Micro media is normal

Reposted from Linked In January 28, 2025

January is a thinking month, a glorious time of light email and more capacity for my preferred parts of the job. I’ve spent much of the month sorting findings from 40, hour-long, in-depth interviews with an indicative mix of Australians 18+ completed at the end of 2024. It will take a while for that work to make its way to print, but the biggest general findings have redrawn my perceptions of how people live with media now.

The interviews explored how people use media (media defined as anything you read, write, listen to, or play and yes, social and legacy, digital and not), and wow.

1) Use is amazingly deliberate. What is consumed varies a lot, but there are patterns to why and how media are used.

2) Behavior patterns span demographic groups and there are better categories for sorting media consumption (although <~25 year-olds are just a whole different thing, but that young adult use changes markedly around 25).

3) Social media use is mostly private (direct sharing of messages/posts/videos with friends and family) or seeing stuff about your personal media stream – the ~4 things that are interesting to you (e.g. photography, Japan, desserts, Arsenal – I’m serious, they are consistently this wonderfully idiosyncratic).

Media use is driven by personal interest, which is the opposite of what was possible under mass media logics. Despite profound industry change in the last 20 years, very little has deeply reckoned with the collapse of mass media. All of the things that seemed ‘normal’ in the 20th century weren’t; they were just practices that developed that were suited to the conditions and technologies of the time. We need to sort out micro media logics (especially for the video sector which has been most reliant on mass media logics).

Mass-reach media has become an absolute aberration, and the more I dug into trying to quantify this, the clearer it became that very little ‘mid’ media even remains. Most everything is micro media now (consumed by ~<1% of a population*) and we really don’t have many tools that help understand this whether in relation to culture/society or business/industry.

What do I mean by mid and micro media? Watch this space, but it is about scale of reach in a culture, typically nationally. My expertise about US television is deepest – and in that context: mass reach meant at least 30% of households were watching and another 60-70% ‘knew’ about it (because of other coverage across television, newspapers, tabloids, talk radio); mid media is consumed by 5-30% – we’ve called this ‘niche’, maybe half the population ‘knows’ about it; micro media is <5% consuming, but most is <1% now. Maybe 25% of the population are aware, but often high awareness (75%+) in subpopulations (teens; sport fans; news devotees; political junkies, fancy TV watchers) and thus zero awareness in many other subpopulations.

I’m still working on this across other media (e.g. scale was more locally defined for newspapers) but just came across this great work by music expert Mark Mulligan (Mainstream is the New Niche). It is worth the read but he makes the same argument showing that despite the sense many have of Taylor Swift’s vast appeal, only 1.3% of the US population went to an Era’s tour show and though she led global Spotify streams in 2023 with 26.1b, she accounted for just 1.4% of streams.

Media diets full of – though not exclusively – micro media is the new normal. If you do the math, most things regarded as ‘hits’ are ‘mid’ at best. And *. A lot of other media (non video) have had large micro sectors for a long time and likely offer good lessons on micro media logics. The new, and unlikely to abate prevalence of micro media requires a lot of rethinking.

We just won some research funding to do more audience/user studies (focused at the human level, though some nationally representative surveys), so this is where I’ll ‘be’ for the next few years. The work from the past few years will be in print in the next few days/months Media Industries in the Digital Age; After Mass Media: Storytelling for Microaudiences in the Twenty-first Century). I aspire to run a new blog series with the still-developing ideas that support the new audience work by mid-year.

Bonus finding: 4) It’s the recent collapse of linear television that is making it all seem so different (or much harder for those in media) right now. Television continued to operate more frequently as a mid or mass medium, and having at least one medium with scale helped us see more of what those with different interests were consuming (and television has really been mostly mid for the last 20 years). But linear television use among Australians has dropped profoundly (a government survey found it dropped below 50% in 2024 (46% use in past 7 days).

* ‘Global’ consumption is a fine business metric (when compared with other global data), but we do not ‘live’ globally. Part of why we get confused and think ‘hits’ = mass media is because the metrics have changed.

Modes of Industrial Practice

Reposted from Linked In (supporting launch of Critical Studies in Television article) March 17, 2025

If you want to get nerdy... a new academic journal article linked here develops in greater detail the idea used in After Mass Media: Storytelling for Microaudiences in the Twenty-First Century (avail April 15) that one way to make sense of the range of screen stories now common is by recognizing that we now have multiple, coexisting ‘modes of industrial practice.’

Throughout most of the 20th century, one mode dominated in most countries (an industrial-grade mode driven by commercial aims in the US in contrast to a public service one in the UK). These modes were our first experience with television, and we came to see them as ‘normal’ or how ‘television’ worked. But they weren’t normal. They resulted from the technological capabilities of broadcasting that well suited ad and government funding (because broadcast signals can’t exclude those who don’t pay).

I discuss three newer modes: international, spectacular, and character study that deviate from the industrial-grade mode that dominated 20th-century US television. The mode encompasses the mandate (commercial/non), economic features, and technological conditions to yield variation in prioritized textual features. All this is set in a context, typically national, that shapes what can be done based on cultural and regulatory features.

Timing of change varies by country; in the US, the dominant industrial-grade mode of practice – a way of operating that prioritized the efficiency of long-running series with 20+ episodes per seasons – faced alternatives by the early 2000s. Cable originals drew some support from subscribers to adjust the economic features and correspondingly prioritized different kinds of stories.

By the 2020s, an international mode of industrial practice that creates titles foremost for an international viewership is clearly identifiable. This is different than making titles for a domestic market and then selling them abroad. And given the growing role of multi-territory streamer commissions in overall output, we need to understand these titles as developing from a particular industrial context that sets the priorities for their storytelling features.

An inordinate amount of press attention focuses on titles that derive from a spectacular mode of industrial practice. These titles have budgets – for production and promotion – that are more like Hollywood movies than television. Expectations and metrics for these series are unlike other series and only multi-territory streamers commission them.

Finally we have a character study mode of industrial practice that also makes titles that were impossible in the past, at least for US industrial-grade norms. These titles tell ‘small’ stories about characters with many layers.

The thinking behind these modes came from the need for a solution to the difficulty of saying anything about ‘series’ by the 2020s – there was too much variation to make any claim. By linking story features to the conditions of production, we have a tool that is stronger than something like genre (which has a lot of internal variation) or making distinction by commissioning distribution technology. We came to see quickly that Netflix commissioned a lot of different kinds of series, so that history of distinguishing ‘broadcast’ and ‘cable’ series wouldn’t work. There may be other modes – these are just the ones that well captured the greatest variation in my mind.

Maybe these distinctions seem like naval gazing, but they are intended to better help us have conversations about ‘series’ when considerable variation in kinds of stories and budgets, distribution technologies, and metrics of success exists.

Why 'After Mass Media'?

Reposted from Linked In April 17, 2025

After Mass Media: Storytelling for Microaudiences in the Twenty-first Century explores how the changes in the business of television over the last 30 years tie to changes in the content made. The book expands on 40+ years of academic conversations about the role of scripted fictional storytelling in society and people’s lives. Those conversations are also relevant to those interested in the business of media, and the book is written to be widely accessible, but this is a book primarily about how and why stories matter rather than commerce.

The book says things that might make people angry. A whole chapter considers why it makes sense to describe limited series as ‘10-hour movies.’ It says that television made in the US has never really been very ‘American.’ And it suggests that viewers aren’t as concerned about watching stories about/set in their country as decades of scholarship and policymaking has assumed. It says these things to push conversations into some new directions. It doesn’t have all the answers, but it suggests some new paths toward them.

The key proposition of the book – per the title – is that the world of screen storytelling has changed. Even the ‘hits’ do not function as sites of shared mass consumption anymore, and yet that expectation persists in so much that is thought and written about the sector. The idea that nearly everything now reaches a ‘microaudience’ relative to the old norms and ingrained way of thinking does not diminish the cultural importance of stories, but it does require we do the work to understand anew how they matter.

The book argues that the range of commercially viable stories expanded over the last thirty years and owes to the emergence of multiple ‘modes of industrial practice’ in contrast to twentieth-century, US norms that were built around a singular ‘industrial-grade mode of practice.’ All the things we thought true of ‘television’ or the ‘television business’ until the 1990s were true of the industrial-grade mode, not of television.

These new modes of industrial practice tie to new business models, production norms, and distribution technologies that support different subsectors of industry than existed before (deeper dive into the concept of modes of industrial practice here). They enable series built on a ‘spectacular’ mode in titles such as House of the Dragon and The Rings of Power that is similar to Hollywood blockbuster film logics, encourage an ‘international’ mode that imagines a transnational viewership in the first instance (The Day of the Jackal, The Serpent, Sense8), and also a ‘character study’ mode that enables introspective series that extend the stories long limited to art film to longer narrative and living rooms around the globe (Atlanta, Better Things, Somebody Somewhere). The multiplicity of modes explains why it has become nearly impossible to make claims of ‘series’; because series are now a field with so much internal variation that consistent claims cannot be made.

The arguments about a multiplicity of modes and how and why titles expand is made with careful evidence and prepares the back end of the book that argues that we understand very little about why stories matter to people now. The work of talking with people about why they watch what they watch in a world of greater choice and control is my next act, but I lay groundwork in the last chapters of After Mass Media that dare to imagine ways that people connect with scripted stories different from twentieth-century frames that assumed answers would be found in demographics or nationality. We’ve already learned that a lot of viewing for many has little to do with what they watch but is valued for the time spent sharing that viewing: for example, Carry-On was a ‘good enough’ Christmas movie because it was good enough for everyone I wanted to watch with, but not a title I loved. In a world of easy access to thousands of titles, what explains what we love, what resonates? What other uses do these stories play in our lives?

These questions may seem miles away from the business of media, but I suspect the findings will bring us full circle. I’ve now spent nearly thirty years trying to understand how changes in the business/technology of media change the stories that can be made and how those changed stories affect the culture(s) that consume them. While we – academics, journalists, industry – are asking better questions than we did a decade or two ago and understand the rough terrain better, ingrained thinking from another era has prevented us from seeing the full possibility, and risks, now available. The answers are with media users – when we understand the reasons they watch and what they love and build organizations and strategy to deliver it – we’ll find the answer to business questions.