Audiences & Institutions

By Tesfah Watkins-Scott

Production PRE-PRODUCTION This one of the most important stages of the process, and often the longest. Research needs

to be done into audience. Existing media texts that are similar in form or content have been carefully examined. Each stage of production must be planned because, organisation is vital.

PRODUCTION This is the easiest and most straightforward part of production process, and involves

creating the raw data (text, images, sound) that will create the final product. POST-PRODUCTION This consists of editing and constructing the data into the form that the audience will

receive. During this part of the process the magazine pages are proof read. This used to be quite expensive, due to heavily specialised equipment being needed.

MARKETING & PROMOTION When the text has been created, audiences need to be informed about it. This could also be

quite expensive because, if the media product was a magazine they would then need to pay for an advertisement of their magazine and posters and so forth.

DISTRIBUTION Distribution is about shipping products rather than creating them. Media production

companies sell the rights to their text to specialist distributors at this stage, e.g. HMV will take on all record companies' CDs, rather than them trying to open up record stores themselves. However, the distributor and the production company may be part of the same media conglomerate, so all the profit eventually ends up in the same place. There are many different channels of distribution for example Movies can be bought as a DVD or watched in the cinema or even on TV. Music can be listened to via CD or downloaded onto the ICT system an put onto your phone or I Pod.

Audience Audience is a very important concept throughout media. Media texts are made with an audience in mind at all times, for example a group of people who will receive it and make some sort of sense out of it.

When a media text is being planned, conventionally the most important question the producers take notice of is Does the media product have an audience? If the answer to this is 'no', then there is no point in going any further. If no one is going to watch/read, the producers won’t make any money or get the media products message across. Audience research is a major part of any media company's work. Uses of questionnaires, focus groups, and comparisons to existing media texts, to find out if there is anyone out there who might be interested in their idea.

Media producers would like to know: • status• age• gender• ethnicity• locationOnce they know this they can produce a media text that will appeal to that specific target audience.