Republic of the Philippines

Department of Education
Region VII, Central Visayas

Media and information literacy

SECOND QUARTER

Quarter : 2 Week : 9 Day : 14 Activity No. : 14

Competency: : Analyze how the different dimensions are formally and
informally produced, organized, and disseminated.
Objective : Explain media as a middle in the media industry.
Topic : Different dimensions of media
Materials : Printed modules
Reference : (Louis 2009)
Copyrights : For Classroom Use

Concept Notes

As you have learned the different dimension of media in the previous lessons
and activities, you will delve now on how it is formally and informally produced,
organized and disseminated.

Read the personal blog below to gain insights on how it is done.

The Three Dimensions of Media

By: Tristan Louis

Over the last few years, much has been written about some of the challenges
the media industry is facing, particularly newspapers in the United States. I, myself,
have covered the area pretty extensively and for a while but acting as both a reader
and a writer of opinions about that industry, I have yet to see a clear definition of
what is being displaced. To that extent, I’ve started thinking about what is Media
with a capital M and what is changing in its nature?
Media as a Mode of Delivery

In most of the conversations about media, the discussions centers on modes

of delivery. People talk about television, radio, newspapers, magazines, or the
Internet as media. Under that definition, the way a piece of content is transported
appears to define what that piece of content is. It’s an odd approach that seems to
put more emphasis on the how than on the what, that really believes that the
envelope is more important that the message it carries and this offering seems like a
flawed assumption in many ways.

It would seem foolish to consider the telephone a media form so why do we

treat the television or paper as components? They are channels and nothing more
and the hand-wringing around delivery to those channels seems based on the flawed
assumption that the mode of transport is more important than what is transported.

There is an inherent danger in that flawed assumption as previous industries

which failed to recognize the business they were in found themselves displaced and
ultimately delivering value into the hands of a single player that concentrated its
power by offering itself as the primary toll-gate on another form of distribution. The
music industry circa 2001, for example, believed that it was in the business of
moving plastic goods known as CDs and let Apple take what was written on those
plastic goods, the music that is ultimately the value created, and delivered it over the
internet. To this day, many in the music industry still believe that CDs are how
music ought to be distributed, leading to such high performance act as Danger
Mouse’s decision to just release a blank CD-R when the labels wouldn’t let him
release the CD otherwise.
 Today, newspapers are focused on finding better ways to move paper;
magazines are focused on increasing profit margins against physical goods; TV
channels are still arguing over number of viewers in a single sitting and radio is
partly organized around two competing models: one where people and
corporations pay in a coop form to get some form of programming created and
distributed and another where advertisers count numbers of earlobes they are
reaching. Even on the internet, some people still believe that the passage of
masses by a web site has some level of importance.

In each case, the players are focused on the distribution and not the
product and yet, the distribution medium is only one end of a relationship that
needs too.

In the Middle

Because if you look at the core definition of a medium, it’s something that’s
in the middle.

But in the middle of what? Trying to assess this becomes a little more
difficult. Obviously, a good is produced and it is consumed. Focusing on that
equation may get us closer to establishing the right model for media in the future
because it forces us to admit that what we know today as media is not a single
thing but a variety of things:

∑ On one dimension, it could be listed as going from entertaining to

informative
∑ On another, it could go from being considered as purchased or
subsidized
∑ On a third axis, it could be treated as mass generated or
professionalized

In three simple dimension, we can break down most of the known media
industry.

For example, take newspapers: They strive to be middle of the road between
entertaining and informative, with a bias towards the front section of the
newspaper being informative and the back section being entertaining; They also
range from the completely subsidized approach (free advertising sponsored
newspaper) to the heavily subsidized model (most newspapers). And most tend to
be more professionalized, with professional editors and reporters building most of
the content.

Magazines run the gamut, but largely focus on entertainment (the delivery of
information is generally left to a much narrower portion of the market knows as
newsletters); they are, for the most part heavily subsidized goods and mostly
professionalized.

In the TV space, the news channels tend to be moving further and further into
the entertainment arena (I would group opinion as a form of entertainment); They
are 90+ percent subsidized as their main goal is to serve the advertisers and only
a portion of their revenue is coming directly from consumers through some of the
cable system carriage fees.

In radio, NPR is balancing between entertaining and informative; the

interesting thing is that it is the closest thing to a purchased good as the group
tends to attempt to get its consumers to ante up for their consumption; and it
mixes mostly professionalized goods with mass-generated content (call-in shows,
for example). Other “news” station tend to focus on the entertainment part of the
 and fully subsidized (advertising based) and mostly mass generated (talk show
host merely serve as the forum administrator ensure that like minds confirm
their own bias or vent to each other).

On the Internet, diverse sites can run from pure forms of entertainment
(celebrity or gossip blogs, for example) to heavy information delivery (generally
more niche focused publication); they are also all over the place in terms of
models, ranging from the fully subsidized model to the fully purchased one; and
one could argue that they tend to also run the gamut in terms of mass-generated
vs. professional production.

While I have given you a short preview of each of the dimensions, I would like to
focus the discussion around particulars so I will delve further into each of the
three dimensions in the next few entries.

General Directions: Carefully read the instructions. Answer the questions based on
your own understanding about the concept on the space provided. Write your answers
in a sentence form.

Activity 1:

1. Why is a medium considered to be “in the middle”? A middle for what?

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2. What are the three simple dimensions most known of the media industry?
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3. What approaches are used in a newspaper? What does the approaches mean?
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Bibliography

Louis, Tristan. 2009. September 25. Accessed August 8, 2020.

https://www.tnl.net/blog/2009/09/25/the-three-dimensions-of-media/.