WHAT DO WE MEAN BY MEDIA PRACTICE EDUCATION?

JOHN ELLIS, BOURNEMOUTH MEDIA SCHOOL, BOURNEMOUTH UNIVERSITY

Revised version for publication 15/11/99

Even a few years ago, the question ‘what do we mean by media practice education’ would be answered by a straightforward reply: it means enabling students to acquire the skills and understandings appropriate to a career in media practice. This was understood as an educative process dominated by the acquisition of craft skills such as those of research, mise-en-scene and editing; supplemented by an understanding of the working practices that underpinned them (for example, narrative construction or the ethical dilemmas of programme makers); and completed by a survey of the power structure of the industry and its organisational habits. The hoary old debate about ‘the theory/practice divide’ centred around how far those supplemental theoretical knowledges should extend in terms of an intellectual understanding of the effects of the media industries and therefore whatever the current theoretical fashion might be in understanding media audiences, their behaviours and their pleasures. On the whole, theoretical attempts to understand the peculiarities of audiences did not cut much ice with those interested in teaching media practice, many of whom had come from an industry background itself hostile to media theories and used to thinking of the audience as a relatively undifferentiated mass. Once in academia, their attitudes had, on the whole, been reinforced by the widespread academic culture of suspicion of ‘doing things rather than thinking about them’. 

However, this situation cannot continue. Practice teaching needs theoretical approaches like never before. This is not because theory has produced startling revelations, nor because theory-savvy media graduates now occupy many key posts in broadcasting. It is because the industry itself has changed. Craft skills are no longer enough to sustain a career within it. Indeed, however good a person’s programme making skills might be, they will encounter a glass ceiling in the new media industries, a glass ceiling not experienced by those with intellectual formations remote from those of programme-makers. The recognised route to management in broadcasting used to start with programme-making, then move through executive producing or commissioning, then progressed to head of production in a particular genre and on to programme controller. This is scarcely the formation of most of broadcasting’s current senior management, even in the variant that encompasses chief executive of thriving independent production company. Nor is it the background of the majority of those working in the new media: a figure like Roly Keating at the BBC a rare programme maker amongst the power brokers of the new television. For power in the new television industry lies elsewhere, requiring different skills: deal-making, scheduling, marketing and information management. Nevertheless, if broadcasting is to survive as a key social form, the sensibilities of programme makers still need to be present at all levels of management. The series of scandals about documentary ethics, about actors masquerading as studio guests in daytime talk and so on, show how vital are skills learned in programme-making for the continuing functioning of new television.

So why is theory relevant to this, and, more to the point, what theory? My argument is that an uneasy combination of aesthetics, sociology and business studies is currently required: a new variant on the habitual theoretical heterodoxy of media studies. The changes in broadcasting have made it a far more complex and opaque industry than it used to be: both its underlying trends and the disparate perspectives that operate within it require a theoretical understanding. As I argue elsewhere, television has evolved from an initial era of scarcity to the current era of availability, and the industry (if not its consumers) is busily preparing for a future era of plenty. The era of scarcity, which dates from the origins of broadcasting roughly to the end of the 1970s in most countries, was characterised from a producers’ point of view by programmes produced for a single screening to a relatively undifferentiated mass of viewers. The industry’s own internal practices of regulation had a far greater impact on the form and content of programmes than did the vagaries of viewer taste and behaviour. Intellectually, the result was that theory was marginalised. In both the industry and media practice education, professional ideologies were treated as more important than the ruminations of academics, no matter whether they were the number crunchers of audience research or the eggheads of semiotic theory.

The age of availability has brought fundamental change. Television’s first era was as a wholesale industry: now it has become a retail one. How programmes conceive of their audiences and how their potential viewers conceive of them has become a crucial factor. Programme makers’ traditional ideologies of the ‘punters’ or ‘bums on seats’ have been invaded, developed and displaced by conceptions of the consumer drawn from marketing and theories of the viewer drawn from academic sociology and audience measurement. Programmes, it is said, “have to work a lot harder to reach their audiences”. Although the term ‘repeat’ may still carry negative connotations, the provision of numerous opportunities to view is becoming habitual for anything other than the most time-tied material. 

Two related developments spring from this. The first is the tendency – restrained in Britain compared to many other systems – towards a more mass production process, where multiple versions of a successful format are generated. This is not simply the generation of content hungry daytime shows stripped across the weekday schedule or the open-ended everyday formats of soap operas. It is typical of the more rarefied atmosphere of the evening peak as well. Two examples will suffice: few single documentaries on particular issues can be found in primetime nowadays. They have largely given way to the four part or six part series. In drama, Peak Practice continues on ITV despite having lost its entire cast more than once. Peak Practice is more than a format, it is a brand, a ‘product with personality’ which can sustain repetition even when some of its crucial elements (the stars) have been removed and replaced. In such a context, production teams are in for the long haul and this leads to new management problems of staff boredom, incentivisation and internal promotion. In addition, it is now common practice for material to be reused and adapted to suit other channels and even other formats on the same channel. This generates both a redrawing of traditional practices such as logging and new requirements for archiving and date retrieval. The need for reversioned material extends beyond broadcasting into related media (e.g. the BBC’s attempts to introduce bi-media working) and the new media industries. This is the area where the convergence of electronic media is already a reality. 

Indeed, the new television is itself probably a transitional phase in a wider development which will see the emergence of what has been called ‘screen-based audio-visual media’ as a new industrial sector. Television in its broadcast form will be one important aspect of this new sector, but it will be characterised by a large degree of transfer of both skills and material between its various areas. Programme material (or ‘content’ as it tends to be known within this emerging sector) will be designed to promote the interdependence of the various audio-visual media. Already, the broadcast television commissioning process prefers proposals which explore the possibilities of related web content, and this development is likely to grow as technological developments allow broadcast television channels to rethink themselves as gateways to further realms of content. This is explicitly the vision of those areas of the BBC which are most concerned with the generation of websites and new channels and the exploitation of the BBC’s key brands within this new media industry. 

In this context, the exploration of the complexities of new television are all the more necessary to provide its students with an understanding of the forces that will shape their professional futures anywhere within this new industrial sector. The administration of the creative process has become a more complex activity in all its aspects. This requires two related forms of understanding. The first is openly managerial, requiring attention to questions as diverse as personnel management, scheduling and brand management. The second is a sharper attention to hitherto rarefied questions of aesthetics, understanding the nature of the broadcast and television text. 

What follows is a series of prescriptions of the kinds of knowledges required by graduates entering into the new television industry from media practice courses.

1)	The existing teaching of the budgeting and pitching process needs to be widened in scope to include all the aspects of the difficult process of spending other people’s money on your ideas. Hence there is a need for an understanding of the processes of personnel management, which includes staff motivation and team working alongside the practice of employment law and the use of contracts. The understanding of the legal process has to extend to the vital area of copyright and the management of both underlying and newly created rights. Financial planning has to take on aspects hitherto limited to film production finance, including long-term financial planning, deal-making dealing with multiple funding sources and deficit financing. 

Would-be programme makers in the new television and media industries have to understand the subtleties of negotiating the editorial process. The everyday reality for programme makers is now one of interventionist commissioning organisations with several (often conflicting) layers of decision making. It is also one where any major project will involve multiple investors who wish to satisfy different segments of their own domestic and wider world markets. These conflicting pressures will become more intense as programme material is generated for use across a wide range of screen-based audio-visual media. Not only will it be a matter of satisfying different potential market fragments, but also the varying behaviours of viewers and/or purchasers within different audio-visual media.

A further implication of the new television structure needs to be explored with students as well. The characteristic career patterns of long-term contracts and career progression within large corporations have all but disappeared, even though large corporations emphatically have not. The majority of workers within new television and related media are freelance. Recently, Granada Media have begun to explore a new form of career counselling for their freelance staff, realising that their rapid semi-acculturation to the organisation during the typical six month contract could well lead to their subsequent re-employment as freelancers with a knowledge of ‘how Granada works’. Freelancers on such contracts were offered sessions in career development planning, as well as how best to use the opportunity presented by working within a corner of Granada Media in order to develop a longer series of contractual relationships with the company. This could well be seen as Granada Media trying to have the best of both worlds (a long-term staff but on convenient short-term contracts), but the lesson to be drawn by educators is the need to develop such skills training for students. How to behave as a freelance; how to plan a career; and make use of opportunities are all new skills, but necessary ones.

2)	The complexities of the administration of the new television, including the process of scheduling, brand management and marketing, are the second focus. No more is scheduling simply the process by which programmes are presented in an attractive order to viewers. In the new television, scheduling determines the types and forms of the programmes that will be presented. The schedule is also the basis of the brand identity of a television channel as it lies at the heart of the output as understood by the channel’s viewers, and this identity is crucial to the launch of new programme brands. The scheduling process is crucially underpinned by audience research, and specifically by the use of the BARB quantitative sample. They are currently supplemented by activities such as focus group research and forms of market testing. Key to the understanding of this process is the area of audience research which has traditionally been a ‘theory’ activity in media studies. A proper understanding requires not only a knowledge of its methodologies and forms of data presentation. It also needs the healthy scepticism of writers such as Ien Ang and David Morley.

3)	The pervasive use of audience data in the new television industry should alert us to a fundamental change: the concept of “a television programme” is no longer a taken-for-granted one. Programmes are now produced for radically differing conceptions of audience, for delivery and use in a diverse number of ways. Those above ‘a certain age’ will have seen their assumptions gradually changed as television has gradually changed from the era of scarcity to the era of availability. But this is not the case for students arriving to learn about the television industry today. Media studies, be they practice-based or purely reflective, have to make explicit the nature of the television text, as this theoretical understanding is crucial for understanding not only the social place of television but also of the new structure of the industry. The leading edge of media studies now provides a number of key texts which make this possible. Roger Silverstone has surveyed many of the routes for understanding the nature of television as a commodity within modern society, how it shapes and is shaped by social and economic trends. Lynn Spigel has explored the domestic nature of television and vividly demonstrated how it upset traditional domestic arrangements and the reciprocal effect of the domestic on programme content and development of genres. Jostein Gripsrud has explored the nature of the soap opera narrative, including its delicate connections with the arena of everyday life, and related this back to the detailed production context of the American series ‘Dynasty’ and its reception in the distinctive local conditions of Norway. John T.Caudwell has explored the visual nature of television, examining, amongst other issues, the escalation in production values and the pervasive use of digital graphics.  Since writer like Nick Browne and Beverle Houston first asked what the nature of the TV text might be, many writers have tackled the nature of television narration, and the shifts in particular genres are now well charted, for example by John Corner (documentary), Joan Shattuck and Sonia Livingstone (talk). This material is theoretical in derivation, but it addresses the problem of the nature of the textual activity of television. The instincts of programme makers and the suppositions of filmmakers are no longer enough to educate the producers of new television. They need to know how their work might and can fit into the complex structures of a mature and fast changing consumer-driven audio-visual industry. This is necessary intellectual equipment for dealing with both the generation of viable ideas, bringing them to fruition, dealing with the pitfalls along the way, and even coming up with fresh and challenging work.

4)	The final area of study which is necessary may in practice be the first to be studied. It is an understanding of the wider issues surrounding technological reproduction. This might embrace classics such as Walter Benjamin. It might examine the story of the introduction of sound into American cinema, which is well documented, including intriguing accounts of the problems of adapting aesthetic presuppositions to actual practice and tastes. It would certainty take in John Caudwell’s account of technological innovation in American TV graphics, and Michael Chanan’s persuasive account of the impact of recording technologies on the music industry. It would equally review the literature on ownership and control, globalisation and freedom of speech and expression. Much of this adopts a conceptual framework that is in sharp contrast to the management literature that would confront students elsewhere.
 
My argument is that current media practice students have to be confronted with this diverse range of approaches. There are formidable intellectual problems inherent in forging a new approach to the media industries that incorporates both advanced textual studies, audience research methods, an understanding of management and an exploration of marketing and brand management. These are not exactly compatible disciplines. Conceptual mismatches abound. Very little work has so far taken place to explore the borders and conflicts between them. In effect, the media practice students of the future would have to try to reconcile these diverse disciplines within their own heads and their own practice. Not for the first time, media studies would be inviting its students to live out the intellectual heterogeneity of the subject area. This, in the end, is why media studies continue to be one of the most exciting disciplines in academic life.

The approach that I have sketched involves material that bridges the traditional divide between theory and practice, hence the intellectual challenge involved. This situation is an odd one for someone of my background, having developed intellectually in a period when theory and practice were aggressively divided. The situation has reversed itself. Practice needs theory because the complexity of the market demands it. Critical understanding is no longer a luxury for tomorrow’s media producers, it is a necessity for them. It is also a necessity for the new television industry. The current trend within the industry is towards a senior management whose formation is that of marketing, law and finance rather than programme making. These disciplines are beginning to govern the ways that media products are understood and manipulated by the industry. And, increasingly, they define the terms under which programme makers have to work as well. The results are all too obvious in the burgeoning series of programme making scandals and problems whose origins lie not with programme makers but with the system in which they work, of which they have an imperfect understanding, and over which they have too little control. Such problems will only intensify as the new screen-based audio-visual media develop in complexity. Professionals with an awareness of programme forms tempered with an understanding of the factors governing their emergence will be essential figures in this new sector.  

In short, the response to the emergence of marketing and management studies into the arena of new television is not to reject these new and exotic disciplines. Television folklore is full of stories of the sudden appearance of layers of lawyers and acres of accountants and the consequent problems of cultural adaptation suffered by programme makers, whereas accounts from the point of view of the lawyers and accountants are rather harder to find. The BBC is said to spend millions on management consultants with their obscure emphases on core brand values, market segmentation, organograms and team working. These developments may be coloured by the sometimes difficult personalities that have driven their introduction, but they are not a consequence of them. Broadcasting has recruited across a wide variety of disciplines to fill management posts created by the demands of the era of availability. The teaching of media practice has to adjust to and understand the demands of this new era, rather than to fight over again the battles around its emergence.

November 1999