Managing in the Media

William Houseley, Tom Nicholls, Ron Southwell, Pamela Block

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781136055133
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Médias et arts de la scène
• Subtopic: Film et vidéo

Managing in the Media has been devised for a broad audience. It is based upon the perceived need for a text that amalgamates cultural theories, film and television analysis, management theories and media production practice into one volume. There are many books on film and cultural studies. Similarly, there are copious numbers of texts written on management. To date little has been written that analyses the management of the audiovisual industry set against the backdrop of the cultural and economic environment within which the media manager operates.
Managing in the Media is divided into three sections that take the reader from the global to the specific, from the strategic to the tactical. Each chapter discusses specific topics that can be read in isolation yet contribute to the theme within each part. Taken as a whole, the book provides the potential professional media manager and current practising media manager with a framework of issues that will give them an awareness of the range of knowledge needed by the successful media manager.
This book does not try to be a manual to success. The media industry is awash with successful individuals none of whom needed textbooks to set them on their chosen career paths. Yet these exceptional people prove the rule; that in the main, most media practitioners would benefit from some additional support and guidance. The aim of this book is to present to them some of the management issues that have, or will have, an impact upon their working careers. The accompanying website www.mediaops.net (which can also be accessed via www.focalpress.com) features:
- Tutor notes and reader activities
- Updated list of further reading
- Additional support material such as production templates
- Interviews with the authors
- A discussion forum
- Industry and education links
- Media News

Part 1

The media environment

Chapter 1

The media industry – into the millennium

1.1 Summary

This chapter describes the historical and economic background to the film, broadcast television and non-broadcast media markets within the wider audiovisual industry. In essence, it is an introduction to the British audiovisual industry. Where appropriate, references to global models are made. We recognise that any attempt to categorise a media product is bound to raise questions of definition, so the terms used in this text are only used to provide boundary conditions for discussion. For example, for the purposes of this book, non-broadcast media include:

• industrial and corporate video production

• secondary sales of feature films and television programmes

• training and education programmes

• other non-broadcast or non-broadcastable programmes (such as pornography).

On the associated web site there are thumbnail assessments of several nation states and economic blocks’ audiovisual industries. These notes are provided to give you support notes for comparative studies.

Media products, especially film and television programmes, are not just another commodity sold to the consumer or viewer, they come laden with cultural baggage from the society that created the product. During the 1993–1994 Uruguay round of GATT (General Agreement on Tariff and Trade), France led an EU driven complaint about the USA/Hollywood influence on, and dominance of, the audiovisual industry. The French delegates accused the USA of employing unfair price competition by dumping film and television programmes into the European market. Surprisingly, it was the most contentious aspect of GATT. This was not just about the economic concerns of the Europeans, feeling that the media industries within their own countries were under threat; it was also about a perception of a cultural imperialism that they felt was undermining their own cultural mores – a fear of the ‘Hollywoodisation’ of the entire audiovisual industry.

Many other governments are also concerned about their audiovisual industry and culture having to compete with that of the USA. An exported media product is more than just a commodity for resale, a means of generating a favourable balance of trade. Whether intended or not, it carries at least some of the prevailing social, cultural and political assumptions of the country that produced it. For this reason, the economic model can only be one part of any analysis or assessment of the global audiovisual industry. Therefore, this chapter begins by looking at the changing audiovisual industrial environment set within the context of the social, economic, technical and cultural values that underpin the industry. At the back of the book a media timeline is provided, to illustrate the links between political, economic, technical and media environments in the UK, which will allow you to place the British audiovisual industry within an historical framework.

At this point, an analysis of the British media industry alone may seem surprisingly parochial. However, there are several good reasons why the British audiovisual industry provides a benchmark for audiovisual industries elsewhere in the world. First, the BBC was the first public television transmission system. Second, the UK is the first national environment and industry in which the three possibilities of delivering digital television signals to the domestic user – satellite, cable and terrestrial – are already in place. Third, the British audiovisual industry, especially television, has often been the laboratory for innovative media productions. However, that is not to say that the impact of Hollywood should be dismissed – indeed, Hollywood undermined the British film industry almost from the start, a situation explored in more detail in later chapters.

This chapter introduces the debate between public or state control of the media and the notion of the independent or free market. Many media observers around the world are amazed, and sometimes appalled, that within the British media environment we accept the idea of the licence fee as a means of ‘paying for our television’. Yet, by definition, their notion of the ‘free market’ cannot exist for the following reasons:

• Regulation at national level determines airwave allocation.

• Treaties at the international level (or the attempt to do so through GATT, for example) moderate and control sales across international boundaries.

• Sales of products from one economic entity to another are, in theory at least, protected by copyright.

• Technology agreements have to be reached about standards. Image conversion and the methods of distribution provide marketing opportunities, but without these agreements no single format programme can be shown or sold in all global markets. The delay in launching DVD occurred more through concerns of product protection than through any technical constraints.

• Internal markets are monitored by monopoly commissions.

• Government audiovisual agencies/departments regulate output.

In countries where regulatory bodies do not exist, anarchy rises to such a level that being able to watch a programme at all can become a hit or miss affair. The very function of being able to provide the air space or bandwidth to enable terrestrial transmission to take place restricts the number of channels available to the analogue broadcasters. Within the UK, this limit was reached with the licensing of Channel 5. Even so, a massive campaign of re-tuning domestic VCRs throughout the country was required to enable Channel 5 to transmit without interfering with the pre-set channel of the majority of domestic videotape recorders. The UK had reached its limits in terms of analogue terrestrial transmission.

A primary driver for change is new technology opening up new possibilities for production and distribution. Yet the audiovisual industry has many forces acting upon it that constrain the opportunities for media practitioners, company owners and business managers to exploit these opportunities. Governments and international bodies seek to regulate and control these opportunities, either to sweep away competition and opposition, or to act as a barrier to the entry of predatory products from other nation states that may possibly overwhelm the indigenous cultural offerings.

New technology, in the form of digital transmission and digital storage, means that images may be transmitted and replicated with no loss of quality. Global distribution networks are possible. Hence the panic and concern in Hollywood about the Digital Versatile Disk (DVD); once a feature film is committed to a digital form, the distribution and replication of the product is harder to control. Price control through segmented markets collapses, and in poorly regulated countries and markets a thriving black market will copy and distribute the product.

There is a continuing fragmentation of the production process. The pessimistic assessment of this is that it reduces still further the influence that the craft skill operators have on those managing and owning the means of production. Alternatively it can be viewed as the embodiment of the post-Fordist production line artisan returning to his or her studio in the Cotswolds, yet using the digital superhighway to form virtual production networks to produce the next Hollywood blockbuster – the ultimate postmodernist vision of movie making.

This fragmentation is underpinned by the economic and social debate over public versus private broadcasting. The potential for more unsatisfactory results from any current round of GATT talks will continue to create a dynamic ebb and flow in the fortunes of the national and international media who trade with the USA. Only when the concept of the nation state and the definitions of what is an American, British or French product become indistinct and insignificant, might the barriers to free trade finally be removed. We are already part way there. If an American company based in Hollywood and owned by a Japanese conglomerate produces a film directed by an Italian and whose leading stars are from England, France and Germany, what determines where this product actually comes from? Or in the UK, will a future Culture and Heritage Secretary make the expedient decision to change yet again the definition of a British film so that it might remain British? Does this matter? Perhaps the answer is to work out who has made the most profit out of such an enterprise – although when we then discover that it is the Icelandic leading actor or actress, where does that leave us? Is the mass viewing audience really concerned about film that reflects the cultural identity of a people or nation state, or do they just want to be entertained? While this debate rages, the reality of a global product designed and produced in a global virtual workshop still has some way to go.

This chapter therefore presents the reader with an overview of the past, present and the possible future of the audiovisual industry as summarised in the media timeline.

1.2 Objectives and key issues

This chapter is not designed to give a blow-by-blow account of the British audiovisual industry. There are many texts that give full and complete histories of the film, television and even (despite its short life span) the multimedia industry. The purpose of this chapter is to highlight some of the activities, behaviours, actions and reactions of players in the audiovisual industry. At the back of the book is a media timeline reference chart, which will enable you to position any discussion mentioned here in its historical context. There is little advantage in giving a detailed chronological account of the media and communication industry because there have been many texts dedicated to that purpose; instead this chapter examines some of the business behaviours manifested in the audiovisual industry in the period since the Second World War.

It is usual to think of audiovisual products as having a three-stage life cycle; production, distribution and exhibition (although to some extent exhibition has become wrapped up in distribution, as the film model becomes a smaller percentage of the total audiovisual offering to the audience). Internet sales of audio material are already challenging the traditional distribution model for music. It is surely no coincidence that Virgin began moving into the communications business, with mobile phones and links to Microsoft, in early 2000. These expanding opportunities to reach a new audience have become known as ‘channels to market’.

Throughout the life of the media industry there has been a continual change in the players at each stage of this production process. For example, the model of film production that the media industry would currently accept as standard is not the process by which films were made in its earliest days. Chapter 6 explores some of the issues about the development of the Hollywood system of film-making. Since the 1980s, the relatively low barriers to entry and the continual churn of internal competition have encouraged many to join the film and television production market. The intentions of any government to create a ‘free and open market’ will be undermined by their very intervention as they perturb the system. In any case, the resourceful entrepreneur will always seek (and often find) ways to undermine government strategies if they are not in their interest. The future of the audiovisual industry will be determined by the current debate about ownership, technology and globalisation.

1.3 The audiovisual industry – past and present

1.3.1 The British film industry

In the early days of film-making, there was genuine naiveté about the role and demarcation of tasks in the production process. George Pearson, one of the earliest directors and producers, thought of his film crew as a team of interchangeable sportsmen. This seems rather a good analogy since, in the early days, production and craft roles were not clearly defined. As explained in Chapter 6, it was only with the establishment of film as a commodity with a formal production process that clear craft and management roles emerged, creating what Orson Wells described RKO studios as being – ‘the biggest electric train set any boy ever had!’.

As production became more complex in its scope and use of technology, so the division of labour, production management and senior management became more formal. Once the division of labour had been established, the three stages in the production lifecycle emerged – production, distribution and exhibition. Throughout this book, reference is made to these stages.

Most students of media will be aware that production embodies the ‘manufacturing’ stage, comprising pre-production, production and postproduction. As any product and its associated manufacturing process becomes more mature and has an impact on the economy of the nation, governments inevitably intervene (see Chapters 2 and 3 for British government policy on TV and film).

In Chapter 9, we consider Michael Porter’s model of competitive strategies in some detail and illustrate some of the issues pertinent to the audiovisual industry. In this chapter we set the scene for the analysis that will be further explored in Chapters 2, 3 and 4.

If you look at the media timeline, you will see that various British governments have taken all of the following approaches to media production:

• Laissez faire – do nothing and let the market decide

• Regulate – through government agencies that control the infrastructure

• Legislate – to determine industry structure (i.e. use of independent companies by the broadcasters)

• Provide funds – grants, tax breaks

• Change the terms of reference for the industry – i.e. the definition of a British film.

In turn, organisations in the media industry have responded by:

• Competing – nationally and globally

• Specialising – developing products for niche markets (arts, science, religion, news etc.)

• Seeking protection from government...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Dedication
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Statement on reference sources
• Introduction
• Part I: The Media Environment
• 1 The Media Industry – into the Millennium
• 2 British Public Service Broadcasting
• 3 British Film Policy
• 4 European Union Media Policy
• 5 Mass Media Theory
• 6 Media and its Cultural Implications
• Part II: Management Theories and Applications to the Media Industry
• 7 The Growth of Business in the Audiovisual Industry
• 8 Behaviour in Media Organisations and Organisational Behaviour
• 9 Strategic Management
• 10 Introduction to Media Law
• 11 Principles of Media Law
• 12 Media Ethics
• Part III: Media Management in Action
• 13 Production
• 14 Production Project Management in Practice
• Glossary
• Bibliography
• Media time line
• Index