TV — AEJMC Hot Topics

New TV Stations Boom With Lack of Egyptian Censorship

By EMAD MEKAY on NYTimes.com, July 13: CAIRO — In Tahrir Square, Egypt’s revolution is playing out before the world’s cameras; but off-screen another revolution is happening that may be just as important.

These are busy times for Egyptian Media Production City, Egypt’s largest media services company, which runs a sprawling studio complex on the outskirts of Cairo.

Stimulated by deregulation and an insatiable demand for news and information amid the uncertainties that have followed the ouster of President Hosni Mubarak, investors are racing to set up new television channels.

Since Mr. Mubarak was toppled on Feb. 11, a total of 16 new Egyptian channels have obtained licenses to broadcast to the country’s 85 million people and via satellite to the larger market of 310 million in the Arab world.

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Book Review – Satire TV: Politics and Comedy in the Post-Network Era

Satire TV: Politics and Comedy in the Post-Network Era. Jonathan Gray, Jeffrey P. Jones, and Ethan Thompson, eds. New York, NY: New York University Press, 2009. 283 pp.

Humor is delicate to dissect. If you explain a joke, it may cease to be funny and the humor falls apart. But taking apart satire leads to understanding humor’s critical capacity to attack and disarm its subjects. This is especially true when it comes to the politically and socially oriented humor addressed in Satire TV. Dissecting satire—and similar humor tropes such as parody and irony —requires careful work. And the editors as well as authors of this collection do just that, working to understand satire as a form of critique, as challenger to the status quo of news and politics, and as contributor to political and civic discourses.

The Great War on the Small Screen: Representing the First World War in Contemporary Britain. Emma Hanna. Edinburgh, UK: Edinburgh University Press, 2009.

For many Americans—at least those less than about 98 years old—World War I is barely a blip on the historical screen. The assassination of an Austrian archduke in Sarajevo ignited a devastating conflict that ravaged Europe from 1914 to 1918. But the United States didn’t enter the war until 1917, and emerged comparatively unscathed. It’s true that American troops suffered losses on the battlefield, Congress passed the Espionage Act of 1917 and the Sedition Act of 1918, and everyone risked succumbing to the deadly pandemic known as the Spanish Flu. But for most Americans, “The Great War” was primarily a prelude to the conflict that would really matter: World War II. [Read more...]

Where Will TV Be in 2020?

From Michael Stroud on The Wrap, April 17 - So where will television be in 2020? Seems an appropriate question with the annual NAB Show winding down. And also the subject of a panel I led last week in Vegas with execs from DreamWorks, Sony Electronics, Starz, Nielsen and Technicolor.

Of course, nobody really knows what TV will look like in two years, let alone most of a decade. But the panel boldly took some educated guesses. Read the article

Filed Under: News Tagged With: TV, Web

The End of TV As We Know It

From Jim Louderback on AdAdge, April 1 -

It’s the end of the world as we know it
It’s the end of the world as we know it
It’s the end of the world as we know it and I feel fine
–REM

Lots of attention has been lavished on Time Warner Cable’s attempt to stream TV networks over its IP network, and the subsequent backlash from those TV networks. But that’s just one recent development that will lead to the end of the multichannel TV bundle as we know it today. Two other developments — Adobe’s new TV Everywhere authentication scheme and Comcast’s drive towards non-system network licensing — spell the beginning of a scorched-earth phase that will unfold over the next year or so. And when it’s done, the media landscape will look entirely different. Let’s take a look at each of these individually, and then wrap up what it all means. Read full article

TV Ad Spending Still on Top, Web Catching Up

From Sam Gustin at Wired on March 29 - Here’s a real shocker that I know you’ll find hard to believe: television is the most popular medium in the United States.

That’s why brand advertisers continue to pour more marketing dollars into TV ad campaigns than print, radio or the internet. According to eMarketer, TV ad spending grew a robust 9.7 percent in 2010 as the economy started to rebound from the recession. Read more

Katie Couric Most Likely Leaving CBS News – Why Now?

From Bill Wyman at The Atlantic on March 28 - You can be forgiven for reading with skepticism the reports that Katie Couric may soon leave the anchor desk at the CBS Evening News. Couric was originally said to have been leaving in April 2008, in a much-talked-about story in the Wall Street Journal. Her last weeks of work were supposedly to come soon after the inauguration of Barack Obama. That story was nearly three years ago, and Couric’s still there.

Couric, who began hosting the show in 2006, had been drawing dismal ratings when the WSJ story was published. After that, viewership of the CBS Evening News dropped, and then dropped some more. Indeed, Katie Couric brought the newscast to historic lows, losing fully half the audience she had when she started. At this point, CBS has been eating those ratings for years (and paying Couric a reported $15 million annually). Why stop now? There’s a strong argument to be made that Couric will be there forever. Read More

Study: Newspapers Sink Below Internet and TV as Information Sources

Editor & Publisher, Mark Fitzgerald | [...] The study found that just 56% Internet users ranked newspapers as important or very important sources of information for them, down from 60% in 2008 — and below the Internet (78%) and television (68%).

And while newspapers also regard themselves as being in the entertainment business, just 29% of users consider them as important sources of entertainment, down from 32% two years ago, and last among principal media. [Read more...]

Extreme Social Media

By Brad King, Assistant Professor, Ball State University

On Thursday Oct 15, Hallmark Homes Inc., a home builder in the Muncie, Jnd. area, approached the Ball State University Department of Journalism with an interesting request: assemble three teams of students for a project with ABC’s Extreme Makeover: Home Edition, a popular television program through which a family receives a new house in seven days. The show would be coming to Bunker Hill, about 70 miles north of the university.

Derek Wilder, Hallmark’s chief executive officer, wanted to make sure that the thousands of volunteers, builders and sponsors — many of whom don’t receive recognition on the television program — had the opportunity to have their stories told. The catch for the team, though, was that the show won’t air until sometime in January, which meant we had to build not only the network, but the media outreach as well. [Read more...]