How Media Mergers Are Impacting News and Entertainment
By Shellie Branco
Adam Clayton Powell III
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It’s an old pattern in the media biz: Look to outsiders for innovation. This will still hold true as fewer companies control the mass media.
That’s what USC visiting professor Adam Clayton Powell III stressed in his presentation for the Western Knight Center on “How Media Mergers Are Impacting News and Entertainment.”
CNN is one example of an innovation prompted by out-of-the-box thinking. When Powell was working at ABC, the broadcaster sold its unsuccessful 24-hour satellite news channel to CNN.
Today, expect innovators to come from the videogame industry – and expect to be surprised, Powell said. “The big players don’t always play like big players,” he said. “And small innovators can hold on by their fingernails and survive.”
As the power of mass media declines, so do some long-standing business models: In 2003 broadcast networks were down to 23 percent of the Primetime share, and that’s including channels owned by their parent companies. The number of 30-second spots are on the decline; it’s estimated they’ll disappear in five to seven years, Powell said. Localization is on the decline too, as consumers are able to pull up information online about any corner of the world.
Networks impacted by media concentration in entertainment are more likely to dish out promotions of their own shows’ stars on their news shows. ABC News is expected to promote Disney films, for example, and at NBC (owned by nuclear power giant GE), to suggest a news story on nuclear power “would be the end of your career,” Powell said.
He also reviewed findings about the impact of consolidation on the quality of journalism at the local level. In an April 2003 study by Tom Rosenstiel, “Does Ownership Matter in Local TV News?” network affiliates were found to generally produce higher quality news than network-owned and operated stations. Stations with cross-ownership (with a newspaper in the same market) produce better quality journalism, as do smaller stations in comparison to those owned by larger companies. And local ownership offers little protection in defense against poor quality news.
The best TV news, Powell said, is found on the local 24-hour news channel, such as NY1 in New York City. These outlets have serious editorial resources and don’t make investments in snazzy graphics, following more of a newspaper model, he said.
Powell, who is director at USC’s Integrated Media Systems Center, closed with some of the futuristic media technologies being produced there. The government research center has created a program that can create a 3D model of any location on earth, and fill in any leftover blanks with aerial photos and live traffic cameras on city streets. The center also created a football game in 3D for Fox Sports, with the fan experiencing the game from the point of view of the quarterback. The perspective was so lifelike it was too intense for some Fox reps in the presentation meeting, Powell said.
The center is also interested in a Sony patent filed in the spring on “direct-to-brain transmission.” The device using this technology would sit below the user’s eyes as information bypasses the viewer’s senses to the brain. The technology, however, would provide all the sensory experiences of an event.
One news-oriented application would be for stock market numbers. In one scenario, the future trader could virtually immerse himself in a sea of data that swims past him like a school of fish to be netted, Powell said.
Such technologies are the next step for the media, but some aren’t paying enough attention to them.
“TV networks don’t understand what’s about to happen,” he said. “You may see newspaper companies embracing this. Yahoo and Google are on top of it.”
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