My Oscar Picks

Good morning,

My Oscar picks will be posted here right at 8:30 p.m. (at the deadline for entering).

Good luck!

Jack

Sports Production Jobs/Internships

If you're interested in a career in sports production, don't miss this: 

Representatives from Game Creek Video, live event mobile production, will visit the Park School Feb. 19 and 20 to recruit for their postgrad one-year apprentice program, and summer internships. 

 Meet with Game Creek in the first floor Park Photo Gallery #184 either Thurs. at 5:00 p.m. or Friday at 11:00 a.m. If neither time works, please contact Eloise Greene atEloise@ithaca.edu.  

Game Creek clients include ESPN, Fox Sports, NBC Sports, The NFL Network, The YES Network and MSG Network.

Online Assignment (Week of February 16, 2015)

For your online assignment, please read the two articles posted on the blog:

TV vs Film, Part I 

TV vs Film, Part II

After reading them, write a 1-2- page reaction based on the articles (roughly 250 words).

You should include what you now know about the TV industry as well as your own thoughts.

Does TV tell better stories today than film?  Why or why not? What does TV do better than film? What does film do better than TV?

Again, write a well developed reaction based on the two articles. Post your reactions here, as comments.

The assignment must be submitted by Monday, February 23rd, 2015 Midnight (PST).

Thanks.

Jack

TV vs. Film, Part II

TV vs. Film, Part II

Why Television Is Trouncing Film at Major Media Companies

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By Brent Lang

Movies are fast becoming the ugly stepchild for major media companies, while television continues to be the cash cow that drives profits.

That’s the message that emerges from an analysis conducted by TheWrap of the annual reports of five major media companies in 2011. And it's a dramatic change from the way things used to be, when movies were the straw that stirred Hollywood's drink.

“I remember when international buyers had to be forced to take TV product, and they only wanted movies -- now it's the other way around,” Jeff Sagansky, former president of CBS Entertainment and a former senior executive at Sony, told TheWrap.

The latest annual reports show that film has become a very small piece of the overall revenue pie. Television can be counted on to generate roughly half of a company’s revenue and up to 80 percent of its operating income, such as at Time Warner. (Sony does not break out its TV and film revenues and thus was not included in the survey.)

Read the full data comparison here: By the Numbers: Television Trounces Film (Slideshow)

Though Paramount has began to ramp up its film production in recent years with hits like “Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol” and “Star Trek,” its big screen successes cannot match those of Comedy Central, Nick at Nite, MTV and Nickelodeon. From ad sales to SpongeBob SquarePants merchandise, the margins and opportunities for ancillary revenue are more generous on the television side of the business.

The strength of cable networks like ESPN and the Disney Channel and the affiliate and advertising revenue they generate enabled the Mouse House to emerge relatively unscathed from its recent “John Carter” and "Mars Needs Moms" debacles.

In a recent presentation at Barclay’s Global Technology, Media and Communication Conference, Warner Bros. Television Chief Bruce Rosenblum boasted that Time Warner’s small-screen divisions are responsible for about 80 percent of its profits. Although its film side has produced global smashes like “The Dark Knight” and the Harry Potter franchise, it cannot match the combined earnings of HBO, Turner and Warner Bros. TV Group. Plus, Warner Bros. hit programming like “The Big Bang Theory” and “Two and Half Men” earns countless millions more in syndication.

Fox News continues to dominate the cable-news ratings, while the company’s broadcast network has churned out hits like “Glee” and “Family Guy” that allows them to paper over misfires like “Terra Nova.”

NBC may be a ratings also-ran, but MSNBC has carved out a niche for itself in the crowded cable-news space, and overall cable operations have benefited from higher licensing fees. It is easy to see why Comcast Chairman Brian Roberts’ first love is cable, not film.

Top executives such as Roberts have publicly acknowledged that programs like “The Voice,” not to mention cable subscription fees, are driving earnings.

Speaking at the Sanford Bernstein Strategic decisions conference last week, Roberts said the film business was much more volatile than the television industry and made no secret about why Comcast plunked down $13.8 billion for NBC Universal in 2011. Let's just say it wasn't for the rights to "Jurassic Park" and "Jaws."

"We want to continue to invest in cable programming," Roberts said. "That's why we bought the company."

For television, the increase in the number of cable networks and video streaming services has created fresh opportunities to leverage hit programming through syndication. Plus, content companies like Disney and News Corp. are adept at extracting retransmission fees for the right to carry their channels from cable providers. 

“The value of successful programming has grown exponentially as new platforms have been created,” Bill Carroll, vice president and director of programming at Katz Television Group, told TheWrap. “More shows fail than succeed, but when shows succeed the upside is so dramatic that it’s sort of the tradeoff.”

After recent flops like “Battleship” and “Dark Shadows,” it's not hard to see why film is out of favor. Movies are growing more expensive to produce and market, and attendance, at least domestically, has declined in recent years.

“There is no doubt that television has become more important than the film business and has been for some time,” Hal Vogel, a media analyst and CEO of Vogel Capital Management, told TheWrap. “There’s more stability. With films you can have ‘The Avengers’ or you can have ‘Battleship,’ but it’s hard to predict.”

Lucas Shaw and Sharon Waxman contributed to this report

TV vs Film, Part I

Reprints

Are Films Bad, or Is TV Just Better?
By A. O. SCOTT

FOR as long as anyone in the movie world can remember (which may be only 20 years or so, but never mind), the fall season has been marked by a sober kind of excitement. The commercial entertainments of summer give way to more ambitious fare, and the grown-up segment of the audience goes back to the theaters looking for stirring performances, complex storytelling, important themes and big emotions. That’s the theory, anyway.

Recently, though, that eager, earnest sense of anticipation — which this section of The New York Times, along with similar preview issues of other publications, both reflects and encourages — has been accompanied, at least among insiders and journalists, by annual paroxysms of anxiety. A few years ago the dominant worry was that a glut of serious movies would overwhelm the marketplace, the films crowding one another out, a concern that was followed almost seamlessly by the fear that such films might disappear altogether.

Several of the major studios shut down or scaled back their specialty divisions even before the global economy began to sag. Since then producers have had more and more trouble raising money through private equity and the preselling of foreign rights. As DVD sales sink, and the best minds in the movie industry try to figure out how to take advantage of video on demand, Internet streaming and other forms of digital distribution, the business climate seems grimmer than ever.

Perhaps the movie business, as it has before, will take care of itself and figure out a way to wring profits from changed circumstances. What concerns me more, apart from the quality of the movies themselves (which will continue to vary and to seem, in successive weeks, either better or worse than ever), is the state of the audience. By which I mean you, if you have read this far. Do you still care about movies? Should you?

You probably do, and I somewhat self-interestedly think that you should, but how much of this is the force of habit and the weight of tradition? People like going to the movies. As personal screens and media platforms mutate and proliferate, with content streaming from all directions, there is still something special about the experience of buying a ticket and a tub of popcorn and sitting, alone or with friends, watching pictures projected through the darkness.

And movies still occupy an Olympian position in the pop-culture landscape. They are bigger than television, grander than video games, more important than viral Internet videos — even if those things can often be more interesting, more profitable or more fun. Movie stars are coveted for magazine covers and talk-show guest spots; the premier movie awards show is a red-letter date on the global television calendar; movie advertisements festoon billboards, buses and Web pages. Movies are everywhere! Everyone loves movies!

But love is never easy, and the relationship between cinema and its public, which has endured for more than a century, has hit a rough patch. Some data, and some impressions: This summer, box office revenue was higher than ever, but the number of people going to movies was the lowest since the summer of 1997. (Remember “Con Air” and “Men in Black” and “Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery”? It seems like so long ago. Or maybe just yesterday.) This apparent paradox is explained by rising ticket prices, and especially the lucrative practice of charging a premium for movies shown in 3-D. Some of the biggest hits of the season were presented in this format, which seems an especially profitable vehicle for children’s entertainment.

It was not a brilliant summer, even if some of the more dyspeptic complaining, like the novelist and screenwriter Joe Queenan’s apocalyptic late-July rant in The Wall Street Journal, might seem exaggerated. Summertime brought the usual fare — superhero sequels, action thrillers, goofball comedies, animated spectacles for the whole family, remakes and reboots and rehashes. A lot of these were not as good as previous examples, though it may be splitting hairs to distinguish levels of mediocrity. But the Will Ferrell comedy (“The Other Guys”) was not as good as “Talladega Nights” or “Anchorman”; the Steve Carell comedy (“Dinner for Schmucks”) was nowhere near “The 40-Year-Old Virgin”; and, as Mr. Queenan noted at some length, the Adam Sandler comedy (“Grown-Ups”) was downright lame.

People went to see them anyway, and also “Ironman 2” and “The Twilight Saga: Eclipse” and “Sex and the City 2” and “Salt.” And quite a few went to Christopher Nolan’s “Inception,” a film that, whatever its flaws, showed originality rare in big-budget studio releases. It was also unusual in inspiring excited talk and obsessive argument on the Web and in multiplex parking lots. Did the top fall at the end? Did you hear that music? Was it all a dream?

“Inception” and “Toy Story 3,” virtually alone among the scores of summer releases, came close to sustaining the dream of Old Hollywood, spawned back when the movies enjoyed a monopoly on visual entertainment and preserved the utopian capitalist ideal of the summer blockbuster. Movies are for everybody.

But of course not everyone goes to the same movies. A few times a year it seems that way — the parents cry while the children giggle at the Pixar movie; even your nongeek friends need to check out “Avatar” or “Inception” to see what everyone is talking about — but more often movies follow the logic of division, splitting what used to be called the mass audience into demographic segments.

There are, supposedly, “guy movies” and “chick flicks”; genre movies aimed at teenagers; films that cater implicitly or overtly to various ethnic, religious and ideological subgroups. Sometimes there is crossover, or (to borrow from the jargon of electoral politics) high turnout from the base. And occasionally a movie seems to sweep away all distinctions — between popular and critical success; between box office power and awards prestige — and becomes the focus of passionate discussion that ripples through the culture.

When was the last time this happened? Will it happen with “The Social Network” by David Fincher or “Hereafter” by Clint Eastwood or “Black Swan” by Darren Aronofsky or any of the other ambitious movies lining up at the fall festivals? I’m not talking awards prospects or box office numbers, though these have become the easy measures of success. I mean a sense of cultural impact commensurate with the ambition displayed and the money spent.

Or will some of the festival favorites — “Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives,” from the Thai director Apichatpong Weerasethakul, this year’s surprise winner of the top prize in Cannes and showing at the New York Film Festival this month; or “Meek’s Cutoff,” Kelly Reichardt’s western; or Lena Dunham’s “Tiny Furniture” — send out ripples beyond the cinephile coteries that are sure to embrace them?

The salient question is this: Will any of the movies surfacing this fall provoke the kind of conversation that television series routinely do, breaking beyond niches into something larger? This bad summer movie season, in what seems to be one of the best television years ever, reinforces a suspicion that has been brewing for some time. Television, a business with its own troubles, is nonetheless able to inspire loyal devotion among viewers, to sustain virtual water-cooler rehashes on dozens of Web sites and to hold a fun-house mirror up to reality as movies rarely do.

Look back over the past decade. How many films have approached the moral complexity and sociological density of “The Sopranos” or “The Wire”? Engaged recent American history with the verve and insight of “Mad Men”? Turned indeterminacy and ambiguity into high entertainment with the conviction of “Lost”? Addressed modern families with the sharp humor and sly warmth of “Modern Family”? Look at “Glee,” and then try to think of any big-screen teen comedy or musical — or, for that matter, movie set in Ohio — that manages to be so madly satirical with so little mean-spiritedness.

I swear, I’m not trying to horn in on my colleagues’ territory. But the traditional relationship between film and television has reversed, as American movies have become conservative and cautious, while scripted series, on both broadcast networks and cable, are often more daring, topical and willing to risk giving offense.

This may represent not an aesthetic fault line, but rather a corporate division of labor, since the television networks and the movie studios belong to the same conglomerates, and there is frequent crossover among executives and producers as well as directors, actors and writers. And looked at from another angle — from your couch to the living room wall, say, or from your armchair to the laptop or other mobile electronic device in your hand — the distinction between movies and television grows more tenuous every day. The most interesting, provocative and surprising movies of the coming season may well reach you through video on demand or Internet streaming, playing in only a handful of theaters so that critics can have a chance to spread the word about them.

Those movies will reach a smaller audience — a demographic niche existing uncomfortably within the mass public that has always represented the movies’ phantom ideal. And some of the best movies of the future may be movies for the few, or even for no one, expressions of idiosyncratic personal visions or ideas that linger happily at the margins. Oscar Wilde observed that there are as many publics as there are people, a notion that flips the utopian idea of movies for everyone on its head. At the movies, you’re on your own.

----

Important announcement regarding Exam #1

Greetings,

I need to be with my mom as she is facing some serious health issues.

This means that I won't be in Ithaca this week, so Exam #1 has been postponed until Tuesday, February 24, 2015. 

We will not be meeting in class on TR of this week (but you'll still be meeting with Peter Johanns, per usual).

Instead, there will be an online exercise posted tomorrow-- Monday, February 16. You'll have one week to complete it.  

Thanks.

Jack

Review Sheet Exam #1

Review Sheet Exam #1

Intro to Media Industries

Spring 2015

Understanding Television System(s) in the United States (mostly from blog and class) 

Why do the media exist in the United States?

How are the media in the U.S. different from media outlets from around the world?

Commercial broadcast network system

            - networks

            - affiliates

            - studios

            - syndicators

            - advertisers

Cable/satellite television system

Public television system

Components of the broadcast system (networks, affiliates, studios, syndicators, advertisers)

How do the three different TV systems get money?

Nielsen media research (Share vs. Rating)

Ad rates for top shows of 2014 season  (Sunday Night Football, The Walking Dead, The Big Bang Theory)  

Know the major networks and the parent companies of each

Communication: Mass and Other Forms (blog + class + text) 

Elements in the communication process

            -source

            -encoding

            -message

            -channel

            -decoding

            -receiver

            -feedback

            -noise

The major mass media

Intrapersonal communication

Interpersonal communication

Small Group communication

Public communication

Mass communication

Common characteristics of traditional mass media outlets

            -complex and formal

            -multiple gatekeepers

            -need vast cash to operate

            -exist to make a profit

            -highly competitive

Future of mass media (segmentation, convergence, disintermediation)

Perspectives on Mass Communication (blog + class + text) 

Functions of the mass media:

surveillance;

interpretation;

linkage;

transmission of values;

entertainment

Categories of the uses and gratifications approach:

cognition;

diversion;

social utility (conversational currency; parasocial relationships);

withdrawal

Historical and Cultural Context (blog + class + text) 

Media time line (eight milestones in communication evolution—language, writing, printing, telegraph/telephone, photography/motion pictures, radio/TV, digital media/handheld devices

Importance of “writing” (alphabet, surface, social impact, etc.)

Printing (China, Germany)

Effects of the Gutenberg Revolution

Technological determinism

Significance of the telegraph to mass communication

Cultural impact of radio and TV

Digital media (mobile parenting, time softening)

Rules of Language (class) 

Phonemic rules (pronunciation; how many sounds are there in the English language?)

Semantic rules (what we mean when we say things)

Structural/syntax rules (grammar)

Pragmatic rules (how we actually use language)

Normative rules (what is considered appropriate) 

Articles Posted on Blog
FCC's Rule Regarding Internet as Utility 
NBC Scrambles/Brian Williams Fallout 
Importance of Live TV
ESPN Empire
TV vs Film, Part I
TV vs Film, Part II