, pervade public and private spaces, and generally make a mess of our accepted ways of doing scholarship.

For historians – and all analysts are historians in some way or another – the media industries present particular problems. Where do we look for “authors” when authorship is dispersed among a host of productive sites (writers, directors, actors, technicians, marketers, advertisers, ratings companies, networks, studios, regulators, national boards and bodies, etc.) and how do existing (and non-existing) historio-graphical resources complicate this task? How do we approach “texts,” when we are confronted by, to take one extreme example, a program that originated in 1937 on daytime radio and still airs daily on television today, compiling such an incredibly voluminous text that no one person could ever possibly “read” it all in a single lifetime? (I refer, of course, to The Guiding Light, my candidate for the world’s oldest continuously running serial drama.) How do we understand “readership” when its permutations are so infinitely various and incalculable?

By taking an industries approach to the critical study of media we are indicating a perspective that is inherently contextual and interrelated. The concept of “industry” implies the coming together of a host of interests and efforts around the production of goods or services; it also indicates commercial purposes, meaning the distribution of goods or services in a marketplace for accumulation of profit, though this is sometimes more figurative than literal. In media studies, to nominate the industry as our focus of study indicates a concern for the creative forces of production behind the range of communicative texts and objects that comprise our field of analysis, a place held in more traditional humanistic studies by the author.

Thus industry study is the translation of authorship into a dispersed site marked by multiple, intersecting agendas and interests, where individual authorship in the traditional sense still most certainly takes place, but within a framework that robs it, to a greater or lesser degree, of its putative autonomy – a deeply disturbing displacement for many, and productive of much of the dystopian rhetoric that the concept of “mass media” has inspired over the course of two centuries. But it is also a vital enrichment of our understanding of cultural production and a necessary corrective to the narrow categories of traditional scholarship.

In the following pages, I want to survey the field of media industry history, looking at various approaches through a lens that situates them within intellectual traditions forged in humanities scholarship. This will serve to indicate where the study of media production diverges from that comfortable scholarly habitus. I wish to link such approaches with the historiographic challenges they pose, from the location and preservation of sources to the complexity of historical narratives that they engender. In addition, I will examine the organizing frameworks these approaches bump up against and consider some key ways that scholars have organized their thinking on this complex subject: author, text, object, nation, quality. I hope this will provide media industry historians with a useful way of thinking through their task, as well as an overview of a rapidly developing field.

Industrial Production

De Certeau (1988) reminds us that histories always begin at the end: the writing of history cannot take place without a framework forged in and by the present, structuring our path into the past and determining the history that we will produce. In this case, my wish to begin with the most basic and taken-for-granted type of authorship, familiar to all, the humanistic author as individual creative figure – writer, director, producer, performer, designer, composer, etc. – actually represents a late-arriving and highly problematic construction for media studies, particularly television. It reflects the status that media industry studies is moving toward, not the direction from which it has come. Therefore I will leave consideration of the author for last, and begin the way that scholarship in this area itself did – with attempts to understand the arrival of the industrial site of creative production with its diffuse set of practices, “mass-produced” texts, and indeterminate audiences.

The site of production

The tradition of media industry analysis has its roots in the 1930s and 1940s. In film, early works like Benjamin Hampton’s (1931) A History of the Movies, Howard T. Lewis’ (1933) The Motion Picture Industry and Mae Huettig’s (1944) Economic Control of the Motion Picture Industry led to studies like Michael Conant’s (1960) Antitrust in the Motion Picture Industry and Gertrude Jobes’ (1966) Motion Picture Empire. All provided overviews of filmmakers and film studios as they analyzed the circumstances of production and the films thus produced. They laid the groundwork for a new type of scholarly analysis that began to emerge during the last few decades of the twentieth century, positioning itself on the uneasy terrain between economics-based business history and literary/critical analysis, and nominating the productive matrix itself as the site of study: studio, production company, recording label, station, and network.

In film, scholars such as Tino Balio, Janet Wasko, Thomas Schatz, Douglas Gomery, Richard B. Jewell, Anthony Slide, Garth Jowett, Robert Sklar, Richard M. Hurst, David Bordwell, Kristin Thompson, and Janet Staiger combined economic analysis with a focus on the emergence of film as a new expressive medium. The burgeoning field of social, cultural, and aesthetic histories of American film that burst forth in the 1970s and 1980s built on these foundations.

Broadcasting history also depends on highly industry-oriented foundational texts with a production organization focus like Gleason Archer’s two books, A History of Radio to 1926 (1938) and Big Business and Radio (1939) and William Peck Banning’s (1946) Commercial Broadcasting Pioneer: The WEAF Experiment. Herman Hettinger filled in the role of the advertising agency in 1933 with his A Decade of Radio Advertising and Robert Landry (1946) gave an early overview in This Fascinating Radio Business. All of these studies were written either by authors employed in the broadcasting industry or with the industry’s cooperation; they are unapologetically boosterish. They rely heavily on access to records provided or produced by industry corporations themselves.

In the late 1930s and 1940s media industries began to receive a more critical treatment as well. Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, displaced from their German universities by the Nazis and largely appalled by the mass-produced American culture they observed around them, took up a critique of the “cultural industries” that combined an awareness of the power of this new type of cultural production with an intellectual disdain for their products and an anxious concern for their cultural and political effects.³ Llewellyn White’s study The American Radio, written for the Committee on Freedom of the Press in 1947, along with the work of Charles A. Siepmann in the 1940s and 1950s (highly influential in the early years of broadcasting’s admission into the academy), provide a similarly critical take on industrial history and posit a reform agenda. Historians of the broadcasting industry have made fruitful critical use of these sources and of the corporate archives and trade journals upon which they drew for source material. These early works set the stage for broadcasting scholarship to come: focused firmly on industrial questions, almost to the exclusion of the aesthetic or cultural, in contrast to film; and torn between a perspective that glorified the business of broadcasting and one that regarded it as deficient, backward, and sadly lacking in social and cultural substance.⁴

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Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• copyright page
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgments
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction: Does the World Really Need One More Field of Study?
• PartI: History
• PartII: Theory
• PartIII: Methodologies and Models
• PartIV: The Future: Four Visions
• Index