5 September - Lecture Week 7

See how motivated I am, I even write more than one post today hahahaha, anyway, in week 7 we learned about Commercial Media. Media is Based on their purpose, media is divided by two, commercial media and public media (will be covered in the next post). Commercial media is created for profit, it is not government funded and generate its profit from advertisement by guaranteeing audiences. The major players of commercial media are News Limited, Fairfax Media, Nine Entertainment Co., Win Corporation, Southern Cross Broadcasting, Seven West Media and Ten. Their production ranges from newspaper to digital media.

Commercial  media has commercial form, with 3 variants: subscription, sponsored and subsidised, and functions as commercial, propaganda and social. Based on Hutchins Comission 1947, there are 5 social responsibilities of media in a democracy:

1.a truthful, comprehensive, and intelligent account of the day’s events in a context which gives them meaning;
2.a forum for the exchange of comment and criticism;
3.the projection of a representative picture of the constituent groups in the society;
4.the presentation and clarification of the goals and values of the society;
5.full access to the day’s intelligence.

Commercial media, therefore, is expected to deliver commercial and social (public trust) functions. To achieve these, there are 5 things to keep commercial media under control:
1. Formal State Requirement
2. Legal prescription
3. State oversight
4. Statutory
5. Voluntary
Some new social controls include government agency that regulates content, state press subsidies and licensed journalism.

Style of commercial media has 3 keywords: corrupt, profit and low quality. Because of this style, the results of commercial media are dumbing-down its audiences, tabloidisation, the desire to please and 'Mickey Mouse' news. With the current challenges of commercial news such as less revenue from advertisements, there are four solutions: better quality, greater competition, move existing customer to digital and paywalls on internet sites.