Three Articles and key points

A new year, a new you: even if you're an 80-year-old media magnate, it appears the transformative allure of 1 January can prove irresistible.
Rupert Murdoch, the chairman and CEO of News Corporation – who may have more reason than usual to want to make a break with 2011 – has apparently joined Twitter.
Users of the microblogging site have reacted with a mixture of incredulity and unabashed horror to a declaration by its executive chairman Jack Dorsey that Murdoch had set up a verified account and would be gracing the site with his unique observations. "With his own voice, in his own way, @RupertMurdoch is now on Twitter," wrote Dorsey.
Within hours, the media tycoon had amassed more than 14,000 followers and was giving them his views on everything from the US presidential election to his family holiday in the Caribbean.
A cursory glance at his output reveals that he considers Steve Jobs's biography to be "interesting but unfair", that thoughts are best kept private in St Barths ("like London!"), and that George Clooney deserves an Oscar for his performance in The Descendants (whose distributor is News Corp-owned Fox Searchlight Pictures).
Murdoch's latest tweet, posted late on New Year's Eve and betraying a certain technological unease with punctuation, reads: "Huge NY eve do. Oligarchs and silicon valley biggies(like Jack) . May. Learn something".
The arrival on Twitter of one of society's most divisive figures was welcomed by some, but pilloried by many others. Piers Morgan, former editor of the News of the World, wrote: https://twitter.com/#!/piersmorgan/status/153266312993443840
But the former deputy prime minister John Prescott captured the reaction of many when he made indirect reference to the phone-hacking scandal which saw Murdoch come under huge pressure in 2011. "Welcome to Twitter … @rupertmurdoch," he wrote. "I've left you a Happy New Year message on my voicemail!"
Another tweet suggested Murdoch follow Tom Watson, the Labour MP whose dogged pursuit of the scandal has won him many fans.
Despite a blue and white tick appearing next to the Murdoch account – the sign Twitter uses to show that an account has been "verified" as belonging to the right person – many remained dubious as to its authenticity.
Michael Wolff, a contributing editor of Vanity Fair and biographer of Murdoch, declared the account to be "fake, fake". Another user, @factor50, commented: "It can't be him, because all he should be tweeting is SORRY in every single breath." But Dorsey's tweet seems to prove the doubters wrong.

"There won't be too many willing sellers next year, I wouldn't think," said one city banker, summing up the somewhat downbeat view of the mergers and acquisitions market next year. "With the market how it is why would you sell unless you are being forced?"

The failure of Shameless maker All3Media and Dutch firm Eyeworks, maker of Test the Nation and The Biggest Loser, to find buyers in 2011 is indicative of how tough the market is shaping up to be next year.

Big plays by private equity have all but evaporated due to the difficulty of securing funding – as was seen by the dramatic thinning of ranks in the bidding for EMI, which eventually went against the betting to Universal and Sony – with trade buyers taking pole position in any dealmaking in 2012.

All eyes are on Big Brother maker Endemol, which if it can finally agree the protracted restructuring of its €2.8bn debt, which is widely expected to be put up for sale next year. Time Warner and Mediaset, an existing investor, are already circling with unsolicited bids; if Endemol goes into play expect RTL, owner of The X Factor co-producer FremantleMedia, and ITV to run the numbers on a bid.

ITV will be debt free by the end of the year and has access to £1bn, or more, with chief executive Adam Crozier finally likely to make a major acquisition to boost its production arm.

Facebook's highly-anticipated IPO, which could well dwarf Google's effort in 2004, will send the tech stock buzz back into overdrive after the failure of Netflix, Groupon and Zynga to set investors alight.

Netflix's launch in the UK & Ireland next year will be one of the major strategic business moves of the year (well, that we know about) sparking an intense battle with, among others, BSkyB and Amazon's LoveFilm.

However the biggest potential development of the year is whether Rupert Murdoch will be forced by his board into looking to sell off some, or all, of his newspaper titles.

A forced sale attracts bargain-hunting predators and top of the list is Richard Desmond, owner of Express Newspapers and Channel 5, who has form here, having offered £1bn for the Sun in 2009.

If a sale doesn't happen then all eyes will be on whether Murdoch will green light the launch of the Sun on Sunday to fill the gap left by the News of the World.

"We hope News International will launch a replacement in time for the European football," said Group M in a note on national newspapers recently.

Interestingly Group M notes that Murdoch will have to run a very tight business model as following the shrinking of the market after the closure of his Sunday tabloid there will be "pressure on any NoW replacement to wash its face on copy sales, as the ad revenue pot is unlikely to grow to welcome it".

Advertising

The London Olympics will save the UK advertising industry next year.

Sir Martin Sorrell's Group M reckons that the 3% growth it has factored in for 2012 would be lucky to be flat, at best, if not for the Olympics.

Yet some major media owners seem unconvinced. ITV chief executive Adam Crozier cautioned recently that while the broadcaster will get a "positive reaction" – an uplift in TV ad revenue – from the event it will "not be as much as some people think".

By this he means that comparisons with the uplift in ad revenue seen in other host countries, where the Olympics airs on commercial TV, are misguided because in the UK it airs on the BBC.

Daily Mail & General Trust top brass Martin Morgan and Stephen Daintith, the chief executive and finance director respectively, have also been downbeat on expectations – despite the fact that freesheet Metro is expected to be one of the biggest beneficiaries of millions of visitors to the capital.

Morgan said that investors should not have "expectations of a significant lift'; Daintith added that the event is "not the answer" and that the market "shouldn't be thinking about huge numbers from the Olympics for our titles". DMGT reckons it will see an uplift of about £5m.

The big winner will be the outdoor advertising market - Group M reckons it will be up 6%, the most of any media bar digital advertising - with the £746m ad take pencilled the highest since 2008.

Radio is also expected to do well, with advertisers warming to the moves by players such as Global Radio to have fewer station brands and more national networks.

"Radio has managed to completely replace the major revenue loss from the government scrapping COI advertising," said Adam Smith, Futures director at Group M.

The only media that won't be benefiting from one of Sir Martin Sorrell's fabled "maxi quadrennial" years – when events such as the Olympics, US elections and Euro occur – is, unfortunately the press market.

National newspaper advertising is forecast to be down 3.1% and the regional market down 7.8%.

"Head of the column [of issues] is retail," said Smith. "It is the major category in print advertising and it is being massively affected by the squeeze on household income."

A million iPads and Kindles may have been unwrapped on Sunday – according to tentative analyst estimates – an influx of portable technology that is expected to hasten a decline in the already faltering sales of printed newspapers, adding pressure on traditional business models that have traditionally supported so many titles around the country.
Publishers, preparing for the handheld arrivals, took the chance to break with a tradition that dates back to 1912, when publishers agreed not to produce Christmas Day papers to give paperboys, among others, a day off. For the first time in its 190-year history the Sunday Times published a digital-only edition on 25 December – with the normally paid for product given away in the hope of luring sought after digital subscribers.
Boxing Day publication, for dailies like the Guardian, has also become a necessity – to ensure digital editions for new Kindle and iPad owners to read. The result is that what was a traditionally quiet period for news has become a critical moment to showcase new work, at a time when an industry already riven by the phone-hacking scandal and under judicial examination, is facing what can be described as an existential crisis.
Fifty years ago two national dailies – the Daily Mirror and the Daily Express – sold more than 4m copies each; today the bestselling Sun sells 2.6m. In the last year alone, printed sales declined by 10% for daily broadsheets and by 5% for daily tabloids – and when the News of the World stopped printing last July 600,000 copy sales simply disappeared.
The knock-on impact of the decline has been a push for digital readers that have seen newspapers like the Daily Mail win 5m unique visitors a day – compared with its printed sale of 2m – but struggle to generate revenues to match. The Mail generated £16m from its website last year, out of £608m overall.
Some specialist titles, such as the Financial Times, are managing the transition well – it has 260,000 digital subscribers – up 40% this year – compared with 337,000 buyers of the printed product, where sales are down by 12%. Digital subscribers generate £180 a year and the paper, priced at £2.50 on the newsstand on a weekday, is profitable.
John Ridding, the managing director, says that 30% of the FT's revenues come from digital sales and that "within two or three years" digital readers and revenues will account for more than those from the printed business. During a typical week the number of people signing on digitally is "five to 10 times" what it was a year earlier, as the newspaper looks to a future beyond print.
Others, though, are under pressure. Local newspapers have been hit particularly hard, with 31 titles closing in the last year. Most of those shutting are freesheets – with titles distibuted in Yeovil, Scarborough and Harlow lost. Historic paid for titles have seen their frequency cut: the Liverpool Daily Post is to go weekly in print in the new year, after sales dropped as low as 6,500. Its website, however, will update in real time. Daily titles in Birmingham and Bath have also gone the same way in recent years – while pre-tax profits at Johnston Press, the owner of the Scotsman and the Yorkshire Post, fell from £131.5m five years ago to £16m last year.
Roger Parry, chair of Johnston Press since 2009, believes the party has been over for several years, since Craigslist and Google began to take classified advertising away from local press.
"I think the future is for local multimedia companies which focus on signing up 50% plus of the households in their area on some form of subscription – that's what happens in Scandinavia," he says.
 For journalists there will have to be a shift from acting as "print writers to multimedia curators. There will be more content created by local people. The National Union of Journalists will hate this but it is fact of life."
With the culture secretary, Jeremy Hunt, wanting to license local television stations in 20 cities, that gives local media a new way to reach audiences, although some – such as Witney TV in Oxfordshire – have already made a start with a daily offering of local video news. David Cameron, the local MP, regularly appears, but the site is staffed by volunteers, and its content limited – underlining how tough the digital economics are.
There are commercial pressures in national media too. Although the tabloid media have faced criticism at the Leveson inquiry, not least from the likes of Hugh Grant or Steve Coogan, popular titles remain in fair commercial health. Trinity Mirror's stable of nationals – the Daily and Sunday Mirror, the People, and the Record titles in Scotland – will earn about £70m this year, although they made £86m the year before. The profit margin at the Daily Mail hovers at around 10%.
The challenge for the popular press is retaining printed sales – but the financial pressure is acute elsewhere. Three of the traditional broadsheets – the Independent, the Times and the Guardian – all lose money in a market where five titles compete for 1.3 million print buyers. Their readers are more likely to make the digital transition too, leaving newspapers no option but to embrace new forms of reporting – such as the live blog – and seed content at digital hubs, such as Facebook.
The Guardian may generate £40m in digital revenues from its largely free offerings, but some of that comes from its dating sites. The Times titles have gone for a low price subscription model, which has attracted 111,000 takers, but which generates £11m a year against an editorial budget estimated at £100m.
Some, like Paul Zwillenberg, from Boston Consulting Group, says serious newspapers "will have to cut their cloth because there will be a smaller pool of revenue and profit". But he acknowledges that by pursuing different business models, they may increase their chances of success. The result, though, is that was once an industry of one business model: a printed product sold on the newstand is fracturing into very different types of mainly digital content companies.

Holiday Task

Task 1

Textual Analysis  

In the video ‘look back at me’ by Trina, her physique is in fact her ‘talent’. Her lyrics often reinforce the fetishisation upon her in many shots of the video; this interestingly conforms to Phillip Sturgess technical language theory, he argued that technical and language based approaches are taken into consideration and are thus molded by producers in order to make a seamless sync of verbal language and technical viewing. In the beginning of the video Trina’s first lyric is “I got an a** so big like the sun” as she says this a close up shot is used to showcase her behind, not only is she pleasuring the male gaze’s as Laura Mulvery argued she is describing her assets in a degradable way, which according to Trina make her successful. "The female body is rarely a site of empowerment except when it is being objectified to define female strength through heterosexist sexiness”. Nietchez’s perspective contradicts Sturgess argument because audiences are able to create their own perception of a text, Trina believes she is successful due to her physique, many audiences presumably females will be disgusted by her lyrics and videos, they think in view of Stuart Hall, he argues that “Meaning depends on individual interpretation’. The male gaze interpret Trina’s videos as ‘successful’ because their needs are being appeased and her body is constructed in a aesthetically appealing way, whereas female secondary audiences are entitled to their alternative perceptions as the concluding interpretation ‘depends on the individual’.

Another artist worth mentioning who one could argue conforms to the self-objectification theory is Khia; very similar to Trina as they are both black females who invite female gaze through sexual liberal lyrics and who please and control male gaze through their literal self objectification and narrative pleasures. In her print album cover (Nasti Muzik 2005) her legs are open, she is practically naked and the only thing covering her private area’s is a giant dildo which is suppose to represent a microphone facing downwards going through her body, the image itself is an explicit depiction of sex. On the broadcast platform she also operates very explicitly very similar to Trina, her single “My Neck My Back” (2002) Khia begins saying “All my ladies pop your p*ssies like this”, the chorus then follows “Lick it right, lick it good suck this p**sy just like you should”, Chatman argues that these narrative discourses are purposely constructed, to appease the ‘implied audience’, Chatman is suggesting that Khia uses such language because audiences of the hip hop genre expect to hear this as they have become accustom to it, this means her ‘success’ has been predetermined and because she willingly has to conform to these conventions to appease the existing audiences familiar with these present values. The video “My Neck My Back” is very similar to Trina’s video “Look Back at Me” because the producers have fetishized the female body, In Khia’s video a low angle shot is used to exaggerate the size of a female’s bottom while she shakes it for the audience. If we were to follow Chatmans view of thinking female rappers will never challenge these conventions because the audiences they must appease are ‘implied’.

Task 2

Additional book reading

Zyla, D. (2010)

The color of style a fashion expert helps you find colors that attract love, enhance your power, restore your energy, make a lasting impression, and show the world who you really are. (page 3)
Dutton.

He argues that many women cheat and take the easy way out, it’s relevant as it could suggest that female hip hop artist also take the easy way out.

Paige, A. (2009)

Style on a shoestring: develop your cents of style and look like a million without spending a fortune. (page 45)
McGraw-Hill Contemporary Learning Centre.

He argues that females extract favors from males, this is relevant as it could suggest that female artist extract favors such as profit from male and female gaze’s.

Graddol, D. (1994)

Media texts, authors and readers: a reader (page 28)
Multilingual Matters in association with The Open University.

These theorists are of relevance to my study because they describe the linguistic technical devices taken into consideration when a text is being constructed.

Lucas, L. (2007)
Unpacking globalization: markets, gender, and work (page 86).

Lexington Books.
The writer describes that economic factors have –played a part in the misrepresentation of women, laws confining them to grieve would have had an effect on text being created in that time, female producers possibly would have wanted to represent themselves juxtaposing the external influences of society.

T, Denean. (2007)

Pimps up, ho's down: hip hop's hold on young Black women (page 17)
New York University Press.

Denean discusses the movement of the new glamorized post feminist. He describes how this is evident in historic hip hop of 20 years ago and how female artist are using sex as a weapon.

D, Gwendolyn. (2007)

Home girls make some noise: hip-hop feminism anthology (page 9)

Parker pub.

The writer suggests that these sexually liberal female artist are aware of the antics and use their behavior to extract profits.

Task 3

Historical text analysis and research

Based upon the dramatic changes in history, one could argue that a female rapper has to promote different ideologies to represent their success. In the 1980’s rappers such as Queen Latifah seeked to be empowered liberally through their lyrics, in the video ‘Ladies First’ in 1989 she raps about the hidden power women possess ‘some think that we cant flow, stereotypes that go to go, I’m gon’ flip the scene with a little touch (of what) ladies first”. Although the video was filmed using certain angles to gracefully manipulate the power given to Queen Latifah, the language however is what she uses to represent her success; David Graddol suggested there are two models implemented in to text to convey linguistic meaning the ‘Schemtaic model’ argues that Producers encode messages and directly transmit them to audiences. This is also a form of the hypodermic model It’s the idea that Queen Latifah the producer is carrying messages which she believes will represent her as successful and because she has decided to construct this linguistic representation for her audiences they can ‘recover’ the ‘meaning’. By Queen Latifah saying she is going to ‘flip the screen’, she could mean she is going to change the common representation of women in society. Writer Maria DiCenzo describes women as a ‘struggling minority’; she argues that history has contributed the misrepresentation of women, which may be the reason, why Queen Latifah wishes to ‘flip the script’. The twentieth century suffrage of women devalued the worth of the common women through a variety of misogynistic laws confining them to a life of grieve, one of particular importance which also covers economic values present today is that women were required to work for minimum wage until the supreme court declared this as unconstitutionally in 1923. ‘Women would never achieve economic independence as long as laws treated them like children in need of protection’; the feminist movement took women to a pinnacle of independence and today they are still fighting for equal rights as Julie Hayward a victorious feminist who set the land mark for the equal pay right still fights for the barrier to be broken. We now have a clear idea of what Queen Latifah meant when she was trying to ‘flip the script’, because of the obstacles society has created for women it is difficult for them to be successful which is possibly why Trina juxtaposes the movement of feminism through her sexually liberal representation.

In the Video ‘Ladies first’ by Queen Latifah, she conforms to Chomsky and Hermans manipulation theory as she has manipulated the population of the mise en scene in order to make her the only strong women in the scene. A particular scene of relevance is where she is dressed in all black controlling the ‘military movement’ of women, the close up shots were used to emphasize where the movements would take place next, miniature statues of women were placed all over the table which had a map of the world. The fist statues, which possibly represented male dominance and misogyny were being pushed of the table my Queen Latifah, the female statues were places all over the world to signify the possibly dominance women will have over society. Through Queen Latifah’s lyrics her audiences can decode what makes her ‘successful’, its now evident that social, political and economical factors have had a part in the sexualization of female rap.

Task 4

Additional web research

What's so special about the British rap pack?

"Above anything, it's dangerous for them," he says. "I've never lived in that environment myself, so I don't know the ins and outs, but as a manager, I think it's definitely important for them to find somewhere a bit out of that. And it's good for them to reap the rewards of their hard work. Rap's aspirational. It's always been about bettering yourself."

http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2007/nov/01/popandrock.urban?INTCMP=SRCH.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2011/nov/18/british-rap-pack-dizzee-tinie-tinchy?INTCMP=SRCH.

Nicki Minaj reopens door for women in hip-hop

“There had always been at least one female rap act to contrast hip-hop's defining male edge, from Queen Latifah to Lil' Kim to Missy Elliott to Lauryn Hill. But in the past few years, female rappers were mere blips on the scene, and the occasional hit only underscored how weak the field had become”.

http://articles.sfgate.com/2010-08-20/entertainment/22227251_1_hip-hop-female-rappers-nicki-minaj.

Hip-Hop's Betrayal of Black Women

“It is to make an understanding of the misogynistic objectification of black women in hip-hop so elusive that we can't grasp it long enough to wring the neck of its power over us”.

http://www.saidit.org/archives/jan06/article4.html.

Hip-hop portrayal of women protested

"We're telling people [black women] are bitches and hos and sluts and not worthy of respect," she said. "And that's exactly how society is treating us."

http://articles.cnn.com/2005-03-03/entertainment/hip.hop_1_hip-hop-black-women-spelman-college?_s=PM:SHOWBIZ.

The return of soft-porn marketing?

“Hip-hop - with sleeves to accompany the talk of "hos and bitches" - was the last genre to more or less succumb to the censorship of the political correctness era, but the heyday of what could be called sexist album covers was the 1970s and early 1980s, particularly in heavy rock”.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/musicblog/2008/may/22/thereturnofsoftpornmarketi?INTCMP=SRCH.

Nicki Minaj: 'I am doing everything the boys can – plus more…'

She does concede, though, that female MCs have been, "a little lost for a few years. We just had to get back our footing, get back our confidence. Female rappers tend to have a lower self-esteem and they don't believe in themselves as much as they should."

http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2010/nov/28/nicki-minaj-interview-hermione-hoby?INTCMP=SRCH.

Misogyny in Hip-Hop: "Take it Personal"

“Have we in hip-hop been negligent in our attitudes towards females? Have we condoned misogyny by not speaking out when it takes place? Do we create an environment which encourages such otherwise positive people to commit negative acts against women simply for being women?”

http://www.suite101.com/article.cfm/hip_hop_music/1891.

Misogyny and women of color

For women of color, misogyny and (mis)representation is two-fold, playing on stereotypes of both gender and race. Scholar Jelani Cobb blames sexist music videos for taking “a view of women of color that’s not radically different from the views of 19th-century white slaveholders.”

http://www.pbs.org/independentlens/hiphop/gender.htm

Task 6

Introduction first and second paragraphs

“Hip-hop and pornography are going into business together” [1] is this not evident throughout modern hip-hop? Females are degraded through sexual expressive dances, and vulgar explicit lyrics. It’s argued that as audiences we have become desensitized to the sexism, misogyny, and sexual objectification of hip-hop and that this has blinded us to how demeaning and harmful it really is [2]. Hip-hop artists such as Trina conform to stereotypical narrative found thought hip-hop videos, female hip-hop artist have certain values and ideologies that differ from a male hip hop artist, this is because females must entertain their audiences. Laura Mulvery argued that women are objectified to appeal to the male gaze; her argument plays a powerful part within contemporary female hip hop because males vouyrestic needs must be appeased in order for female rappers to be ‘successful’. “A successful female artist must not only be talented, but also able to titillate the gaze of an assumed male viewers” [3] this quote taken from the guardian reinforces the structuralized narrative found throughout female hip-hop because a form of a female rappers success is her physique (her talents).

In the video ‘look back at me’ by Trina, her physique is in fact her ‘talent’. Her lyrics often reinforce the fetishisation upon her in many shots of the video; this interestingly conforms to Phillip Sturgess technical language theory, he argued that technical and language based approaches are taken into consideration and are thus molded by producers in order to make a seamless sync of verbal language and technical viewing [4]. In the beginning of the video Trina’s first lyric is “I got an a** so big like the sun” as she says this a close up shot is used to showcase her behind, not only is she pleasuring the male gaze’s as Laura Mulvery argued she is describing her assets in a degradable way, which according to Trina make her successful. "The female body is rarely a site of empowerment except when it is being objectified to define female strength through heterosexist sexiness” [5]. Nietchez’s perspective contradicts Sturgess argument because audiences are able to create their own perception of a text, Trina believes she is successful due to her physique, many audiences presumably females will be disgusted by her lyrics and videos, they think in view of Stuart Hall, he argues that “Meaning depends on individual interpretation’ [6]. The male gaze interpret Trina’s videos as ‘successful’ because their needs are being appeased and her body is constructed in a aesthetically appealing way, whereas female secondary audiences are entitled to their alternative perceptions as the concluding interpretation ‘depends on the individual’ [6].