Glossary Terms Alphabetical

24/7: Around-the-clock news operations that continually update stories and present new ones.

A and B movie units: An element of the studio system in which films were divided into two categories of production.

Abridge: To reduce in scope; to diminish

Academic journals: Small-circulation periodicals that cover scholarly topics, with articles typically edited and written by professors and/or other university-affiliated researchers.

Accountability to advertisers: The ability to trace an individual's response to a particular ad.

Accuracy: Reporting factually correct information.

Achieving good share of mind: Making a substantial proportion of the target audiences in a variety of media locations aware of the material's existence.

Acquisitions editor: A person who recruits and signs new authors and titles for the company's list of books.

Active audience: The idea that people are not simply passive recipients of media messages; they respond to content based on their personal backgrounds, interests, and interpersonal relationships.

Actual malice: Reckless disregard for truth or knowledge of falsity.

Ad campaign: A carefully considered approach to creating and circulating messages about a product over a specific period with particular goals in mind.

Ad clutter: Term used to refer to the competing messages facing Americans virtually everywhere they turn, virtually every moment of the day.

Adequate revenue: Enough cash to allow the enterprise to pay for itself and give the owners or bankers who put up the money the desired return on their investment.

Administrative personnel: Workers who oversee the business side of the media organization.

Advance on royalties: A payment before the book is published of money that the publisher anticipates the author's earning through royalties on the book.

Advergaming: Using games to reach specific segments of the population with messages that would lead the target audiences to feel favorably toward the products and buy them usually by creating custom games and embedding ads in the game.

Adversarial press: A press that has the ability to argue with government.

Advertisement: A message that explicitly aims to direct favorable attention to certain goods and services.

Advertising: A strategy to gain revenue in which a company buys space or time on a mass medium (a page in a magazine, thirty seconds on a radio station) in exchange for being allowed to display a persuasive message (an advertisement) for a product or service.

Advertising agency: A company that specializes in the creation of ads and their placement in media that accept payment for exhibiting those ads.

Advertising campaign: The entire set of advertisements using a particular theme to promote a particular product for a certain period of time.

Advertising-editorial ratio: Set by the publisher, this ratio determines the balance between the amount of space available for advertisements and the amount of space available for editorial matter in one issues of a newspaper.

Advertising tactics: Activities that typically involve purchasing media space or time in which to present short messages.

Advocacy organizations or pressure groups: Collections of people who work to change the nature of certain kinds of mass media materials.

A films: Expensively made productions featuring glamorous, high paid movie stars.

Agency holding company: A firm with global reach that owns full-service advertising agencies, specialty agencies, direct-marketing firms, research companies, and even public relations agencies.

Agency network: Advertising agencies with branch offices in a number of different cities worldwide.

Agenda: The list of items that people in a society talk about.

Agenda setting: The notion that the media create "the ideas in our heads" about what is going on in the world.

Album: A collection of a dozen or more individual musical recordings.

Algorithm: a complex set of rules activated by search terms in search engines that come up with sites that relate to your search terms.

Alternative weeklies: A paper written for a young, urban audience with an eye on political and cultural commentary.

Amplitude modulation (AM): A means of radio broadcasting, utilizing the band between 540 and 1700 megahertz; AM signals are prone to frequent static interference, but their high powered signals allow them to travel great distances, especially at night.

Analog: Electronic transmission accomplished by adding signals of varying frequency or amplitude to carrier waves of a given frequency of alternating electromagnetic current. Broadcast and phone transmission have conventionally used analog technology.

Analysis of existing data: A systematic investigation into the potential audience for the material (who they are, where they are, how much they like the idea, how much they will pay for it) and the competitors (who they are, how similar their products are, how powerful they are).

Antitrust policies: Policies put in place to maintain competition in the U.S. economy, carried out through the passing of laws, through enforcement of the laws by the U.S. Department of Justice and by state attorneys general, and through federal court decisions that determine how far the government ought to go in encouraging competition and forcing companies to break themselves up into a number of smaller companies.

Appropriation: An invasion of privacy that takes the form of the unauthorized use of a person's name or likeness in an advertisement, poster, public relations promotion, or other commercial context.

Artist and repertoire or A&R: Describes the function of screening new musical acts for a recording company and determining whether or not to sign these acts; the record executives considered it their duty to shape artists by choosing the collection of songs (their repertoire) to be played or sung by the artist.

Audience erosion: A decrease in the percentage of the population using a particular mass medium or a specific media outlet.

Audience fragmentation: The process of dividing audience members into segments based on background and lifestyle in order to send them messages targeted to their specific characteristics.

Audiences: The people to whom a media product is directed.

Audience segmentation: The process by which production and distribution are targeted to reach different type of people with messages tailored for them.

Audio streaming: An audio file delivered to a computer-like device from a website so that it can be heard while it is coming into the device but cannot be saved or stored.

Authoritarian approaches: Approaches to media regulation that require that the owners of mass media firms be avid supporters of the authoritarian regime, with workers who are willing to create news and entertainment materials that adhere strictly to the party line; typically adopted by dictators who want to keep themselves and the elite class that supports them in direct control over all aspects of their society.

Average commercial minute: Nielsen's reporting standard for determining ratings and households viewing during commercials. This information gives advertisers measurements not just for each program taken as a whole, but for the commercials that run during the programs.

Back-end deal or percentage of the gross: A deal in which a production firm convinces a major actor or director to take a lower salary in return for a percentage of the money that the production firm will later receive from the distributor.

Bad tendency: Materials that may be restricted because they are distributed in a time of war, domestic unrest, or riot, even though they do not meet the level of clear and present danger.

Banners: Square or rectangular commercial messages that sit on the page of a website.

Barter: Products used in movies and TV shows aree provided by the manufacturer to the producers for free in exchange for the publicity.

Basic cable: The entry-level cable service that typically offers the customer all the broadcast channels available in the area, including channels featuring local government and other access programming, and a small number of subscription channels, such as TBS (general programming plus sports) and TNT (classic movies).

Beat: A specific, long-term assignment that covers a single topic area.

Behavioral targeting: Companies track people's actions within and across websites and use the information to make inferences about what they want to see online.

Bestseller: A title that has sold more than 75,000 hardcover copies or more than 100,000 paperback copies.

B films: Lower-budget films that were made quickly.

Big Four: The four largest television networks ABC, CBS, Fox, and NBC.

Billboard: The mention of a sponsor's name or products at the start or end of an aired program in return for money.

Binary digits: the zero-to-one system that is at the core of digital technology.

Block booking: A tactic under the studio system in which distribution executives ensured that theaters showed both their A films and their B films; if theater owners refused to carry a certain number of a studio's B films, they would not be allowed access to certain A films produced by that studio.

Blockbuster: A film that brings in more than $100 million at the box office.

Blockbuster book: A title that has sold well over 100,000 hardcover copies.

Blogs: Journalistic websites or opinion sites in which writings are in the style of journal entries, often in reverse chronological order.

Book clubs: Organizations through which individuals who have joined can select books from the club's catalog and purchase them through the mail or via the club's web site, often at a discounted price.

Book tour: A series of appearances that an author makes in various cities in order to promote a title and stimulate sales.

Bootlegging: The unauthorized recording of a music performance, and the subsequent distribution of that recording.

Box office receipts: The sum of money taken in for admission at movie theatres around the country.

Brand: A clearly identifiable image that attracts target audiences over and over again.

Branding: Creating a specific image of a product that makes it stand out in the marketplace.

Broadband technologies: Services that allow for a wide array of signals to come into the computer at the same time.

Broadcasting: Term referring to radio transmissions that can be widely received; originally an agricultural term meaning to scatter seed over a broad area rather than in particular places.

Broadcast live: Broadcast while actually being performed; not taped, filmed or recorded.

Browser: Software that interprets Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) and displays it on a computer screen.

Business-to-business agencies: Advertising agencies that do work for companies that are interested in persuading personnel in other companies to buy from them instead of from their competitors.

Business-to-business or trade magazine: A magazine that focuses on topics related to a particular occupation, profession, or industry

Byline: A statement identifying who wrote the story.

C3 standard: Nielsen technique of measuring the average commercial minute of a program within a three-day window by including in the ratings people who recorded commercials on DVRs and viewed them within a three day period.

Cable: A type of flexible tube or pipe through which programs are exhibited in the home.

Cable networks: Program channels offered by a cable television system to its customers in addition to what is broadcast over the airwaves in their geographic area (now more appropriately called cable/satellite networks, since they can be delivered to the consumer through cable television systems or via satellite).

Cable Technical Advisory Committee: A committee established at the request of the FCC whose mission was to provide guidance on technical regulations for inclusion in the Cable Television Rules.

Cable Telecommunications Act of 1984: A law that requires cable companies to report to their subscribers what personal information is collected about them and how it is used, and prohibits the cable operators from releasing to the government or other companies "personally identifiable information" without subscribers' consent.

Cable television: Businesses that provide programming to subscribers through a wire (usually a coaxial cable, but increasingly via fiber optic lines).

Cable television system: The cable television retailer that physically installs the cable and markets the program service to consumers in a particular geographic area.

Call-outs: Periodic survey of representative listeners in which a station representative plays a snippet of a song and asks a listener to rate the song.

Capitalism: As defined by Karl Marx, the ownership of the means of production by a ruling class in society.

Casual gamers: Women and men who are older than the hardcore types and like to play less intense (though not necessarily less difficult) games than the hardcore types.

Categorical imperative: Emmanuel Kant's theory that individuals should follow ethical principles as if these principles could be applied in any situation, so that an individual would act only in ways in which she or he would want everyone else to act, all the time.

Channels: The pathways through which the transmitter sends all features of the message, whether they involve sight, sound, smell, or touch.

Children's Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA) of 1998: A law that applies to the online collection of personal information from children under the age of thirteen; it spells out what a web site operator must include in a privacy policy, when and how to seek verifiable consent from a parent, and what responsibilities an operator has to protect children's privacy and safety online.

Circulation: The number of units of a magazine or newspaper sold or distributed free to individuals in one publishing cycle.

Classified ad: A short announcement for a product or service that is typically grouped with announcements for other products or services of the same kind.

Clear and present danger test: As stated by Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, "expression can be limited by the government when the words are used in such circumstances and are of such a nature as to create a clear and present danger that they will bring about the substantive evils that Congress has a right to prevent."

Click-and-mortar companies: Firms with both an online and an offline sales presence.

Clickstream: Computer jargon used to describe movement through websites.

Click-through ad: A web-based advertisement that, when clicked on, takes the user to the advertiser's web site.

Client conflicts: Serving companies that compete with one another.

Coaxial cable: A type of copper cable used by cable TV companies between the community antenna and user homes and businesses; it is made up of one physical channel that carries the signal surrounded by another concentric physical channel and is able to carry information for a great distance.

Code of ethics: A formal list of guidelines and standards that tell the members of a profession, in this case media practitioners, what they should and should not do.

Codex: The first manuscripts that began to take on the look of a book, papyrus leaves faced one another and were bound together, instead of rolled up, this form made it easier to find a particular passage quickly.

Collaborative activity: An activity in which many people work together to initiate, create, and polish the end material.

Colonialism: Control over a dependent area or people by a powerful entity by force of arms.

Columnist: An individual who is paid to write editorials on a regular basis - usually daily, weekly, or monthly.

Comic book: A periodical that tells a story through pictures as well as words.

Commercials: Short audiovisual advertisements that call attention to certain products or services.

Commercial speech: Messages that are designed to sell you products or services.

Commercial stations: A radio station that supports itself financially by selling time on its airwaves to advertisers.

Commercial television stations: A broadcast television station that supports itself financially by selling time on its airwaves to advertisers.

Commercialism: A situation in which the buying and selling of goods and services is a highly promoted value.

Commodification of audiences: The idea, held by critics of the advertiser-supported media's approach to audiences, that everything in life, both private and public, is being shaped by the values of business and commercialism.

Commodities: Goods in a real marketplace.

Communication: Refers to people interacting in ways that at least one of the parties involved understands as messages.
Communist approaches: Approaches to media regulation that hold that the government should determine what the population sees, reads, hears, and experiences through media outlets, in order to convey communist beliefs in everything the media produces for public consumption.

Community antenna television (CATV) service: A service (now known as community access television) that provides television programs to people who are connected to a community antenna.

Completion bond companies: An insurance company that, for a large fee, will cover the costs of film production that exceed an agreed-upon amount.

Composition: The work involved in inserting into a manuscript the codes and conventions that tell the pagemaking program or the printing press how the material should look on the page.

Concept testing: Research commissioned by network executives in order to determine whether the format of a proposed series appeals to members of the series' target audience; this often involves reading a one-paragraph description of series formats to people who fit the profile of likely viewers.

Conceptual research: Research that focuses on the perspectives or philosophies that we should use when we think about the media or media research.

Conglomerate: A company that owns a number of different companies in different industries.

Consumer agencies: Advertising agencies that do work for advertisers that are intent on persuading people in their nonwork roles to buy products.

Consumer books: Books that are aimed at the general public.

Consumer magazine: A magazine that is aimed at people in their private, nonbusiness lives.

Content: The material that a mass media firm produces, distributes or exhibits.

Content analysis: A quantitative research tool that counts aspects of products as opposed to aspects of individuals; it allows a researcher to systematically choose a sample of mass media material, examine certain aspects of that material, and then present the results quantitatively.

Content site: Sites that attempt to build revenues by attracting audiences to content provided on the site

Contextual advertising: The activity of scanning a publisher's web page and serving ads that match the topics of the page.

Control groups: In an experiment, the groups that receive the presentation without the experimental elements.

Controlled-circulation magazine: A magazine whose production and mailing is supported not by charging readers, but (typically) through advertising revenues; the publisher, rather than the reader, decides who gets the magazine.

Convergence: The ability of different media to interact with each other easily because they all deal with information in the same digital form/ coming together.

Cookie: Information that a website puts on your computer's hard disk so that it can remember something about you at a later time; more technically, it is information for future use that is stored by the server on the client side of a client/server communication .

Cooperative advertising: Advertising paid for in part by media production firms or their distributors in order to help the exhibitor promote the product.

Co-optation: A term coined by Marcuse to express the way in which capitalism takes potentially revolutionary ideas and tames them to express capitalist ideals.

Copyeditors: The individuals who edit stories written by reporters; they edit for length, accuracy, style, and grammar, and write headlines to accompany the stories.

Copyright: The legal protection of an author's right to a work.

Copyright Act of 1976: A law that recognizes the rights of an individual creator (in any medium) from the time he or she has created a work, and protects a creative work for the lifetime of that author plus seventy years.

Coproduction: A deal between two firms for the funding of media material.

Corporate communications: The creation and presentation of a company's overall image to its employees and to the public at large.

Cost-per-thousand (CPM): The basic measurement of advertising efficiency in all media; it is used by advertisers to evaluate how much space they will buy in a given medium, and what price they will pay

Counterfeiting: The unauthorized duplication of copyrighted music and packaging, with the goal of making the copy appear authentic for sale.

Counterprogramming: Placing a program that aims to attract a target audience different from that of other shows in the same time slot; often done in order to avoid competing directly with a popular series.

Creative personnel: Individuals who get the initial ideas for the material or use their artistic talents to put the material together.

Creative persuasion: The set of imaginative activities involved in producing and creating advertisements.

Crisis management: The range of activities that helps a company respond to its business partners, the general public, or the government in the event of an unforeseen disaster affecting its image or its products.

Critical theory: The Frankfurt school's members' theories focusing on the corrosive influence of capitalism on culture.

Cross-platform data: Digitized material that can easily be used as resources for the creation of material in other media.

Cross-platform deal: A deal between a cross-media conglomerate and advertiser, which seeks to exploit as many of the conglomerate's holdings as possible.

Cross-platform gaming or pervasive gaming: Location-based advertising activity in relation to gaming that allows users to play the same game and same competitors in a variety of places. It also allows players to use one identity across platforms, as well as all-in-one scorekeeping, chat and friend lists. All this allows ad agencies to sell ads aimed at the same people with particular demographics across all gaming areas.

Cultivation studies: Studies that emphasize that when media systematically portray certain populations in unfavorable ways, the ideas about those people that mainstream audiences pick up help certain groups in society retain their power over the groups they denigrate.

Cultural colonialism: The exercise of control over an area of people by a dominant power not so much through force of arms as by surrounding the weaker countries with cultural materials that reflect values and beliefs that support the interests of that dominant power.

Cultural influences: The historical and social circumstances that lead societies to accept certain media systems and government regulations.

Cultural studies: Studies that start with the idea that all sorts of mass media, from newspapers to movies, present their audiences with technologies and texts and that audiences find meaning in them. Scholars then ask questions that center on how to think about what "making meaning" of technologies and texts means and what consequences it has for those audiences in society.

Culture: Ways of life that are passed on to members of a society through time and that keep the society together.

Custom magazine: A controlled-circulation magazine that is typically created for a company with the goal of reaching out to a specific audience that the company wants to impress.

Cyberspace: The online world of computer networks

Dailies: Newspapers that are published at least five times a week.

Data mining: The process of gathering and storing information about many individuals - often millions - to be used in audience profiling and interactive marketing.

Dateline: A statement identifying where and when the reporter wrote the story.

Day-and-date release: A simultaneous release date for a movie in different countries.

Day part: A segment of the day as defined by programmers and marketers (examples: prime time, daytime, late night, etc.)

Dead air: The silence on the airwaves that is produced when a radio station fails to transmit sound.

Deadline: The time limit for the completion of an assignment.

Decoding: The process by which the receiver translates the source's thoughts and ideas so that they have meaning.

Defamation: A highly disreputable or false statement about a living person or an organization that causes injury to the reputation that a substantial group of people hold for that person or entity.

Demographic indicators: Factors such as age, gender, occupation, ethnicity, race, and income.

Demographics: Characteristics by which people are divided into particular social categories.

Digital: Electronic technology that generates, stores, and process data in the form of strings of 0s and 1s. Each of these digits is referred to as a bit (and a string of 8 bits that a computer can address as a group is a byte).

Digital cable: Cable systems using digital compression technology to deliver over one hundred channels to their customers; many of the channels offer pay-per-view movies or music audio services.

Digital compression technology: A development that allows both cable and satellite delivery firms to pack anywhere from four to twelve digital video signals into the same 6-MHz slot currently occupied by a standard (analog) channel.

Digital convergence: The coming together of computer technologies as the basis for production, distribution, and even exhibition in many media industries.

Digital divide: The separation between those who have access to and knowledge about technology and those who (perhaps because of their level of education or income) do not.

Digital rights management (DRM): A code included on digital music files that sets certain limits on how many times or on what specific device a person can play the music.

Digital versatile disk (DVD): An optical disk technology with two layers on each of its two layers on each of its two sides, holding up to 17 gigabytes of video, audio, or other information; DVD-Video is the usual name for the DVD format designed for full-length movies and played through a box that will work with your television set.

Dime novel: A type of paperback book published in the early 1860s, so called because their price was ten cents per copy.

Direct mail firms: Advertising firms that mail advertisements directly to consumers' homes.

Direct sales: A strategy to gain revenue in which the consumer pays the producer, distributor, or exhibitor for the item and can use it in any way she or he sees fit.

Direct-to-consumer (DTC): Used most effectively by the pharmaceutical industry, this type of advertising suggests the use of various prescription drugs for medical conditions a viewer might experience, and suggests that the viewer ask his or her physician if the medication would be appropriate for them.

Direct-to-home satellite service: A digital technology that delivers up to 150 channels to a plate-size receiver on a subscriber's house; these services include the DBS format in the United States and the DVB format in much of the rest of the world.

Direct-marketing agencies: Agencies that focus on consumer mailings, telephone marketing contacts, TV commercials, and other appeals to target audiences so as to elicit purchases right then and there.

Display ads: add graphics and sometimes video to text and usually take up more space on a web page.

Distortion: A type of false light privacy invasion that involves the arrangement of materials or photographs to give a false impression.

Distribution: The delivery of the produced material to the point where it will be shown to its intended audience.

Domain name: One word or a connected phrase with which the person or organization wants to be identified on the Web.

Domestic novel: A type of paperback book published in the 1870s, mostly aimed at women.

Download: To transfer data or programs from a server or host computer to one's own computer or digital device.

Dramady: A subgenre that blends the rules associated with drama (serious) and comedy (funny).

Drive time: Early weekday mornings and late afternoons, when people are driving to and from work; this is the time during which radio stations expect to capture their largest audiences.

Economic influences: The costs, associated with carrying out certain types of government regulation.

Edison vitascope: A projector that made the showing of film on a large screen possible; invented by Thomas Armat ad C. Francis Jenkins, and premiered in 1896.

Editor: The executive in charge of all the operations required to fill the news hole.

Editorial: A subgenre of news that concentrates on an individual's or organization's point of view.

Editorial: A term used to describe both all nonadvertising matter included in the newspaper and opinion pieces created by a newspaper's editorial writers.

Editorial policies: Policies, most often used by print media organizations, that identify company positions on specific issues, such as which presidential candidate the paper supports, and whether the paper is in support of certain governmental policies.

Editorial profile: A summary of a magazine publisher's publication philosophy, designed to inform potential advertisers of the kinds of articles that will surround their ads.

Editorial standards: Written statements of policy and conduct established by media organizations as a form of self-regulation.

Education: Content that is purposefully crafted to teach people specific ideas about the world in specific ways.

Edutainment: Teaching oriented video games that have educational outcomes for specific groups of learners.

El-hi books and materials or el-hi textbooks: Educational books published for use by elementary, middle, and high school students.

Embeds: Reporters who receive permission from the military to travel with a military unit across the battlefield.

Embellishment: A type of false light privacy invasion in which false material added to a story places someone in a false light.

Empirical research: Research that involves investigating and reporting on actual things in the world.

Encoding: The process by which the source translates the thoughts and ideas so that they can be perceived by the human senses - primarily sight and sound, but may also include smell, taste, and touch.

Enhanced basic: A cable system programming tier that includes the basic cable service plus a number of popular cable networks such as USA, MTV, TLC, VH1, and E!, for example.

ENIAC or Electric Numerical Integrator and Computer: The world's first operational electronic digital computer.

Entertainment: Material that grabs the audience's attention and leaves agreeable feelings, as opposed to challenging their views of themselves and the world.

Entertainment arcade: A commercial location for coin-operated machines such as pinball machines, fortune tellers, and shooter games.

Entertainment licensing: The sale of rights to transform the product of one medium into other products such as toys, lunchboxes, backpacks, and paraphernalia.

Environment: The media material surrounding the ad.

Equal time rule: An order of Congress that requires broadcasters to provide equal amounts of time during comparable parts of the day to all legally qualified candidates for political office.

Ethics: A system of principles about what is right that guides a person's actions.

Evidentiary privilege: A journalist's right to withhold the identification of confidential sources.

Excessive market control: Behavior by one company or a few companies that makes it nearly impossible for new companies to enter the marketplace and compete.

Exclusive releases: The release of a film to only a handful of carefully selected theaters and target audiences throughout the country.

Exhibition: The activity of presenting mass media materials to audiences for viewing or purchase.

Exhibition license: An agreement between a distributor and an exhibition firm that specifies the date on which the distributor will make the film available to the exhibition firm's theaters, the number of weeks the theatres agree to run the film, and when and where competing theatres can show the same film; it also sets the financial arrangements between the distributor and the exhibition firm.

Experiment: A study in which groups of randomly chosen people are exposed to one stimulus while other groups of randomly chosen people are given a similar presentation without that stimulus.

Fair comment and criticism: A defense against libel in which the defendant claims, and proves, that the defamatory statement in question was part of the defendant's fair comment and criticism of a public figure who has thrust himself or herself into the public eye or is at the center of public attention; this defense is good only when it applies to an opinion, not to an assertion of a fact.

Fair use regulations: Provisions under which a person or company may use small portions of a copyrighted work without asking permission.

Fairness doctrine: A rule implemented by the FCC in the late 1940s that requires broadcasters to provide some degree of balance in the presentation of controversial issues.

False light: Invading a person's privacy by implying something untrue about him or her.

Falsity: In libel law, untruth; one party or the other (either the defendant or the plaintiff) must prove that the defamatory statements are either true or untrue, and who must bear this burden of proof depends on whether the plaintiff is a public figure or a private person.

Family Friendly Programming Forum: A forum created by a coalition of marketers in order to stimulate the production of shows meant to appeal to broader, multigenerational audiences and suitable to run between 8 and 10 p.m. (Easter and Pacific times).

Fault: In libel law, a condition that may be established according to who has brought the lawsuit, the nature of the lawsuit, and the applicable state laws.

Federal Communications Act of 1934: The Congressional act that turned the Federal Radio Commission into a larger Federal Communications Commission, with responsibilities for regulating the telephone and telegraph industry as well as the radio broadcasting industry.

Federal Communications Commission (FTC): A federal agency specifically mandated by Congress to govern interstate and international communication by television, radio, wire, satellite, and cable.

Federal Radio Commission (FRC): Created by the Radio Act of 1927, this commission's purpose was to issue radio licenses to those who applied for them, and to bring order to the nation's radio airwaves.

Federal Trade Commission (FTC): A federal agency whose mission is to ensure that the nation's markets function competitively; its coverage can include any mass media - print or electronic - as long as the issue involved is related to the smooth functioning of the marketplace and consumer protection in that sphere.

Feedback: When the receive responds to the message with what the sender perceives as a message.

Fictionalization: A type of false light privacy invasion in which reference is made to real people or to thinly disguised characters that clearly represent real people in supposedly untrue stories.

Film ratings system: The system by which a motion picture rating is assigned to a film by the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), with regard to the amount and degree of profanity, violence and sex found in the film.

Financial interest and syndication rules or fin-syn rules: Regulations promulgated in 1971 by the Justice Department and abolished in 1996 that prohibited the TV networks CBS, ABC, and NBC from owning most of the entertainment programming they aired as well as from getting involved in syndication.
Financial relations: Helping a client's interactions with lenders, shareholders, and stock market regulators proceed smoothly.

Focus group: An assemblage of eight to ten carefully chosen people who are asked to discuss their habits and opinions about one or more topics.

Format: The look of a book.

Format: The rules that guide the flow of products that are put together with a particular audience-attracting goal in mind; a formula that describes a particular media product.

Format: The collection of elements that constitute a recognizable personality of a radio station, created through a set of rules that guide the way the elements are stitched together with a particular audience-attracting goal in mind.

Format: The collection of elements that propel a series and give it a recognizable personality, created using a set of rules that guide the way the elements are stitched together with a particular audience-attracting goal in mind.

Format clock or format wheel: A circular chart that divides one hour of a radio station's format into different, time program elements.

Format consultant: An individual hired by a radio station to analyze the competition and select a format that will attract the most lucrative audience niche possible.

Format network: Programming firm that provides a subscribing radio station with all the programming it needs to fill its airwaves 24 hours a day, 7 days a week; often the stations needs only to insert local commercial spots into the programming.

Formula: A patterned approach to creating content that is characterized by the use of setting, typical characters, and patterns of action.

Frameworks: Sets of concepts that guide understanding.

Franchise: A brand that is highly profitable across time as well as across media.

Free skies: A policy instituted by the U.S. government that for the first time allowed satellites to be used freely for a wide variety of business purposes.

Freedom of Information Act (FOIA): An act passed by Congress in 1967 that allows citizens to request government records and reports that have not yet been made public, so long as these records and reports do not relate to nine specific areas: national security, agency interpersonal activities, statutory exemptions, trade secrets, some intra-agency and interagency memos, issues involving personal privacy, police investigations, protection of government-regulated financial institutions, and information about oil and gas wells.

Freelancer: A worker who makes a living by accepting and completing creative assignments from a number of different companies - sometimes several at one time.

Freestanding insert (FSI): Preprinted sheets that advertise particular products, services, or retailers, most often accompanying the Sunday edition of a newspaper; FSIs are not printed as a part of the paper itself, but are inserted into the paper after the printing process has been completed.

Frequency modulation (FM): A means of radio broadcasting, utilizing the band between 88 and 108 megahertz; FM signals are marked by high levels of clarity, but rarely travel more than eighty miles from the site of their transmission.

Gatefold: A foldout from the back or front cover of a magazine or book.

General ad agency: An advertising agency that invites business from all types of advertisers.

General assignment reporters: Newspaper reporters who cover a variety of topics within their department.

Genre film: A movie that fits a classic storytelling formula (science fiction, horror, action) and is typically made relatively inexpensively.

Globalization: The worldwide spread of media companies, fueled by a combination of media fragmentation, audience erosion, and the need to move materials to more outlets in order to increase revenues.

Global presence: Having strategic offices and representatives around the world.

Golden Age of television: The period of time from approximately 1949 to 1960, marked by the proliferation of original and classic dramas produced for live television.

Golden Mean: Aristotle's belief that an individual who combines both intellectual and moral virtues while following reason can be happy, and that an individual's acts are right and virtuous if they are the mean of two extremes.

Government-in-the-Sunshine-Act: A federal act passed by Congress in 1977 that requires more than fifty governmental agencies, departments, and other groups to open their meetings to the public and the press (except under specific conditions).

Government regulation: A wide variety of activities and laws through which elected and appointed officials at local, state, and federal levels exercise influence over media firms.

Gramophone: Emil Berliner's 1887 modification of both the phonograph and the graphophone, which featured wax discs for recording and playback, rather than a cylinder.

Graphophone: Chichester Bell and Charles Tainter's 1885 modification of Edison's phonograph, which featured a wax cylinder rather than a tin foil cylinder for recording and playback.

Green light: A term used to describe production and distribution executives' approval of the making of a particular film.

Guild: A union established by writers, directors, and/or actors to protect their mutual interests and maintain standards.

Hammocking: The strategic placement of a program between two other programs; positioning a new series between two well-established shows that appeal to the same target audience often gives the right viewers an opportunity to sample the new series.

Handheld game devices: Portable machines that are primarily for game playing.

Hardcore gamers: Typically (75%) male and young (46% are under 18 years old) who enjoy playing complex adventures that require dexterity with hard-to-learn controls.

Harm: In libel law, loss of income (actual financial loss) or physical and emotional discomfort.

Hard news: A news story marked by timeliness, unusualness, conflict, and closeness.

Hard-sell ads: Messages that combine information about the product with intense attempts to get the consumer to purchase it as soon as possible.

Head end: A cable system's regional delivery location.

Headline: An identifying tag appearing at the top of a news story, cueing readers in on the content and relative importance of the story.

Hidden curriculum: A program of study that people don't realize they are taking.

High definition television (HDTV): A television display technology that provides picture quality similar to that of 35-millimeter movies with sound quality similar to that of today's compact disk. Some television stations have begun transmitting HDTV broadcasts to users on a limited number of channels, generally using digital rather than analog signal transmission.

Horizontal integration: The ownership of production facilities, distribution channels, and/or exhibition outlets in a number of media industries and the integration of those elements so that each can profit from the expertise of the others.

Household ratings: Ratings that represent the percentage of households in which the channel was turned on, compared to the number of households in the channel's universe (the local area, or the number of people who receive the cable network).

Household shares: The percentage of households in which a particular channel was turned on, compared to the number of TV-owning households in the area where the channel can be viewed.

HTTP or hypertext transfer protocol: The set of rules for exchanging files on the World Wide Web.

Hybrid genres: A term used by some academic writers to describe mixed genres.

Hybridity: The process of mixing genres within a culture and across cultures.

Hyperlinks: Highlighted words or pictures on the Internet that, when clicked, will connect the user to a particular file, even to a specific relevant part of a document.

Hypotheses: Tentative predictions made in order to draw out and test the logical consequences of a theory or set of concepts.

Ideals: A notion of excellence, a goal that is thought to bring greater harmony to ourselves and to others.

Identity theft: When someone uses information about a person to claim that person's name and finances.

Image ads: Advertisements that tie the product to a set of positive feelings.

Independent broadcast station: A broadcast television station that is not affiliated with one of the Big Four networks.

Independent distributors: A company other than the major studios that distributes movies.

Industrialized nature of the mass media: What distinguishes mass communication from other forms of communication is the industrialized - or mass production - process that is involved in creating the message material. This industrial process creates the potential for reaching billions of diverse, anonymous people simultaneously.

Industry: A grouping of companies that use technology to work together in a regularized way to produce and distribute goods and services.

Information: The raw material that journalists use when they create news stories.

Information subsidies: The idea that PR people's help with information is akin to advancing money and time.

Informational ads: Advertisements that rely primarily on the recitation of facts about a product and the product's features to convince target consumers that it is the right product for them to purchase.

Initial public offering (IPO): The offering for sale to the general public of a predetermined number of shares of stock of a company that previously was owned by a limited number of individuals and the listing of the company's shares on a stock exchange.

Innovation: The introduction of something new into a company's products.

Integrated marketing communications (IMC): A type of PR, the goal of which is to blend (integrate) historically different ways to communicate to an organization's various audiences and markets.

Interactivity: The ability to track and respond to any actions triggered by the end user, in order to cultivate a rapport.

Internet: A worldwide system of computer networks; a network of networks in which users at any one computer can, if they have permission, get information from any other computer (and sometimes talk directly to users at other computers).

Internet agency: An advertising company that promotes its expertise in understanding the technology for reaching people online, for creating the ads and websites that will lead to customer responses, and for measuring those responses.

Internet radio: Pre-chosen music streams based around certain genres-for example, jazz or classical-free of charge to listeners, paid for by commercial advertisements, much like a radio station.

Internet service provider (ISP): A company that sells access to the Internet.

Interpersonal communication: A form of communication that involves two or three individuals signaling to each other using their voices, facial and hand gestures, and other signs (even clothes) that they use to convey meaning.

Interpretation: Using the media to find out why things are happening - who or what is the cause - and what to do about them.

Interstitial pop-up ads: Pop-up ads that jump out at you between page loadings.

Interstitials: Station or network identifiers and related signals that are interspersed between programs and commercials aired on the radio.

Intrapersonal communication: An individual "talking" to himself or herself.

Intrusion: An invasion of privacy that takes place when a person or organization intentionally invades a person's solitude, private area, or affairs.

Investigative reports: In-depth explorations of some aspects of reality.

Investment banks: Companies that arrange to lend millions, even tens and hundreds of millions, of dollars to companies, and also arrange stock offerings.

Joint ventures: Alliances formed between a large media firm and one or more of the thousands of smaller firms that are eager to extend their niches in the global media environment; the companies either work together or share investments.

Journalism reviews: Publications that report on and analyze examples of ethical and unethical journalism.

Journalist: One who is trained to report nonfiction events to an audience.

Judeo-Christian ethic or Golden Rule: The admonition to "do unto others as you would have them do unto you."

Kinetoscope: A moving-picture device, invented by Thomas Edison and his associates in 1892, that allowed one person at a time to watch a motion picture by looking through the viewer.

Knowledge gap: A theory developed by Tichenor, Donahue, and Olien, that holds that in the development of any social or political issue, the more highly educated segments of a population know more about the issue early on and, in fact, acquire information about that issue at a faster rate than the less-educated ones, and so the difference between the two types of people grows wider.

Label: A division of a recording firm that releases a certain type of music and reflects a certain personality.

Lead-in: A program that comes before, and therefore leads into, another program.

Leading questions: Questions that imply the answers the researcher wants in the way the questions are posed.

Lead-out: The program that follows the program after the lead-in.

Libel: Written communication that is considered harmful to a person's reputation.

Libel per quod: Words, expressions, and statements that, at face value, seem to be innocent and not injurious, but may actually be considered libelous in their actual contexts.

Libel per se: Words and expressions that are always considered libelous.

Libertarian approaches: Approaches to media regulation that hold that individuals are capable of making sound decisions for themselves and that government should intervene only in those rare circumstances where society cannot be served by people going about their own business; the mass media do not represent such an area, since individuals and companies will create mass media materials without prodding from the government.

License: The contract between a production company and network executives that grants the network permission to air each episode a certain number of times; usually thirteen episodes of a series are ordered.

License fees: A strategy to gain revenue in which a person or organization pays the producer for the use of a product but the producer has ultimate control over the way it is used.

License fees: The costs that particular networks charge exhibitors for carrying the networks' lineups in the exhibitors' cable or satellite systems.

Licensing: The sale of the rights to transform the product of one medium into another.

Licensing system: In the history of print media, a system put in place by King Henry VIII in 1509 under which only people with written authority from the Crown could use a printing press.

Lifestyle categories: Activities in which potential audiences are involved that mark them as different from others in the population at large.

Line: An assortment of products with a particular, predetermined format.

Line producer: The individual responsible for making sure that the equipment and personnel necessary for a film's production are available when they are needed.

Lineup: The menu of channels that a cable television system offers potential subscribers.

Listening posts: A booth or station at which listeners can don headphones, select a song or an artist from a set of choices, and listen to a sample of the selected song or the selected artist's music.

Literacy: The ability to effectively comprehend and use messages that are expressed in written or printed symbols, such as letters.

Literary agent: A person who, on behalf of a client, markets the client's manuscripts to editors, publishers, and other buyers, based upon knowledge of the target market and the specific content of the manuscript.

Literary reviews: Small-circulation periodicals about literature and related topics; usually funded by scholarly associations, universities, or foundations.

Loan: Money borrowed from a company, usually a bank, for a certain price (a percentage of the loan called an interest rate).

Magazine distribution: The channel through which a magazine reaches its exhibition point.

Magazine publisher: The chief executive of a magazine, who is in charge of its financial health.

Magic bullet or hypodermic needle approach: The idea that messages delivered through the mass media persuade all people powerfully and directly (as if they were hit by a bullet or injected by a needle) without the people having any control over the way they react.

Mail-order books: Books that are advertised on TV or in promotional mailings that can be ordered directly from the publisher and are shipped to the consumer's home.

Mainstream approaches: The research models that developed out of the work of the Columbia school, the Yale school, and the Payne Fund studies.

Majors: The motion picture industry's largest and most powerful film distributors.

Managing editor: Individual who coordinates the work of the sections or departments within the newspaper.

Market research: Research that has, as its end goal, the gathering of information that will help an organization sell more products.

Market segmentation: Dividing society into different categories of consumers.

Marketplace of ideas: The belief, asserted by John Milton in Aeropagitica, that in a free-flowing media system, individuals will be able to make their own decisions about what is true and what is false, because media competition will allow different opinions to emerge and struggle for public approval (as in a market), and in the end, the true opinion will win out.

Marriage mail outlets: Advertising firms that specialize in delivering circular advertisements that might otherwise be inserted as FSIs in newspapers; these firms produce preprinted sheets and brochures from a number of advertisers, bundle them together, and send them directly to consumers' homes.

Mass communication: The industrialized production and multiple distribution of messages

Mass customization: The use of sophisticated technology to send large numbers of people messages tailored to their individual interests.

Massively multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPG): Videogames in which a large number of players interact with one another in a virtual world.

Mass market outlets: Venues where mass market paperbacks are generally sold, including newsstands, drugstores, discount stores, and supermarkets.

Mass market paperbacks: Smaller, pocket-sized paperback books.

Mass media: The technological vehicles through which mass communication takes place (Note that the term mass media is plural; it refers to more than one vehicle. The singular version is mass medium.)

Mass media conglomerate: A company that holds several mass media firms in different media industries under its corporate umbrella.

Mass media outlets: Enterprises that send out messages via mass media.

Mass media production firm: A company that creates materials for distribution through one or more mass media vehicles.

Mass media research: The use of systematic methods to understand or solve problems regarding the mass media.

Media fragmentation: The increase in the number of mass media and mass media outlets that has been taking place during the past two decades.

Media kits: A database compiled by a magazine that tells potential advertisers attractive key facts about its readers.

Media literacy: The ability to access, analyze, evaluate, and communicate messages in a variety of forms

Media-literate: Able to apply critical thinking skills to the mass media, thereby becoming a more aware and responsible citizen - parent, voter, worker - our media-drive society.

Media planning and buying: A function of advertising, involving purchasing media space and/or time on strategically selected outlets, which are deemed best-suited to carry a client's ad message.

Media practitioners: The people who select or create the material that a mass media firm produces, distributes or exhibits.

Media relations: All dealings with reporters and other members of media organizations who might tell a story about a client.

Mediated interpersonal communication: A specialized type of interpersonal communication that is assisted by a device, such as a pen or pencil, a computer, or a telephone.

Medium: Part of a technical system that helps in the transmission, distribution, or reception of messages.

Megaplex: A modern, air-conditioned building that houses sixteen or more screens and has the capacity to exhibit a number of different films at the same time.

Messages: Collections of symbols that appear purposefully organized (meaningful) to those sending or receiving them.

Microprocessor: A miniaturized version of the central processing unit (the "brains") of a computer processor on a single microchip (sometimes called a logic chip); designed to perform arithmetic and logic operations that make use of small number-holding areas called registers. Typical microprocessor operations include adding, subtracting, comparing two numbers, and fetching numbers from one area to another.

Minstrel show: A touring show popular in the mid-nineteenth century, in which performers dressed up in special "blackface" makeup, made jokes, and sang songs that, though supposedly drawn from "black songfests," actually had little to do with the African-American lifestyles and rhythms they claimed to mimic.

Mobile feed: Stories specifically formatted for the user's cellular phone, "smart" device or personal digital assistant.

Mobile phones: Used as handheld portable gaming platforms.

Modem: A device attached to the computer that performs a digital-to-analog conversion of data and then transmits the data to another modem, which reverses the process.

Monopoly: Control of the market by a single firm.

Motion Picture Patents Company (MPPC): Also known as the Movie Trust, Edison Trust, or The Trust, this coalition, which lasted from 1908 to 1912, was organized by the ten largest movie companies, whose producers and distributors attempted to gain complete control of the motion-picture industry in the United States primarily through control of patents.

Motion Picture Producers and Distribution Associates: Also known as the Hays Office, this self-regulatory body of the film industry created and enforced a code that defined movie morality, setting a precedent for self-regulations in other media industries.

Motivation research: The systematic investigation of the reasons people purchase products.

Movable type: Individual letters of the alphabet made out of wood or metal that can be rearranged in any number of combinations to make different words; invented by Johannes Gutenberg.

Muckrakers: American journalists, novelists, and critics who, in the early 1900s, attempted to expose the abuses of business and the corruption in politics. .

MUDS or multi-user dungeons: Fantasy role-playing games such as "Dungeons and Dragons", they were the predecessors of today's online games with hundreds of thousands of players.

Multiple system owner (MSO): A cable television firm that owns two or more cable television systems.

Multiplex: A modern, air-conditioned building that houses between eight and fifteen screens and had the capacity to exhibit a number of different films at the same time.

Multiplexing or multichannel broadcasting: Sending multiple signals or streams of information on a carrier at the same time in the form of a single complex signal, then recovering the separate signals at the receiving end.

Music activity level: The aspect of a radio station's format that refers to the measure of the played music's dynamic impact (i.e. "soft rock," "smooth jazz," etc.)

Music sophistication: The aspect of a radio station's format that refers to the simplicity or complexity of the musical structure and lyrical content of the music played.

Music style: The aspect of a radio station's format that refers to the type of music the station plays.

Music time period: The aspect of a radio station's format that refers to the release date of the music the station plays (i.e., "Contemporary," "Oldies," etc.)

Narrowcasting: Going after specific slices of the radio audience that are especially attractive to advertisers.

National ads: Advertisements placed by large national and multinational firms that have branch stores and other operations that do business within the newspaper's geographic area.

National rating points: A measure of the percentage of TV sets in the United States that are tuned to a specific show. In 2001, each national rating point represented just over 1 million U.S. TV homes.

Natural search results: Websites that come up based on a search engine's algorithm without any influence from any advertisers.

National security: One of the circumstances that permits government censorship via prior restraint; an example is the right to restrain speech about military activities during times of war.

National spot advertising: Form of radio advertising in which airtime is purchased from a local radio station by national advertisers or their representatives.

Naturalistic experiment: A study in which randomly selected people are manipulated in a relatively controlled environment (as in an experiment) without knowing that they are involved in an experiment.

Negative-option plan: A membership agreement under which a consumer continues to receive a product until the agreement is fulfilled or the subscription is cancelled.

Net neutrality: The desire by websites and advocates to make sure that ISPs do not charge sites for transmission.

Network: A company that distributes programs simultaneously to radio stations that agree to carry a substantial amount of its material on an ongoing basis; typically, a network will provide a regular schedule of programming material to its affiliate stations for broadcast.

Network advertising: Form of radio advertising in which national advertisers or their representatives purchase airtime not from local radio stations, but from the network that serves the radio station.

Network affiliates: Local broadcast television or radio stations that are not owned by broadcast networks and yet transmit network signals and programs on a daily basis; in return, the network promises to compensate the affiliate with a portion of the revenues received from advertisers that have bought time on the network.

News gathering: The process by which reporters and editors gather and organize the news they include in their publication.

News hole: The number of pages left over and available for editorial matter, based upon the number of pages needed to run advertisements.

Newsletter: A small-circulation periodical, typically four to eight pages long, that is composed and printed in a simple style.

Newspaper chains: Companies that own a number of newspapers around the nation.

Newspaper distribution: Bringing the finished newspaper issue to the point of exhibition.

Nickelodeon: An early movie theater that charged an admission price of five cents per person.

Nielsen Diaries: A method used by A.C. Nielsen Company to determine television ratings information, which requires selected individuals to keep a written record or "diary" of their television use during a given time period.

Noncommercial stations: A radio station that does not receive financial support from advertisers, but rather from donations from private foundations and listeners, or form commercial firms in return for mentioning the firm or its products at the start or end of programs airing on the station; most of these stations are located at the very left of the FM band (88 to 92 MhZ), because these frequencies have been reserved by the government exclusively for noncommercial use.

Noncommercial television stations: A broadcast television station that does not receive financial support from advertisers, but rather supports itself through donations from listeners and private foundations, and from commercial firms in return for mentioning the firm or its products in announcements at the beginning and end of programs airing on the station.

O & o stations: Local radio stations which are commonly owned and operated by a network that often provides a regular schedule of programming materials for broadcast.

Objectivity: Presenting a fair, balanced, and impartial representation of the events that took place by recording a news event based on the facts and without interpretation, so that anyone else who witnessed the news even would agree with the journalists' recounting of it; the way in which news ought to be researched, organized, and presented.

Obscene material: Material that deals with sex in a manner appealing to prurient interest.

Off-network syndication: A situation in which a distributor takes a program that has already been shown on network television and rents (licenses) episodes of that program to TV stations for local airing.

Oligopoly: Control of the market by a select few firms.

Ombudsperson: An individual who is hired by a media organization to deal with readers, viewers, or listeners who have a complaint to report or an issue to discuss.

On-air talent: Term referring to radio workers whose voices and personalities are broadcast over the radio's airwaves.

On-staff workers: Workers who have secured a full-time position at a production firm.

One-way model of public relations: A model of PR that concentrates on sending to the press persuasive facts that benefit the client without any attempts at systematically learning about the populations whom the client wants to persuade.

On spec: Writing a script for a film without a contract to do so, with the hope that when the script is passed along to various production firms by the scriptwriterâ??s agent, it will be bid for and purchased.

Operating policies: Policies, most often used by print media organizations, that spell out guidelines for everyday operations, such as conflicts of interest, acceptable advertising content, boundaries of deceptive information-gathering practices, paying sources for news stories, etc.

Opt-in: A rule for sending email advertising around that states the recipient has to agree to receive such ads or have a relationship with the firm that is sending them.

Opt-in-approach: An approach to collecting personal information in which marketers are not permitted to collect information about a person unless that person explicitly indicates that it is OK for them to do so (say, by checking a box online).

Opt-out: Legitimate companies that send email ads also provide the opportunity for recipients to opt-out-to not continue to receive the ads.

Opt-out-approach: An approach to collecting personal information in which marketers are permitted to collect such information from consumers as long as they inform the consumers of what they are doing and give them the opportunity to check a "no" box or otherwise refuse to allow it.

Organizational communication: The interactions of individuals in a formal working environment.

Out of home locations or captive audiences: places such as airline waiting areas and store check out lines where people congregate and would likely pay attention to TV clips and commercials.

Owned and operated or O & O: Broadcast television stations that are owned and operated by a network that often provides a regular schedule of programming materials for broadcast.

P&A or prints and advertising: The expenses that distributors incur in making prints of their films for theatres and marketing the films to the public.

Pagination: The process by which newspaper pages are composed and displayed as completed pages, with pictures and graphics.

Paid-circulation magazine: A magazine that supports its production and mailing by charging readers money, either for a subscription or for a single copy.

Panel survey: Asking the same individuals questions over a period of time in order to find out whether and how the attitudes of these people change over time.

Parasocial interaction: The psychological connections that some media users establish with celebrities that they learn about through the mass media.

Parodies: Entertainment subgenre intended to entertain as well as make serious political points.

Parody: A work that imitates another work for laughs in a way that comments on the original work in one way or another.

Patterns of action: The predictable activities associated with the characters in the settings.

Payola: Describes an activity in which promotion personnel pay money to radio DJs in order to ensure that they will devote airtime to artists that their recording companies represent; in the late 1950s, a revision of the Federal Communications Act made this activity illegal.

Pay-per-view (PPV): Cable- or satellite-delivered material for which the cable or satellite company charges the customer for viewing an individual program, such as a boxing match, a live broadcast of a concert, or a newly released motion picture. Pedagogy or learning apparatus: The use of features such as learning objective, chapter recaps, and questions for discussion; this is characteristic of educational books.

Peer-to-peer computing (P2P): A process in which people share the resources of their computers with computers owned by other people.

Penny papers: Newspapers produced in the early 1830s that were sold on the street at a penny per copy.

People meter: A small box installed by Nielsen on television sets in about five thousand homes that is has chosen as a representative sample of the U.S. population. The meter holds a preassigned code for every individual in the home, including visitors. Nielsen asks each viewer to enter his or her code at the start and end of a TV viewing session. Information from each viewing session is transmitted to Nielsen's computers through television lines and is the basis for the firm's conclusions about national viewing habits.

People ratings: Particular demographic categories of individuals within each household - for example, those eighteen to forty-nine years old or those who are female.Personal tort: Behavior that harms another individual.

Percentage-above-the-nut: An agreement drawn between a distributor and an exhibition firm in which the executives of the exhibition firm and the distribution firm agree on the costs of operating each theater (the electricity, salaries, rent, maintenance, and the like), a break-even point called the nut; then, film by film, the distributor and the exhibition firm negotiate what percentage of revenues "above the nut" the exhibition firm will pay to the distribution firm.

Personalization of content: A strategy for providing tailored content, based upon profiles and real-time activities of a website's visitors.

Phonograph: Invented by Thomas Alva Edison in 1877, this device recorded and played back sound on tin foil wrapped around a metal cylinder with spiral grooves on it.

Pickup: A film that is not produced by a major firm but that a major firm agrees to distribute in the United States or other areas of the world.

Pilot: A single episode that is used to test the viability of a series.

Pinball machine: A coin operated game in which a player scores points by causing metal balls to move in certain directions (often with flippers) inside a glass covered case.

Piracy: The unauthorized duplication of copyrighted films for profit.

Pitches: Brief summaries of program ideas.

Plagiarism: Using parts of another person's work without citing or otherwise crediting the original author.

Platform release: The initial release of a film in a small number of theatres in a relatively small number of areas; executives use this approach when they believe a film has the potential for wide appeal but needs time for newspaper reviews and other media discussions of the film to emerge and encourage the film's target audience to go see it.

Playlist: The roster or line-up of songs that a radio can play on the air during a given period of time.

Pod: A group of advertisements in succession.

Podcasting: Audio recordings that can be downloaded to MP3 players.

Policy books: Guidelines for fairness, accuracy, and appropriateness of station content, etc., adopted by media organizations in the interest of self-regulation.

Political economy: An area of study that focuses specifically on the relationship between the economic and the cultural, and looks at when and how the economic structures of society and the media system reflect the political interests of society's rich and powerful.

Political ideologies: Beliefs about who should hold the greatest power within a culture.

Political influences: The types of power that government officials have to impose their will over the nation's institutions, including the media.

Polysemous: Open to multiple meanings.

Pool reporters: Selected members of the media who are present at a news event and share facts, stories, images, and other firsthand knowledge of that event with others.

Pop-ups: Commercial messages that jump out at you (typically in square and rectangular form) when you go to a web page or click on a picture or word.

Pornography: The presentation of sexually explicit behavior, as in a photograph, intended to arouse sexual excitement.

Positioning: Making a particular target group of consumers feel that a brand relates to their particular interests and lifestyles.

Power of a distributor: The firm's ability to ensure that the media products it carries will end up in the best locations at the best exhibitors to the best audience.

Premium channels: HBO, Encore, Showtime, Cinemax, and other networks that charge individual monthly fees for receiving their programming, although discounted "packages" are available; premium sports channels are also part of the pay cable menu in many areas.

Preproduction research: Systematically investigating potential sources of revenue, including learning about the leisure habits of different audiences through surveys, focus groups, or the analysis of existing data.

Prepublication research: Research conducted in order to gauge a title's chances of success with its likely audience.

Presold title: A book that publishers expect will sell well to specific audiences because it ties into material that is popular with those audiences across other media.

Press council: An independent group of people who monitor complaints from media consumers, including complaints about unbalanced coverage, inadequate coverage, and erroneous coverage.

Press release: A short essay that is written in the form of an objective news story.

Previewing: A type of concept testing to evaluate newly completed films, in order to determine what members of the films target audience like and/or dislike about the film.

Preview theatres: A venue to which members of a target audience are invited to engage in concept testing or to evaluate newly completed series pilots.

Prime time: The broadcasting slots from 7:00 to 11:00pm the eastern and Pacific time zones, and form 6:00 to 10:00pm in the central and mountain time zones.

Prime-time access rule or PTAR: A 1970 FCC rule that forced the networks to stop supplying programming to local stations for a half hour during prime time (the period chosen turned out to be 7:30 to 8:00pm EST) six days a week.

Priming: The process by which the media affect the standard that individuals use to evaluate what they see and hear in the media.

Principle of utility: John Stuart Mill's theory promoting an action based on its utility, or usefulness; often rephrased as "the greatest good for the greatest number," the basis of utilitarianism is the idea that the rightness or wrongness of any action can be judged entirely in terms of its consequences.

Principles: Those guidelines we derive from values and ideals that are precursors to codified rules.

Print run: The number of copies that are printed.

Privacy: The right to be protected from unwanted intrusions or disclosures.

Private person: An individual who may be well known in the community, but who has no authority or responsibility for the conduct of government affairs and has not thrust himself or herself into the middle of an important public controversy.

Privilege: A defense to libel that holds that while the public's right to know takes precedence over a person's right to preserve his or her reputation, certain professions (doctors, lawyers, psychologists), or individuals (chiefly a spouse) can maintain privilege; if any nonprivileged third part was part of the communication, the privilege is broken.

Production: The creation of mass media materials for distribution through one or more mass media vehicles.

Professional books: Books that are dedicated to postgraduate training primarily for people in the fields of business, law, medicine, technology and science, library science, and education.

Profiling: Creating a description of someone based on collected data.

Profits: The amount of money brought in by the completed products minus expenses.

Program feed: The succession of shows sent from a network to its network affiliates.

Promotion: The process of scheduling publicity appearances for a recording artists, with the goal of generating excitement about the artist, and thereby sales of hi or her album.

Propaganda: Messages designed to change the attitudes and behavior of huge numbers of otherwise disconnected individuals on controversial social issues.

Propaganda analysis: The systematic examination of mass media messages that seem to be designed to sway the attitudes of large populations on controversial issues.

Psychographic data: Information that links demographic categories to personality characteristics of an audience.

Psychographics: Categorizing people by their attitudes, personality types, or motivations.

Public affairs: Public relations that focuses on government issues.

Public communication: One person who speaks to a large number of people.

Public disclosure: Truthful information concerning the private life of a person that a media source reveals that both would be highly offensive to a reasonable person and is not of legitimate public concern is considered to be an invasion of privacy.

Public figure: A person who is an elected or appointed official ( a politician), or someone who has stepped (willingly or unwillingly) into a public controversy.

Public relations (PR): The art or science of establishing and promoting a favorable relationship with the public through various methods and/or activities.

Publication: In libel law, a process that occurs when one person - in addition to the plaintiff and the defendant - sees or hears the defamatory material in question.

Publicity: The process of getting people or products mentioned in the news and entertainment media in order to get member of the public interested in them.

Publicity outlet: A media vehicle (for instance, a particular magazine, a specific TV interview program, a particular radio talk show) that has in the past been open to input from public relations practitioners.

Publisher: The individual in charge of all of a newspaper's, magazine's, or website's operations, including financial issues, production issues, and editorial issues.

Qualitative research: Making sense of an aspect of reality by showing how different parts of it fit together in particular ways.

Quantitative research: Research in which the researcher collects and reports data in numerical form.

Questionnaire: A quantitative research tool consisting of a series of questions with answers that can be translated into numbers.

Rack jobber: A company contracted by a department store to maintain its rack of records, tapes, CDs, and/or DVDs.

Genres: Major categories of media content.

Radio Act of 1912: Passed by Congress in 1912, this act gave the secretary of commerce the right to issue licenses to parties interested in radio broadcasting, and to decide which radio frequencies should be used for which types of services (i.e., public broadcast, military use, police use, etc.)

Radio network: A group of interconnected radio stations.

Radiotelephone: The broadcast of speech and music through wireless transmission; radio for short.

Ratings: The audits of people's viewing behavior that help to determine where much of the money for programming and advertising should go.

RBOC's or Regional Bell Operating Companies: A term used to describe Verizon and AT&T who have determined to compete with traditional cable MSOs. Although they wouldn't be called cable companies by people in the business, Verizon and AT&T do use wire technologies (as opposed to the unwired satellite approach) to reach people's homes.

Reach: The percentage of the entire target audience to which a media outlet will circulate.

Reason-why ads: Advertisements that list the benefits of a product in ways that would move the consumer to purchase it.

Receiver: The person or organization that gets the message.

Regulation: With regard to mass media, laws and guidelines that influence the way media companies produce, distribute, or exhibit materials for audiences.

Reliable: The results can be reproduced by repeating the conditions in the study.

Religious books: Trade books that contain specifically religious content.

Rental outlets: Companies that purchase releases from film distribution and then rent them on a pay-per-day basis to individual customers.

Rentals: A strategy to gain revenue in which a producer, distributor, or exhibitor charges for employing (reading, viewing, or hearing) a mass media product for a certain period of time, and then gets it back.

Repurposing: The reuse of content for different aims.

Research: The application of a systematic method to solve a problem or understand it better than in the past.

Research and development (R&D): Departments within companies that explore new ideas and generate new products and services aimed at helping the firm attract customers in the future.

Retail advertising: Advertising by establishments located in the same geographic area as the newspaper in which the ad is placed.

Rich media: Ads that contain animated or video presentations that activate automatically or can be activated by clicking on the ad.

Ringtones: Bits of songs (or even new musical compositions) that people download to their mobile phones so that they play when someone calls them.

Rough cut: A preliminary version of a film, shown before its final editing process and formal release.

Royalty: The share of money paid to a songwriter or music composer out of the money that the production firm receives from the sale or exhibition of a work.

Royalties: Shares of a book's sales income which are paid to an author, usually based upon the number of copies sold.

RSS: A flow of stories on topics the reader has chosen that the newspaper sends to the individual's personal website (at MySpace or MyYahoo, for example) so that the user does not have to go to the paper's website to see it.

Sample: A subset of a population that is selected through systematic methods in such a way that the answers from the subset can be considered generalizable to the entire population of concern.

Sampling: Trying out a new series by watching it for the first time.

Satellite television: Programming that comes directly to the home from a satellite orbiting the earth; the signal is initially sent by the transmitting company from a station on the earth. A satellite dish then receives the signal at the home, and the signal moves via cable to the television set for viewing.

Saturation release: The initial release of a film in more than 2,000 theatres simultaneously.

Schedule: The pattern in which media programs are arranged and presented to the audience.

Scriptoria: Areas located in ancient Greek libraries where books were copied by hand.

Segments: Portions of a magazine's readership that an advertiser wants to reach.

Series pictures: Movies that feature the same characters, storylines, and sets across a number of films.

Service magazine: A type of consumer magazine, aimed at women, which provides advice for women across a wide spectrum of life issues.

Setting: The environment in which content takes place.

Shelf space: The amount of area or time available for presenting products to consumers.

Shield laws: Laws passed in thirty states and the District of Columbia that afford the media varying degrees of protection against being forced to disclose information about their sources.

Shoppers: Free, nondaily newspapers, typically aimed at people in particular neighborhoods, that are designed primarily to deliver advertisements, but which may also carry some news and feature content.

Simple malice: Hatred or ill will toward another person.

Simple negligence: Lack of reasonable care.

Single: A product that contains only one or two individual musical recordings.

Single-copy sales: The number of copies of a magazine sold not by subscription, but one issue at a time.

Slander: Spoken communication that is considered harmful to a person's reputation.

Small-group communication: Communication among three or more individuals.

Social currency: Media content used as coins of exchange in everyday interpersonal discussions.

Social media: Sites that allow people to create networks of acquaintances and friends and to share their writings and audiovisual materials with them.

Social relations: Interactions among people.

Social responsibility approaches: Approaches to media regulation that agree with the libertarian belief in the importance of the individual and the marketplace of ideas, but hold that the real competition over ideas will never happen without government action to encourage companies to be socially responsible by offering a diversity of voices and ideas, and also argue that sometimes things that individuals or companies want to publish - for example, child pornography - might be harmful to a large number of people in the society.

Society: Large numbers of individuals, groups, and organizations that live in the same general area and consider themselves connected to one another through the sharing of a culture.

Soft news: The kind of news story that news workers feel may not have the critical importance of hard news, but nevertheless would appeal to a substantial number of people in the audience.

Soft-sell ads: Advertisements that aim mostly to create good feelings about the product or service by associating it with desirable music, personalities, or events that the creators of that product or service feel would appeal to the target audience.

Source: The originator of the message which may be a person, several people or an organization.

Stakeholders: Parties outside media industries who care particularly about an issue and may try to use their economic and political power to influence the outcome to their benefit.

Stereotypes: Predictable depictions that reflect (and sometimes create) cultural prejudices.

Stock offering: Selling units of ownership in the company, or shares of stock, to organizations and individuals.

Subcultures: Groups with habits that many people consider odd and unusual but not threatening to the more general way of life.

Subgenres: Subcategories of media content genres.

Subscription: A long-term order, paid in advance, for the receipt of a product for a predetermined period of time or number of issues.

Subscription reference books: Titles such as "great books" series, dictionaries, atlases, and sets of encyclopedias that are marketed by their publishers to consumers on a door-to-door or direct-mail basis; the distribution typically involves one large package deal - several volumes at a time - with a deferred payment schedule.

Subscriptions: A strategy to gain revenue in which the producer, distributor, or exhibitor charge for continually providing a media product or service.

Sunshine laws: Regulations that ensure that government meetings and reports are made available to the press and to members of the public.

Surveillance: Using the media to learn about what is happening in the world around us.

Survey: A form of quantitative empirical research that involves systematically asking questions of a population of people and then presenting numerical tallies of the results.

Syndicate: A company that sells soft news editorial matter, cartoons, and photographs to newspapers for use.

Syndicate: A group of banks that agree to share the risks and rewards of a lending deal, organized by investment banks when very large amounts of money are required.

Syndication: Licensing or renting to local stations or cable networks the right to air programs with a long network run (generally at least one hundred episodes).

Synergy: A situation in which the whole is greater than the sum of its parts; the ability of mass media organizations to channel content into a wide variety of mass media on a global scale through control over production, distribution, and exhibition in as many of those media as possible.

Tabloid form: A printing format that uses pages that are about half the size of a traditional newspaper page.

Talent agents: An individual who represents creative personnel, such as actors, directors, authors, and screenwriters) and aims to link them with production firms in exchange for a percentage of the creator's revenues from the finished product.

Talent guild: A union formed by people who work in similar crafts to help negotiate rules with major production firms in their industries regarding the ways in which freelance creatives will be treated and paid.

Talkies: Films that featured sound (such as singing, talking, sound effects, etc.) as well as images.

Targeted: Created to appeal to particular segments of society rather than the population as a whole.

Targeting: The process by which a mass media organization sets its sights on having as its audience one or more of the social segments it has identified in the population.

Target segments: The desired segments that a media organization is trying to reach.

Telecommunication Act of 1996: A law that allowed anyone to enter any communications business and let any communications business compete in any market against any other business.

Television broadcasting: The transmission of visual images of moving an stationary objects, generally with accompanying sound, in the form of electromagnetic waves that when received can be reconverted into visual images.

Television network: An organization that distributes television programs, typically by satellite and microwave relay, to all its affiliated stations, or stations that agree to carry a substantial amount of the network's material on an ongoing basis, so that programs can be broadcast by all the stations at the same time.

Television program ratings: Audits of people's viewing behaviors that gauge which shows households are viewing and how many are viewing them; they help network executives decide which shows should stay, which should be dropped from the lineup, and how much advertisers should pay to hawk their products during breaks in the program.

Terrestrial: Traditional broadcast radio.

Text ads: typically comprise a few lines of writing about the offered product or service that link to the advertiser's website.

Theatrical film or feature film: A film created to be shown first in traditional movie theatres; once these films have had their run at movie theatres, often they are redistributed as home videos and DVDs for rental or for sale, as pay-per-view films in hotels and in homes, as in-flight movies on airlines, and as featured films on cable, satellite, and broadcast television channels.

The baby boom: The huge spike in the population that was created during the late 1940s through the 1950s as soldiers who returned from World War II married and started families.

Theories: Bodies of knowledge that contain tested explanations of how phenomena work.

Theory of reasoned action: A theory, developed by Martin Fishbein and Icek Ajzen, that posits that the most important determinant of a person's behavior is behavior intent, and that an individual's intention to perform a behavior is a combination of his or her attitude toward performing the behavior and a subjective norm.

Third party publishers: Companies that are unaffiliated with hardware companies that typically create games that work on a variety of systems.

Tiering: The strategy by which different levels of television programming are priced differently.

Time slot: A particular position in the schedule.

Tin Pan Alley: Term describing the popular-music publishing industry of the early twentieth century.

Title testing: Conducting interviews with filmgoers in order to determine which of a number of titles (or names) for an upcoming film will draw people in the target audience to the theatre to see the film.

Top-level domain (TLD): Most general part of the domain name in an Internet address. A TLD is either a generic top-level domain (gTLD), such as "com" for "commercial," "edu" for "educational," and so forth, or a country code top-level domain (ccTLD), such as "fr" for France of "is" for Iceland.

Total market coverage (TMC): Reaching nearly all households in its market area.

Tracking studies: Research on the public's awareness of and interest in a film, beginning two weeks before the film's release and continuing through the film's first month of release.

Track record: The previous successes or failures of an individual creative person or organization.

Trade books: General-interest titles, including both fiction and nonfiction books, which are typically sold to consumers through retail bookstores and to libraries.

Trade incentives: Payments in cash, discounts, or publicity activities that provide a special reason for an exhibitor to highlight a product.

Trade magazine: A periodical focused on a single industry and intended for practitioners of that industry.

Trade paperbacks: Standard-sized books with flexible covers.

Traditional advertising agency: An advertising agency that creates and distributes persuasive message with the aim of creating a favorable impression of the product in the minds of target consumers that will lead them to buy it in stores.

Transactional databases: A database that stores and sorts large quantities of data that reflects transactions - such as logs of phone calls, emails, mailings, or purchases.

Transformative: When use of copyrighted material presents the work in a way that adds interpretation to it so that some people might see it in a new light.

Transistor: Device for amplifying, controlling, and generating radio signals; a smaller replacement for the Audion vacuum tube, leading to the miniaturization of radio receivers.

Transmitter: Performs the physical activity of distributing the message.

Treatment: A multipage elaboration of a television series producer's initial pitch to network programming executives; the document describes the proposed show's setup and the way in which it relates to prior popular series.

Truth: An absolute defense against charges of libel; to prove that a statement is true, and therefore not defamatory, the evidence presented in court must be both direct and explicit, and the statement must be substantial truth - it doesn't have to be entirely true, but the part that "stings" must be true.

Two-step flow model: A model, developed by Paul Lazarsfeld and his colleagues, that states that media influence often works in two stages: (1) Media content (opinions and facts) is picked up by people who use the media frequently, and (2) these people, in turn, act as opinion leaders when they discuss the media content with others, who are therefore influenced by the media in a way that is one step removed from the actual content.

Typical characters: Those who appear regularly in the subgenre.

Ultra high frequency (UHF): A band of radio frequencies from 300 to 3,000 MHz; UHF signals are used extensively in television broadcasting, typically carrying television signals on channels 14 through 83.

Uniform Resource Locator (URL): The address or location of a website or other Internet service.

Upscale readers: Upper- middle- or upper-class people with substantial disposable income (money beyond the amount needed for basis expenses).

Usage fees: A strategy to gain revenue in which the producer, distributor, or exhibitor charges for a mass media product based on the number of times it is employed.

User generated content: Creative products, such as videos and music, generated by the people who visit websites such as MySpace, Heavy, and Facebook.

Users: The audience of newspaper websites.

Uses and gratifications research: Research that studies how people use media products to meet their needs and interests; it asks (and answers) questions about why individuals use the mass media

V-Chip: A small computer device that allows parents to block programs automatically from a television set if the programs are transmitted with a code that will activate the chip; the codes are content ratings that reflect concerns about violence, sex, and "strong" language (the V in the V-Chip stands for violence).

Validity: The extent to which the study accurately describes circumstances as they exist in the real world.

Value-added offer: A special service promised by a media firm to its most desired advertisers as an inducement to get their business.

Values: Those things that reflect our presuppositions about social life and human nature.

Vaudeville shows: A touring show comprised of several types of acts that were popular in the United States from the late nineteenth century through the 1920s.

Veil of ignorance: John Rawls' theory that holds that in any given situation, justice emerges only when all parties are treated without social differentiation; from this perspective, fairness is the fundamental idea in the concept of justice.

Venture capitalists: Individuals or companies that invest in startup or nonpublic firms in the hope that the firms' value will increase over time.

Vertical integration: An organization's control over a media product from production through distribution to exhibition.

Very high frequency (VHF): A band of radio frequencies falling between 30 and 300 MHz; VHF signals are widely employed for television and radio transmissions. In the United States and Canada, television stations that broadcast on channels 2 through 13 use VHF frequencies, as do FM radio stations. Many amateur radio operators also transmit on frequencies within the VHF band.

Videocassette recorder (VCR): An electronic device for recording and playing back video images and sound on a videocassette tape.

Video games: Entertainment products powered by computer chips and displayed on monitors that require users to experience and interact with challenges in a series of tasks.

Video Privacy Protection Act (VPPA) of 1988: A law that prevents disclosure of personally identifiable rental records of "prerecorded video cassette tapes or similar audio visual material."

Visibility: Putting the ad in a place where it is most likely to be seen.

Web filters: Computer programs that block objectionable sites from coming into a computer; sites are blocked either because they have been specifically censored or because a search engine used by the filter program has detected words that indicate that there is prose (and possibly pictures) on the site that the filter's creators want excluded.

Web hosting: Providing space on a computer for the actual website with the domain name.

Weeklies: Newspapers that are published once a week.

Wide release: Opening a film in more than two thousand theatres simultaneously, usually accompanied by a large publicity campaign to incite people to see the film; the most common release pattern in the United States.

Windows: The series of exhibition points for audiovisual products through which revenues are generated.

Wire service: An organization that, for a fee, supplies newspapers with a continual stream of hard news and feature stories about international, national, and even state topics via high-speed telephone and/or cable connections.

Yellow journalism: A term used to refer to the newspaper products of the 1890s, which were characterized by irresponsible, unethical, and sensational news gathering and exhibition

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