Sunday, January 13, 2008

Advertising and the Media

I found Schudson's chapter "News in the Marketplace," on how corporations advertisements can affect or alter the news being published very intriguing. I knew that certain companies targeted certain publications because of their general audience but I had never really thought about the idea of the marketplace putting constraints on the what is or is not said in the media source. After reading about this I searched on the web to find out other ways and places that this has occurred. I found an intriguing article entitled How corporations still control the marketing conversation. It discusses how advertisements and their corporations are influencing news on the Internet, reaching from online news sites to bloggers to YouTube. The article reinforces what Schudson talked about, but looks into the way the lines between advertisements and the media are being blurring on the Internet. This blog, Should Corporations Control Online Communication, looks into a similar trend of the growing control of corporations.
The majority of newspapers and other news sources are interested in making the most plausible profit and since media sources get the majority of their profit from advertisements it is no wonder that the corporations would want a say in what they are associating themselves with. It would, however, be a pity if in the search for the almighty dollar we lost sight of our search for the truth.

2 comments:

Rachel said...

These were really interesting articles. It's pretty amazing how the traditional corporate media model is now invading citzen media. I guess it's not surprising, though, since the internet provides so much access to so many people. It would be a great place for corporations to receive unprecedented exposure.

I think the blog you cited is important because it emphasizes open source media sites that aren't owned by corporations. I also think that even though some sites are owned by corporations, their willingness to open forums to the general public will still allow for divergent viewpoints and criticism of their views. That's the beauty of being able to post your opinions, which is much more available with new media than with traditional print or broadcast forms.

adrienne said...

Thanks for this. These should be good resources for some of your papers!