Types of ownership in the Media

Public

Public ownership refers to when the broadcaster works towards the public's needs. These are broadcasters such as BBC. Due to the fact that they work for the public a fee has to be paid for the service. This is paid as part of your t.v license which is £145.50 a year. However this makes sure that there programmes are specific to what the public want and there is no adverts. However a disadvantage of public is that it doesn't cover a wide audience just the majority. Therefore, if you want to watch something specific to your needs you may need to look elsewhere for example on a private broadcaster.



Private



A private ownership refers to when a channel is owned by a specific company. There is no license fee for these broadcasters although there is advertisements between programs. These advertisements is how the private broadcasters produce there revenue. They get there income based on how many viewers there channel or programme gets. However, if a programme doesn't get enough viewers it will be pulled and not shown on the channel any more  However an advantage of private ownership is that you don't have to pay a license fee on the channels.

Geographical Scope

Geographical scope is determined by the amount of locations the media company or service is active in. There are normally three types, which are national, regional and local.

National 

A national media company means one which is active in various amounts of countries worldwide. They normally have a broad range of diffrent products and services. Usually, constantly expanding there business into other countries and regions aroun the world. An example would be Rupert Murdochs company News Corp. They own a massive empire of diffrent media based companies and services around the world. The Image below shows just how much his media empire stretches.

   

Regional

This is when the ownership spreads across a specific region in the country. For instance the midlands or the North-East. This is diffrent from local as it dosen't focus on one specific city or area. An example of this would be the nwpaper 'The Northen Echo'. This is a regional newspaper as it not only covers teesed but most surrounding areas suchg as north yorkshire and durham.

Local

Local means that the company is based in a small area within a region. For instance if a newspaper was based only in watford this would be accounted as a loacal media company. An example of this would be the radio statio TFM based in Teeside. This only broadcasts throughout the Teeside area. This is counted as local is it dosne't cover the whole of the north east. It just covers a small area of the region. In this case Teeside. However with the gaining popularity in internet many local services are becoming national.