Introduction to the Media Sector
Publishing - Publishing is the act of making information available to the general public. Printing in news papers holds approximately 200,000 jobs alone. There are three different categories in which publishing can be divided these are:
- Non-Paid publishers - These are publishers that do not charge the author at all for them to publish their book
- Semi-Paid publishers - These are publishers that charge partially to pay the expenses off the book
- Paid Publishers - This is the most common type of publication where the author has to pay the full expense of the book and the job of setting up marketing policies.
One of the most popular publishing companies is Pearson publishing company with around 41,000 employees and it operates in over 70 countries. It has mainly started to really grow in the past few years and is now averaging a total revenue of 5.9 billion pounds sterling. In the U.S penguin published 254 New York Times best sellers and penguins children's books being the publisher of the year in 2011.
Radio - Radio has been around for a very long time since the very first idea of it in 1893 and in 1895 the first radio receiver was built. But sadly radio ios starting to come to an end as most people prefer to listen to portable music devices such as iPod's and MP3 players. In the UK radio is still a very big part of our day to day lives as most of the people travelling to work every morning will listen to the radio in their car or have it on in the background whilst they are working. The most popular radio station in the UK is BBC Radio 2 averaging around 15.1 million listeners a week, followed by BBC radio 1 with 11.1 and BBC radio 4 with 10.8. As you can tell the BBC is still doing a good job of dominating the radio and even though radio is getting less popular the BBC are not letting their standards slip. I recently took a visit to the TFM radio and was toured round along with my class mates by one of their top DJ's and although there was still a lot to do he pointed out that they no longer have the money to employ people to do those jobs. This give me the impression that although there is lots of jobs to be done in the radio industry it is probably not the best career pathway to take as it is slowly but surely dying out.
T.V - Television has been around since the 50's and since then has had a massive impact on the entire world. Television also is a huge part of advertising, a recent study shows that on average people are exposed to just over an hour of T.V ads and promotions a day. Television is an absolutely massive chunk of the media with stations all over the UK and thousands across the world. Television shows all different types of programs from Reality (Geordie Shore), to Sci Fi (Dr Who), Dr who is one of the most successful shows around in this day and age. It was first aired in 1963 and up to this day has seen 11 different actors play the part of The Doctor. In the 80's it was costing around 100,000 to produce just one episode of Dr Who and now has expanded incredibly to 1 million pounds per episode and around 13 million per series. Television offers around 43 different types of jobs Ranging from the director the the title sequence designer.
The average child watches 20,000 television adverts a year
66% of American homes posses 3 or more T.V sets
The average child has seen 8,000 murders on T.V by the time they leave primary school
250 billion hours of T.V is watched by Americans annually
Photo Imaging - This consists of things such as Adobe Photoshop, Firework, Retouching images and lots of other things, there will always be a need for this in the modern world. There are nearly 14,000 companies in this industry with 95% of them companies employing 5 people or less. Almost half of the 14,000 companies are free lance photographers or sole traders
Jobs in the industry can be divided into:
- Photography – Advertising and Editorial Photographer, General Practice (Social) Photographer, Press Photographer or Photojournalist, Fashion Photographer, Scientific Photographer, Corporate Photographer, Forensic Photographer, Medical Photographer, Assistant Photographer, Staff Photographer Photographic Laboratories and Image Producers – Minilab Operator, Print Finishing Technician, Digital Imaging Specialist
- Photo Retail – Photo Retail Manager, Minilab Operator Photo Retail
- Picture Libraries – Picture Researcher, Picture Library Manager
- Manufacturers – Field Service Technician, Marketing Executive
- Equipment Support Services – Product Repair Engineer, Technical Support Engineer, Product
- Returns Management Technician
Interactive Media - This is a huge part of the media sector that you will take part in every day without giving it a thought for example sending a tweet or uploading a Facebook status this has around 40,000 jobs. A survey in may 2011 shows there are around 7.5 million users on Facebook that are under the age of 13 and 5 million under the age of 10 violating the Facebook user terms and conditions. In 2009 Facebook was ranked the most used social networking site, Obviously as there is so many users using the site it is a very popular place for advertising and is a very opportunistic place to advertise for a new brand or company.
Social networking sites such as twitter, Facebook, Tumblr and others are a very good place for people to get free advertising, for example you can set up a twitter page or Facebook group for a new band, or interdependent company, this is good because you can get people to share your page around and it is an easy way to get yourself known.
Games - The games industry consists of approximation 10,000 jobs which isn't really that many considering how big the industry is and how big of an impact the games sector gives. The games industry Is a huge industry in this day and age with the average new game for Xbox 360 or Play Station costing up to £45 and having as much as £66,198,900.00, That amount of money was spent on making Grand Theft Auto 4.
Film - The Film industry is an amazingly huge part of the world we live in today as we are surrounded by high budget movies where millions have been spent on making and even more millions will be made of them, movies are good because they last a very long time before they are forgotten about unless they are timeless classics which will always stay in the heart of people. The film industry is an industry which has millions of pounds pumped into it every year and is said to have a net worth of 2 Trillion dollars and provides around
Animation - animation is a small part of the media industry that holds approximately 4,700 jobs around the globe. The animation sector is a small sector but plays a very big part for example shows like south park which are regularly shown on channels such as Viva and have been around for many years and are still very popular due to their crude and harsh humor. Voted IGN's top animated film of all time is Disneys Beauty and the Beast which was Released in November 1991 in the USA and in the first weekend made $99,508 and in total grossed $218,967,620.
There are many types of animation:
- Cell Based
- Pixelation
- Stop Motion
- Computer Animation
Advertising - Advertising holds 17,000 jobs around the world this is a huge part of the world we are in today because if there was no advertising you would not have a way of finding out about products new or old. Advertising is very easy to come by these day due to social networking, it allows you created pages and accounts that can be used for free to promote things and get it around the internet very quickly and very cheaply if not for free. There is many different ways you can advertise, most of these include using posters and/or logos These include:
- Billboards
- Bus Stop Posters
- Flyers
- Television Commercials
- Adds in Papers/Magazines
