COMM 122 Lecture 3: Comm 122 Week 2 Lecture 1
26 Sep 2018
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Department
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Professor
Comm 122 Week 2 Lecture 1
Media Economics: Information Products
• Structural Constraints of the Industry
o Genres, formats, and scripts
o Ratings and audiences
o Advertising
o Programming
o Rules that govern production processes
• Circumscribed agency of media professionals
o Decisions about how they perform their job
o Creativity, improvs, changes to production routines
• What do media produce?
o Information, culture, and ideology
o Intellectual property
o Media industries make, package, and sell information products which are
appropriated and sold through intellectual property regimes
▪ Copyright, patents, trademarks
• Information products have some unique characteristics
o Info is easy to shar
o Info does not get “used-up” when you consume it
• Shareability
o Rivalrous vs. Non-Rivalrous
▪ Individual consumption of a good doesn’t prevent other people from
consuming it
▪ Non-rivalrous products do not get used up
Your consumption of that product does not prevent others from
accessing/using it
• Openness
o Excludable vs. Non-Excludable
▪ If it is difficult to prevent people who do not pay for the production of a
good from its consumption or use
• If information has characteristics of a public good, why do we have to pay for it?
o Why do for-profit, commercial television produce TV shows?
• Dual Product Market
o Advertisers, audience, and media
o Look at graph on phone
o For profit-mandate
