Core Post 3

First off I want to say that I loved the Herman Gray chapter. I felt that looking at why the networks started targeting African American audiences on an economical and institutional level to be very enlightening—especially thinking from a business point of view. When I think about studying race representation in the media, I usually associate that with looking at the cultural significance and historical context in which it happened. My academic background has touched a lot on what Gray talks about in terms of narrowcasting and targeting niche audiences, but I’ve read a lot more about women in that aspect than in regards to race.  Seeing how the networks went from dominating the market to them scrambling to figure out how to keep their market share once Fox entered the scene was interesting, but I wish there had been a little more quantitative data. The essay felt like a lot of regurgitating what other scholars were saying, but in the context of why African Americans were starting to get more representation in the 1980s.

I think that nowadays the way we target audiences is repeating—because everything goes in cycles—in a way that happened in the 90s with the repeal of the fin/syn rules but on a much larger scale.  Today audiences are purposely designed to be extremely niche because there is so much more content output than ever before. The goal seems to be to get audiences hooked so that they have to watch as much of that content that they can get their hands on. In my digital media class, we have people in the industry telling us that for Netflix hits don’t matter as much as long as you don’t churn out—cancel their subscription. They just have to keep viewers engaged enough so that they either forget about their subscription or they have some upcoming show that could interest enough people to keep them on the site.