The Writer's Advantage. Laurie Scheer
we all have opportunities to view content on various levels and screens — and all at one time. I can be watching TV on an actual television set or within my computer screen while texting, listening to music, and composing/editing my own movie at the same time. At any given time we have at our fingertips a multitude of instant media options. This is the environment you are writing within and for. You are vying for attention among humans with short attention spans — a hefty and lofty assignment for sure. How do you get their eyeballs to watch your material? How do you invite the gazes of potentially important consumers amidst all of the participating content competition? I believe that it is important to briefly take a look at where media has been to understand how to write for the transmedia marketplace now. We’ll look at a brief analysis of how different media have been distributed so far.
MOVIES
Every form of media has its own unique history. The movie industry began at the end of the 19th century with shorts, silent films, and newsreels before it found its stride and full-length feature films were produced.
If you wanted to see a movie in the ‘50s you went to your local movie palace, usually a grandiose theater located in the central neighborhood of a metropolitan area. If it was a major city, there would be two or three movie theaters. New titles appeared once a week, making for a limited selection, but still, audiences flocked to each new release. The population had one, maybe two selections to choose from, making it easy to discuss the movie afterwards as there was very little competition. This was clearly an unfragmented scenario leading to a good amount of the public viewing the same movies at relatively the same time throughout the early part of the 20th century through to the late ‘70s/early ‘80s, when multiplex theater centers first appeared on the scene. By “unfragmented” I mean that the consumers had very limited options.
Today we have multiplex theater centers with 20+ screens located in various parts of any given town along with the ability to view a movie on television via broadcast and cable networks and through Netflix, Amazon, and other web outlets. We can also DVR and download movies at any time and purchase them for our own viewing pleasure. It would be very difficult to have to wait an entire week to see a new movie and then have no choice in regard to the type of movie that might be. We are now a fragmented audience — broken off and separated from other consumers.
TELEVISION
The television industry began in the middle of the 20th century and — following the formatting of radio programming before it — offered fifteen-minute, half-hour, and hour programs usually sponsored for the entire length of the show by one sponsor. It was not until the advertising industry and the broadcast networks began their marriage of approximately four to six ads per half hour/hour that the industry found the operating pattern that we know today. That programming schedule found its way to basic cable networks when they came on the scene in the ‘80s. The premium cable networks (HBO, Showtime) found they could operate quite well on subscriber monies alone and did not need advertising to interrupt their content.
Within the television industry, there were four commercial networks born in the late 1940s: NBC, CBS, ABC — all off-shoots of established radio companies — and the DuMont Network, the first television-only network. Aside from theatrical movie releases, audiences now had a choice of drama, comedy, variety, news, documentary, talk and game shows to watch at home… and still the audience was unfragmented.
UNFRAGMENTED AUDIENCES
One of the best examples of an unfragmented society watching an event on television is the reporting of President John F. Kennedy’s assassination in November, 1963. The footage from newsman Walter Cronkite’s teary-eyed delivery of the fatal information that day has become legendary within the history of television. There would be a much happier event just three months later — on February 9, 1964 — that would bring nearly the entire U.S. viewing population together: the arrival of the Beatles in America and their performance on The Ed Sullivan Show (1948–1971).
Here is one of the quintessential examples of audience unfragmentation. Over half of the entire American viewing public watched the Beatles that evening. CBS had the majority of the nation’s eyeballs and, to this day, those who experienced that event will talk about it as if it were a mythic appearance. The basic contextual meaning of what the Beatles were about was immediately understood. A new generation embraced them, the older generation didn’t understand them — but both generations knew who John, Paul, George, and Ringo were.
LIMITED AMOUNT OF TEXTS
This type of programming — where the majority of viewers can recall where they were at the moment it happened — continues through the Golden Age of Television programming [I Love Lucy (1951-57), The Andy Griffith Show (1960-68), The Twilight Zone (1959-64), etc.] and with all of the NASA lift-offs at that time. The finite television network universe had its run until the early ‘80s and the advent of basic cable programming. Until the early ‘80s there is only a limited amount of texts for writers to comprehend, write about, spin off of and parody. The Carol Burnett Show (1967–78), a well-loved variety hour, would often parody famous films such as Gone With The Wind (1939) and popular soap operas and disaster movies of the time. The reason Burnett’s parody style was so successful was because the audience had collectively viewed and knew well the original content being parodied. It is nearly impossible for an audience to understand a parody unless they know the original text. This is the secret of the success of Saturday Night Live (1975–present), as the show exists purely to parody current series, events, and personalities. The point here is that because of the limited viewing audience, it was fairly easy for writers to find fodder to write about. These limited choices begin to end in the early ‘80s with the birth of basic cable programming.
THE CABLE REVOLUTION
August 1, 1981, is considered by many to be the birth of basic cable. The first video aired on MTV, The Buggles’ “Video Killed the Radio Star,” began the cable revolution and soon after nearly a hundred new networks were available to view and purchase by American households. Sure, networks like CNN, Lifetime, and HBO existed in the ’70s, but they didn’t have the distribution power then. When cable providers such as Time Warner, Cablevision, and Cox Communication, to name a few (depending on where you were located in the country), came into power, that is when the American public had a much larger menu of entertainment options from which to choose.
FRAGMENTED VIEWERSHIP
The fragmentation of viewers begins here. Now you no longer have a large amount of viewers going out to movie theaters and watching the same movie, watching the same network at the same time, or even watching in real-time (the time the series is scheduled on the network’s programming schedule) because audiences began taping programming (via video cassette recorders) to watch when it was convenient for them personally. This shift made it more difficult for writers of movies and television/cable shows to relate to all viewers. Soon, a 500-network universe is available to American viewers. The fraction of viewers watching one event/series/network becomes smaller and smaller. With the expanding popularity of personal computers and the “world wide web” in the early to mid ’90s, the attention span of a typical content viewer becomes even more fragmented due to the many options available at any time.
WEB CHANNELS
Along with the dawn of the new century, all basic and premium cable networks have ancillary content available on their websites. An example of this might be additional interactive content for children who enjoy the viewing of Dora the Explorer (2000–present) on Nickelodeon and then want to visit the website for more information about that episode, and in some cases watch additional episodes of the show. Likewise for all of the lifestyle programs such as house hunting and remodeling homes on a network like HGTV. Their website would soon include video vignettes regarding household projects, the same for The Food Network, etc.
When YouTube appears on the scene in 2005, the birth of consumer-created content begins. Web sensations such as Fred (2006) and web channels like Funny Or Die (2007) soon follow. The opportunities for writers and creators of content now seem endless, as are the viewing choices for consumers.
SO MANY OPTIONS, SO LITTLE TIME
Today, video gaming, IMING, texting, emailing, gaming, etc., all co-exist. Additionally,