Television as a constant selling point

The need for a constant selling point defines much of what I see in the media ecology of television. The structure of advertising and profit taking rewards the maximization of viewership at all/any times. The option to either change the channel or turn off makes the hold on profit tenuous. The profit structure of printed media on the other hand requires only one selling point, at the point of purchase. This produces two distinct features of television as an ecology.

The first concerns content/context. All information must be delivered with the highest emotional intensity for the viewer possible. With the option to turn off at any moment, every moment becomes critical to the end goal of profit. Even a brief lapse in content delivery could expose the network to a loss. And so, every piece of content gets delivered in the context of high-entertainment value, through some form of emotional stimulation. The delineation between this and printed media comes at the selling point and the necessary steps to be taken in maximizing it. With profit created only at the point of purchase, high stimulation of interest front loads to before the delivery of content, rather than concurrently with it. This means advertisements and stimulating graphics appear as covers on the book, or reviews beforehand- there is never need for ads on the inside of the book. The actual content gets more or less left to its own to prove itself as an object of independent merit, instead of having to function also as ad space for itself.

Second, in news media delivery. In a similar fashion, news media must constantly sell itself to viewers. News dedicated channels must sustain constant viewership to stay afloat just as any other channel would. In this fashion, they cater towards constant updates and recency as a selling point. This produces the fragmentation effect found in television news, where individual developments within a narrative of events get separated out to form their own news story. Events are opportunities to capitalize on, no matter how significant. The focus on recency subordinates focus on coherence or significance in the reporting of news. This makes events fragmented by nature of their importance as self contained news developments rather than as steps along a narrative told after the fact. Print media (or even movie style media) offers a more coherent picture because the focus is on an overall product that warrants purchase at a single time, rather than on a constant repetition of profit-events.

Duncan