Audience Evolution

Audience Evolution

by PhilipNapoli (Author)

Synopsis

Today's consumers have unprecedented choice in terms of the technologies and platforms that access, produce, and distribute media content. The development and overlap of television, the internet, and other media technologies is fragmenting and empowering media audiences more than ever. Building on his award-winning book, Audience Economics, Philip M. Napoli maps the landscape of our current media environment and describes its challenge to traditional conceptions of the audience. He examines the redefinition of the industry-audience relationship by technologies that have moved the audience marketplace beyond traditional metrics. Media providers, advertisers, and audience measurement firms now deploy more sophisticated tools to gather and analyze audience information, focusing on factors rarely considered before, such as appreciation, recall, engagement, and behavior. Napoli explores the interplay between political and economic interests in the audience marketplace and their effect on audience evolution. He recounts the battles waged between stakeholders over the assessment of media audiences and their efforts to restrict the functionality of new technologies. As Napoli makes clear, the very meaning of the media audience continues to evolve in response to changing technological, economic, and political conditions.

$30.30

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More Information

Format: Paperback
Pages: 248
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Published: 30 Nov 2010

ISBN 10: 0231150350
ISBN 13: 9780231150354
Book Overview: Philip M. Napoli introduces the reader to the technologies that are changing the audience marketplace, new media services that have and are being built with those technologies, and the possibilities for measuring aspects of audience members' responses to media products and the advertisements they make possible. He describes new tools for audience measurement, along with the controversies over their use, and the battles among industry interests over which new audience measurement tools should be accepted. I think the time is right for just this type of analysis. A well-researched text, and the scholarship is first rate and insightful. -- Steve Wildman, James H. Quello Professor of Telecommunication Studies, Michigan State University

Media Reviews
Philip M. Napoli offers a rich and original synthesis of the many factors that help construct the audience, as well as the social, economic, and legal consequences of that process, and he has a real talent for creating a cohesive, interesting, and important story. Expansive and important, Audience Evolution is grounded in the relevant bodies of theory and ultimately enlightening. Anyone with a serious interest in the operation of the media industries or popular culture should read this book. -- James G. Webster, Northwestern University, author of Ratings Analysis: The Theory and Practice of Audience Research ...very concise, tightly argued and very timely volume... Communications and Strategies ...its clarity, simplicty, and systematic narrative make it appealing and useful... -- Giacomo Poderi Teachers College Record ...provides new entrees into understanding how socially constructed definitions of audiences are changing. -- Grace Jackson-Brown Journalism and Mass Communication Education The book provides an excellent overview of how new media technologies have changed the patterns of audience behavior.Journal of Communication Journal of Communication a good combination of a critical approach to audience measurement as well as a thorough review of the development of audience information systems. -- Louisa Ha AEJMC This is an important book-one of the first scholarly analyses of both commercial and academic audience research trends amidst change -- Chris Sterling Communication Booknotes Quarterly No college-level media or sociology collection should be without this. Midwest Book Review
Author Bio
Philip M. Napoli is a professor in the Graduate School of Business at Fordham University and director of the Donald McGannon Communication Research Center. He is the author of Audience Economics: Media Institutions and the Audience Marketplace, which won the Robert Picard Award for Best Book in Media Management and Economics, and Foundations of Communication Policy: Principles and Process in the Regulation of Electronic Media.