INDIA

As people need food, shelter and health care for their physical survival, they need communication for their social welfare. Moreover, for their human dignity people need factors that are intrinsic to genuine democracy; reason, responsibility, mutual respect, freedom of expression, and freedom of conscience, all of which are mediated by communication. A prerequisite of democracy, therefore, is the democratization of communication, which in turn requires the empowerment of individual. (Philip Lee, 1995). The media facilitate this process by providing an arena for public debate and by reconstituting private citizens as a public body in the form of public opinion. It is also necessary to make a public communication an integral part of democracy. People should have free access to the knowledge and information they require, they should be able to discuss matters of public interest with their equals in order to influence actions taken. Otherwise there can be no genuine participation.

Michael Traber (1994), holds that the endeavour for equality and justice for all is based on the democratization of communication. He has laid down six principles. They are:

• The principle of human dignity : Human beings have an intrinsic and unique value, which has to be recognized socially. From this stems not just the right to live, but the right to live a life worthy of human beings (which is the ultimate rationale of all human rights).
• The principle of freedom : Deprivation of freedom makes genuine communication impossible, and the first sign of repression in all societies is usually the curtailment of freedom of speech. The silencing of people as a form of punishment, or still worse, solitary confinement, are utterly subhuman. But freedom for what? Freedom to participate. Freedom to be part of a nation and of the human family. Freedom to shape a collective destiny.
• The principle of truth telling : Communication is about human relationships. All relationships presuppose mutual trust, and the basis of such trust is the assumption that we are telling the truth. Communication inevitably breaks down when we suspect the other of lying.
• The principle of justice : Human dignity, freedom and equality are values which, when translated into social relationships, produce justice, or living-in-justice with all other people. The mass media as we know them stand in almost total contradiction to this view. They portray the powerful in politics and business, and the stars of entertainment and sports. But the poor, the marginalized, the refugees, the old, those with disabilities, people of colour, children, and even today, women, are non-people to the media, or are typecast. Justice in communication is also an international issue. The present global information and communication systems reflect the world’s dominant political and economic structures, which maintain and reinforce the dependence of the poorer countries on the richer.
• The principle of peace : Violence and war mark the ultimate breakdown of communication, both interpersonal and public. The word is replaced by the gun or the knife. Most wars between nations have started with a series of lies - by governments and the media about the threat of the enemy. If war is the ultimate failure of public communication, peace is its ultimate glory. Peace means people in communication. Peaceful co-existence of peoples with different national, racial and cultural identities, and of different ideological persuasions can, in today’s world, only be achieved through communication aimed at conflict resolution. The mass media carry a heavy responsibility in this process.
• The principle of participation : Human dignity, freedom, justice and peace: how do we apply these principles to the mass media of today, and make them operational in the decisions leading to the construction of an ‘information superhighway’ of tomorrow? The answer presupposes a change in direction. Mass and interactive media cannot primarily be considered business enterprises, but are part of the cultural environment in which we live and move. Media, old and new, should contribute to the quality of life of everyone by celebrating all that is genuinely human.

But in reality mass media have moved away from positive expectations of civil society. By the end of 19th century and early 20th century the media instead of being a vehicle for advancing freedom and democracy started becoming more and more a means of making money and propaganda for the new and powerful classes. Globalization and economic liberalization have further contributed to deteriorating negative attitude of the media towards the society. Global competition, profit motive made the media forget about its social responsibility. Money ruled over morals. Media is no more interested in creating citizenship, providing public sphere for dialogue and interaction among the citizens. Instead it is busy transforming citizens into spectators by offering them entertainment to education, knowledge and information.

George Gerbner (2002), in his recent article observed: “Our children are born into homes in which the dominant story tellers are not those who have something to tell but a small group of global conglomerates that have something to sell. Channels multiply but communication technologies converge and media merge. With every merger, staffs shrink and creative opportunities diminish. Cross-media conglomeration reduces competition and denies entry to newcomers. Fewer sources fill more outlets more of the time with ever more standardized fare. Alternative perspectives vanish from the mainstream. Media coalesce into a seamless, pervasive, and increasingly homogenized cultural environment that has drifted out of democratic reach. Even fund-starved public television is fighting for its life.

Other distortions of the democratic process include:

• The promotion of practices that drug, hurt, poison, and kill thousands every day.
• Portrayals that dehumanize and stigmatize; cults of media violence that desensitize, terrorize, and brutalize.
• The growing siege mentality of our cities.
• The drift towards ecological suicide.
• The silent crumbling of our infrastructure.
• Widening resource gaps in the richest country that already has the most glaring inequalities in the industrial world.
• The costly neglect of vital institutions such as public education and the arts.

He also offers suggestions to circumvent the present situation. His suggestions are:

• Building a broad new coalition of organizations and individuals committed to broadening the freedom and diversity of communication.
• Opposition domination and working to abolish existing concentration of ownership and censorship, public or private. That includes extending the freedom of speech and access to media beyond those who own them.
• Seeking out and cooperating with cultural liberation forces of other countries, working for the integrity and independence of their own decision-making and against cultural domination and invasion.
• Supporting journalists, artists, writers, actors, directors, and other creative workers struggling for more freedom from marketing formulas imposed on them.
• Promoting critical media awareness as a fresh approach to a liberal education on every level.
• Placing cultural policy-making on the socio-political agenda to secure the right of a child to be born into a cultural environment that is reasonable, free, fair, diverse, and non-damaging.

The Indian situation is not very different from what Gerbner has described. Both public and private media have failed the nation in creating well-informed and enlightened citizen. Except for the pre-independence Nationalist Press, the performance of privately owned print media, cinema and public broadcasting have not raised to the expectations of a growing democracy.

Sunil Khilnani (2000) warns that “every Indian, poor and rich, can be certain of one thing in the decades to come: individually and together, they will encounter a steady stream of politics-plenty of it, becoming ever more intricate.” And he also observes that “the coming of democracy necessitates a new kind of social intelligence, a different division of intellectual labour in the society. It makes obsolete the idea that there can be a single ‘brain’ of the society (the Ministry of Planning, an intellectual elite, a supreme Think Tank, or Operation Room, or even- as some believe-the market), whose function it is to devise and execute blueprints. Democracy is a recognition that people think for themselves, choose and act on the basis of their beliefs, as they happen to be. It also produces an actual diffusion of cognitive capital across the entire citizenry. In this sense democracy is liable to constant mistaking, to cognitive bruising and injury. But this makes it all the more vital for any democratic society to exercise a constant self-consciousness and vigilance about its own intentions, about its actions and their consequences.”

Emphasizing on the role and responsibility of non-elected agencies and institutions as instruments that can check the power of elected Assemblies, he lists judiciary and judicial agencies, President, Election Commission, Prasara Bharati and other agencies and urges them to “develop real capacities to use against elected public officials”. He has two means for scrutinizing and reprimanding elected rulers and public officials. One, criminal law and two, freedom of information. According to him freedom of information is the core of modern democratic politics and it foregrounds a basic contradiction between the notion of state prerogative and the rights of citizens. And stresses the need to have ‘quite liberal legislation concerning the right to know’.

He is very candid about the role of media. “A press free from systematic political interference is certainly essential to the citizenry’s acquisition of information. But there is an unhappy air about India’s much vaunted free press, in an age when most large business houses make it a point to gain a controlling foothold in the electronic or print media. Newspapers operate with a constricted sense of editorial freedom-editors beholden to their employers and often to politicians (particularly in the regional press) regularly dissuade younger journalists from pursuing awkward stories, preferring instead to print safe plants and handouts from politicians. Such freedom as there is tends to be confined to the editorial pages, which have now become the unique preserve of a select menagerie of wind-bagging superannuated bureaucrats, and pious academics.

“India has one of the most restrictive, archaic attitudes about access to information-this is certainly an aspect of the state that needs to be opened up to the criticism of democracy. The laws on the right to public information combine legacies from the colonial Raj with a more contemporary technocratic secrecy. Governments consider themselves to be doing their citizens a favour in giving them scraps of information, rather than fulfilling one of their core obligations. (Indeed, the failure to educate the vast mass of Indians might be considered the biggest and most systematic withholding of information.)

Khilnani’s observation on the vigilant role of media, free access and right to information and also his criticism on the role of elite media once again re-affirms the need and importance of free and responsible media in strengthening the ‘modern republic’. At the political level, the media play a central role in the working of democracies. Historically, a critical feature of movements toward democracy has been the creation of a ‘public sphere,’ meaning all the places and forums where issues of importance to a political community are discussed and debated, and where information is presented that is essential to citizen participation in community life.

The concept is important because a democratic society depends on an informed populace making political choices. In large and complex societies public participation in political processes is already limited largely to occasional expressions of opinion and protests and the periodic selection of representatives. For this weak participation to be minimally effective the public has to know what is going on and the options that they should weigh, debate, and act upon.

In the view of Jurgen Habermas and others, the public sphere works most effectively for democracy when it is institutionally independent of the state and society’s dominant economic forces. Although such autonomy is difficult to develop and maintain, the point of democratic communication policy-making is to strive toward this goal, although within this institutional shemata there are many different shapes a public sphere may assume.(Herman, McChesney,1998).

But, with the processes of media globalization since 1989, the public sphere is fast shrinking. The central feature of the media globalization is larger cross border flows of media outputs, growth of media trans-national conglomerates, centralization of media control, spread and intensification of commercialization. The ‘commercial model’ has its own serious limitations. It has its on own internal logic and being privately owned and heavily dependent on advertisers support, tends to erode the public sphere and to create a ‘culture of entertainment’ that is incompatible with democratic order. Media outputs are commodified and are designed to serve market needs, not citizenship needs. (Herman, McChesney,1998).

The symptoms of media globalization have started showing prominently on Indian media landscape. The country has gone too far in the process of globalization. It is too late to beat a retreat. Instead of attempting to stop the on going processes or turn back media centralization and commercialization, it will be more prudent to seriously concentrate on developing a set of new communication policies based on alternative media paradigm. There is an exhortative need to shift our focus from traditional mass media controlled by big conglomerates (newspapers, radio, TV and cinema) to alternative, more people friendly, cost effective, small, and interactive media like community radio, community newspapers, video and audio cassettes.

Internet is another medium, which can contribute to free and speedy dissemination of information. No doubt, the technology itself has serious limitations. The lack of infrastructure, access have brought criticism against having ‘digital democracy’ and creation of ‘nettizen.’ But recent events like post 9/11 developments have proved that Internet can be effective medium to express dissent and disseminate the other side of the event. In the Indian context, the reach may be small but its effect can be enormous.

Another neglected area of mass communication i.e. traditional or folk media can be revived and used as vehicles of effective social communication. Harikatha, puppet shows, street plays have evolved as people’s medium. As Pradip N.Thomas (1994) observes; “Traditional forms of communication are part of a larger process related to the making and re-making of communities. They play a vital role in the process of negotiation that is itself a core element in the self-understanding and growth of traditional communities. This is an on-going process, but one that has become increasingly complex in the light of the politics of change. It is this complexity that traditional forms of communication endeavor to decipher and to make intellible. Nothing more and nothing less. Against the juggernaut of modernity and its tendency to homogenize difference in the name of progress, traditional forms of communication are a gentle reminder that true cultural democracy is forged in the interplay of difference, however idiosyncratic that might seem.”

What India lacks is media literacy. Even in developed nations there are media literacy groups, which create awareness among the consumers of media on the functions and responsibilities of media. These non-partisan groups have succeeded in bringing moral pressure on media organizations through their constant vigil and constructive criticism.

Creating alternative media systems is not easy. It needs sustained effort, funding and interest. But, once it is achieved we could create a public sphere in real sense, where people-centric, decentralized and democratized media will become true voices of people, community and the nation. These kinds of experiments are taking place in other parts of the world and some of the Latin American attempts should serve as models to us. According to ‘Democratization of Communication’, a social movement process model offered by Robert A.White (1994), “contemporary theory of social movements not only explains the conditions under which democratization of communication is likely to occur and develop, but will provide a much more complete and internally consistent understanding of the dimensions of the democratization of communication.

There are a number of basic points of intersection between social movement theory and what is commonly understood by the democratization of communication:

• Social movements are a communication pattern, which emerges ‘outside’ and in opposition to the existing institutional, hierarchical (non-democratic) structure of communications in a society.
• Social movements, in order to strengthen identification and loyalty, tend to introduce and legitimate an alternative pattern of communication which, relative to the dominant pattern, insists that all members have a right to obtain and make communicative inputs when they wish, that members may participate in all phases of the collective communication decision-making process, that members may engage in ‘horizontal’ communication between individuals and groups without being vetted by authorities, that communication be dialogical in the sense that members have a right to reply and expect a direct reply.
• Social movements tend to renovate and democratize virtually all aspects of the communication process: the definition of what communication means; the definition of which social sectors and social actors may participate in the public communication process; the employment of new media technology and the democratization of existing technology; the redefinition of ‘media professionalism’ and the training of professionals; the development of new codes of ethics and new values guiding public policy, etc.

What is central to the democratization of communication, most social movements insist, is that members - ordinary ‘citizens’ - should participate in the administration, policy-making and government of public communication. ‘Epochal social movements’, those social movements that introduce a major socio-cultural shift in civilizations also tend to introduce a radically different normative theory of communication and a new culture of public communication.

http://www.indiatogether.org/2003/jan/med-hoot0301.htm

CHINA

As a monopolistic regime, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is committed to the Marxist-Leninist-Maoist emphasis on the central control of the press as a tool for public education, propaganda, and mass mobilization. The entire operation of China’s modern media is based upon the foundation of “mass line” governing theory, developed by China’s paramount head of state, Mao Zedong. Such a theory, upon which China’s entire political structure hinges, provides for government of the masses by leaders of the Communist Party, who are not elected by the people and therefore are not responsible to the people, but to the Party. When the theory is applied to journalism, the press becomes the means for top-down communication, a tool used by the Party to “educate” the masses and mobilize public will towards socialist progress. Thus the mass media are not allowed to report any aspect of the internal policy-making process, especially debates within the Party. Because they report only the implementation and impact of resulting policies, there is no concept of the people’s right to influence policies. In this way, the Chinese press has been described as the “mouth and tongue” of the Party. By the same token, the media also act as the Party’s eyes and ears. Externally, where the media fail to adequately provide the public with detailed, useful information, internally, within the Party bureaucracy, the media play a crucial role of intelligence gathering and communicating sensitive information to the central leadership. Therefore, instead of serving as an objective information source, the Chinese press functions as Party-policy announcer, ideological instructor, intelligence collector, and bureaucratic supervisor.

China’s modern media, which were entirely transplanted from the West, did not take off until the 1890s. Most of China’s first newspapers were run by foreigners, particularly missionaries and businessmen. Progressive young Chinese students who were introduced to Western journalism while studying abroad also imported the principles of objective reporting from the West. Upon returning home, these students introduced the methods of running Western-style newspapers to China. The May Fourth Movement in 1919, the first wave of intellectual liberation, witnessed the publishing of Chinese books on reporting, as well as the emergence of the first financially and politically independent newspapers in China. However, the burgeoning Chinese media were suffocated by Nationalist censorship in the 1930s. Soon after the Kuomintang (KMT) gained control of China in 1927, it promulgated a media policy aimed at enforcing strict censorship and intimidating the press into adhering to KMT doctrine. But despite brutal enforcement measures, the KMT had no organized system to rein in press freedom, and when times were good, it was fairly tolerant toward the media. The KMT gave less weight to ideology than the CCP eventually would and therefore allowed greater journalistic freedom.

Chinese journalism under CCP leadership has gone through four phases of development. The first period started with the founding of New China in 1949 and ended in 1966, when the Cultural Revolution began. During those years, private ownership of newspapers was abolished, and the media was gradually turned into a party organ. Central manipulation of the media intensified during the utopian Great Leap Forward, wherein excessive emphasis on class position and the denunciation of objectivity produced distortions of reality. Millions of Chinese peasants starved to death partly as a result of media exaggeration of crop production.

During the second phase (1966-78), journalism in China suffered even greater damage. In the years of the Cultural Revolution, almost all newspapers ceased publication except 43 party organs. All provincial CCP newspapers attempted to emulate the “correct” page layout of the People’s Daily and most copied, on a daily basis, the lead story, second story, number of columns used by each story, total number of articles, and even the size of the typeface. In secret and after the Cultural Revolution, the public characterized the news reporting during the Cultural Revolution as “jia (false), da (exaggerated), and kong (empty).”

The third phase began in December 1978, when the Third Plenary Session of the Eleventh Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party convened. Deng Xiaoping’s open-door policy brought about nation-wide reforms that nurtured an unprecedented media boom. The top agenda of media reform included the crusade for freedom of press, the call for representing the people, the construction of journalism laws, and the emergence of independent newspapers. Cuts in state subsidies and the rise of advertising and other forms of financing pointed the way toward greater economic independence, which in turn promoted editorial autonomy.

The Tiananmen uprising in 1989 and its fallout marked the last phase. During the demonstrations, editors and journalists exerted a newly-found independence in reporting on events around them and joined in the public outcry for democracy and against official corruption, carrying banners reading “Don’t believe us—we tell lies” while marching in demonstrations. The students’ movement was suppressed by army tanks, and the political freedom of journalists also suffered a crippling setback. The central leadership accused the press of engaging in bourgeois activities such as reflecting mass opinion, maintaining surveillance on government, providing information, and covering entertainment. The once-hopeful discourse on journalism legislation and press freedom was immediately abolished. With the closing of the political door on media expansion, the post-Tiananmen era witnessed a dramatic turn towards economic incentives, allowing media commercialization to flourish while simultaneously restricting its freedom in political coverage. These developments produced “the mix of Party logic and market logic that is the defining feature of the Chinese news media system today” (Zhao 2).

The media expanded more rapidly after Mao’s death than at any other time in Chinese history. As of October 1997, China had more than 27,000 newspapers and magazines. Chinese newspapers can be divided into several distinct categories. The first is the “jiguan bao” (organ papers). People’s Daily and other provincial party newspapers are in this category. The second is the trade/professional newspapers, such as Wenhui Ribao (Wenhui Daily), Renmin Tiedaobao (People’s Railroads), and Zhongguo Shangbao (Chinese Business). The third is metropolitan organs (Dushibao), such as Beijing Qingnianbao (Beijing Youth Daily), Huaxi Dushibao (Western China Urban Daily), and other evening newspapers. The fourth is business publications, such as Chengdu Shang bao (Chengdu Business Daily) and Jingji Ribao (Economics Daily). The fifth is service papers; Shopping Guideand Better Commodity Shopping Guide are two examples. The sixth is digest papers, such as Wenzhaibao (News Digest), and finally, army papers: Jiefangjun Ribao (People’s Liberation Army Dail) belongs to this category. Besides these types of formal newspapers, there are tabloids and weekend papers. The Chinese “jietou xiaobao” (small papers on the streets) are the equivalent of tabloids, which are synonymous with sensationalism in China. In addition to tabloids, major newspapers seeking a share of the human-interest market also created zhoumo ban (weekend editions). In 1981, Zhongguo Qingnianbao (China Youth News), the official organ of the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Youth League, published its first weekend edition in an attempt to increase readership. The paper was an instant success. By the end of 1994, one-fourth of all newspapers had weekend editions. Weekend editions sell well because they are usually more interesting than their daily editions, with more critical and analytical pieces on pressing social issues, as well as various entertainment components.

As of March 2000, China had 2,160 newspapers with a total annual circulation of 26 billion (Sun 369). However, these numbers are estimates because newspaper circulation is actually unknown in China. Except for several successful ones, most papers do not give real numbers thus discrepancies exist depending upon the source used. The numbers cited below can only be used as an indication of the general trends. Also, circulation does not necessarily reflect popularity or influence, due to mandatory subscription or larger populations in some areas. The following table lists the 10 largest newspapers with their circulations (Press Release Network, 2001).

• Cankao Xiaoxi (Reference News) 9,000,000
• Sichuan Ribao (Sichuan Dail) 8,000,000
• Gongren Ribao (Workers Daily) 2,500,000
• Renmin Ribao (People’s Daily) 2,150,000
• Xinmin Wanbao (Xinmin Evening News) 1,800,000
• Wenhuibao (Wenhui Daily) 1,700,000

• Yangcheng Wanbao (Yangcheng Evening News) 1,300,000
• Jingji Ribao (Economic Daily) 1,200,000
• Jiefang Ribao (People’s Liberation Army Daily) 1,000,000
• Nanfang Ribao (Nanfang Daily) 1,000,000
• Nongmin Ribao (Farmer’s Daily) 1,000,000
• Zhongguo Qingnianbao (China Youth Daily) 1,000,000

In terms of influence, the next most important newspaper is People’s Daily , whose huge circulation is benefited by the mandatory subscription of all Chinese working units. People’s Daily runs five subsidiary newspapers, including its overseas edition, which is the official organ for propagating the Party line among the Chinese-reading public overseas. The other four editions include two editions covering economic news, a satire and humor tabloid, and an international news edition. Under Deng Xiaoping’s economic reforms, Party and government media organs are no longer simple mouthpieces; they have become business conglomerates.

Beijing Youth News is one of the most influential newspapers among younger Chinese audiences. It began on March 21, 1949, as an official organ of the Beijing Communist Youth League. The paper has been able to make the most of opportunities created by reform and commercialization. Since the early 1980s, it has implemented a series of successful management reforms, refused to accept any “back door” job placements, pioneered the system of recruiting staff through open competition, and eliminated lifetime tenure. From 1994 to 2001, it changed from a daily broadsheet with eight pages to a daily broadsheet with 46 pages, including 14 pages of business information. Its circulation reached 400,000 in 2001, and its advertising income concurrently skyrocketed to 640 million in the same year. In the 1990s, the newspaper grew from a small weekly into a conglomerate that publishes four papers and runs 12 businesses in a wide range of areas.

As of 1997 there were 143 evening newspapers in China. Three of them have circulations of over 1 million. They are the Yangcheng Evening News , Yangzi Evening News, and Xinmin Evening News (China National Evening Newspaper Association). Local evening papers, usually general interest dailies, are among the best sellers. They are under the direct control of the municipal Party propaganda committee and with more soft news content closer to everyday urban life are aimed at urban families.

The huge gap between Chinese urban and rural areas in terms of living standards is reflected in the access to the media and information. Although the majority of the Chinese population are peasants (79%), Chinese media basically serve urban populations since they are more educated and enjoy greater consumption power. Because of high illiteracy rates and the rapid increase of radio and television sets among Chinese peasants, rural residents increasingly use television as their source of information rather than newspapers.

As of 2000, there were 14 English newspapers in China. They are perceived as reporting on China’s problems with less propaganda. China Daily , published by the People’s Daily , was the first English newspaper to appear in China. It serves as the CCP’s official English organ, directed particularly at foreigners in China.

Between 1949 and 1990, almost all Chinese newspapers were distributed through the postal system. However, this changed when Luoyang Daily and Guangzhou Daily started their own distribution company in the late 1980s, followed by a host of other newspapers. As of the beginning of the twenty-first century, 800 newspapers among more than 2,000 distribute through their own networks. Others reach consumers through a variety of channels, such as post offices (both institutional and private subscription), street retail outlets, automatic newspaper dispensers, and occasionally, copies posted on public billboards. While institutional subscriptions provide newspapers to offices, street retail outlets are the major source of newspapers to private homes. In the office, reading free newspapers is considered legitimate political education as part of the job, but newspapers sold on the streets must compete not only among themselves but also with other commodities and for the urbanite’s leisure time and cash.

 China Press, Media, TV, Radio, Newspapers - television, circulation, stations, papers, number, print, freedom http://www.pressreference.com/Be-

Facebook is a social networking service and website launched in February 2004, operated and privately owned by Facebook Inc. As of February 2012, Facebook has more than 845 million active users. Users must register before using the site, after which they may create a personal profile, add other users as friends, and exchange messages, including automatic notifications when they update their profile. Additionally, users may join common-interest user groups, organized by workplace, school or college, or other characteristics, and categorize their friends into lists such as “People From Work” or “Close Friends”. The name of the service stems from the colloquial name for the book given to students at the start of the academic year by some university administrations in the United States to help students get to know each other. Facebook allows any users who declare themselves to be at least 13 years old to become registered users of the site. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook)

According to www.affordablecebu.com, as of January 23, 2011, the latest total number of facebook users in the Philippines reaches to 21,759,280. As we know, the total population of the Philippines is 94,013,200 in the year 2010. So, Filipinos who are using Facebook covers more than 23 percent of the total population in the Philippines. And these numbers are still growing.

We cannot now deny the fact that most of us are facebook users. But then, we should all be responsible enough in using the social networking site. There are two rules that I consider to become a responsible facebook user. First, BE CAREFUL ON WHAT YOU POST. Yep, be careful with what you’ll post in your status, your pictures and even videos. If you don’t, you might end up in having a fight on facebook because you might annoy others with what you post. Be careful with your pictures, there might be bad people around you that might save one picture of yours and use it in not so good way. Another important thing one must know is that, whatever you post in the internet cannot be erased. Yes, you might delete your account or something but it only takes one brainy guy out there in the field of technology to track it down.

Secondly, KNOW ALL YOUR FRIENDS. This rule is kinda more of a common sense. Do not accept friend requests from people whom you don’t really know just to have load of friends on facebook. When you accept them, you’ve given them an access to your account that they might use to harm you if they plan to do so. please do check your privacy also. Don’t be stupid enough, okay? Don’t be stupid enough to forget your passwords, may I add (some do forget it, you know).

With that, hope you could be a responsible facebook user. It may seem short and all but other rules don’t need to be told because all you need is a lot of common sense. These two rules I have are the ones that I think one should take note of specially the one about your posts. Always remember, think before you click!

Public relations is building good relationships with the company’s various publics by obtaining favorable publicity, building up a good “corporate image,” and handling or heading off unfavorable rumors, stories, and events. 

Public Relations, or PR, is the overall term for marketing activities that raise the public’s consciousness about a product, service, individual or issue. In short, PR is the management of a company’s public image that helps the public understand the company and its products.

It is is most effective when it is viewed as a strategic management function supporting the business goals of the organization. PR can use all the same communications tools as in other areas of marketing.

A healthy public relations strategy must permeate all aspects of the business. The PR mechanism itself exists in all organizations—whether formally managed or not. Every communication to the outside world (and even the world inside your organization!) creates an impression, causes an emotional reaction, or makes a statement about who you are and what values you hold dear. Managing those impressions, reactions, and statements should be taken seriously by operating within a carefully planned, executed, and measured PR strategy.

As the Marketing Plan comes from the Business Plan, so must a Public Relations Plan come from a strong Marketing Plan. Your Public Relations program should be planned, executed carefully, and measured to ensure success.

Publicity: An important part of PR 

Publicity also aims to create interest in a person, product, idea, organization, or business establishment generally through the generation and placement of favorable stories in the news media such as newspapers, magazines, TV, and radio.

Unlike advertising which relies on purchasing power to get a message across, publicity relies solely on the quality of content to persuade others to get the message out. Good publicity helps journalists find and report legitimate news that is important to their audience. Anyone can buy advertising space but not just anyone can earn the respect of media in order to establish an effective PR campaign.

A Brief History of Public Relations

    Public relations has been with us for thousands of years. The Greeks had a word for it:  sematikos:  to signify, to mean.  Semantikos means semantics, which can be defined as how to get people to believe things and do things.  That is not a bad definition of public relations. In 50 B.C. Julius Caesar wrote the first campaign biography, Caesar’s Gallic Wars.  He publicized his military exploits to convince the Roman people that he would make the best head of state.  Candidates for political office continue to publicize themselves with campaign biographies and accounts of military exploits to this day.  In 394 A.D., St. Augustine was a professor of rhetoric in Milan, the capitol of the Western Roman Empire.  He delivered the regular eulogies to the emperor and was the closest thing to a minister of propaganda for the imperial court.  Thus, St. Augustine was one of the first people in charge of public relations.  The modern equivalent would be the President’s press secretary or communication director. In 1776, Thomas Pane wrote “The Crisis,” a pamphlet which convinced the soldiers of Washington’s army to stay and fight at a time when so many were prepared to desert so they could escape the cold and the hardships of a winter campaign.  Paine was a master of political propaganda whose writing could get people to do things and believe things.

Benjamin Franklin made it a rule to forbear all contradiction to others, and all positive assertions of his own.  He would say, “I conceive” or “‘I apprehend” or “I imagine” a thing to be so, or it appears to be so.  Franklin pioneered the rules for “personal relations” in an era before mass media had made possible a profession called “public relations.” In the middle of the 19th century appeared a man who was to become one of the leading publicists of all time, P. T. Barnum.  His accomplishments include the founding of the American Museum and the establishment of the Barnum and Bailey Circus.  Barnum was a master of promotion who could fill his enterprises with customers by using what we today would call sleazy methods of publicity.  For example, he announced that his museum would exhibit a 161-year-old woman who had been Washington’s nurse.  He produced an elderly woman and a forged birth certificate to make his case. 

William Seward, Lincoln’s secretary of state in 1861, gained a large American audience through his understanding of how to use the press.  He told his friend Jefferson Davis (they were friends before the war): “I speak to the newspapers – they have a large audience and can repeat a thousand times what I want to impress on the public.”  Public relations became a profession in 1903 as Ivy Lee undertook to advise John D. Rockefeller on how to conduct his public relations.  Rockefeller owned coal mines and the Pennsylvania Railroad.  Miners were on strike and the railroad hushed up the facts when its trains were involved with accidents.  Lee advised Rockefeller to visit the coal mines and talk to the miners.  Rockefeller spent time listening to the complaints of the miners, improved their conditions, danced with their wives, and became a hero to the miners.

 After a railroad accident, Lee invited reporters to inspect the wreck and get the facts.  The Pennsylvania Railroad then obtained its first favorable press coverage.

Lee professionalized public relations by following these principles:

1. Tell the truth

2. Provide accurate facts

3. The public relations director must have access to topmanagement and must be able to influence decisions 3 Lee defined public relations, saying:  Public relations means the  actual relationship of the company to the people and that relationship involves more than talk.  The company must act by performing good deeds.

ON THE IMPORTANCE OF TRUTH:

1. Warren Buffet of Salomon Brothers: “If you lose money for the company, I will be understanding.  If you lose one shred of the company’s reputation, I will be ruthless.”

2. Speaker of the House Sam Rayburn commenting on the integrity of Army Chief-of-Staff George Marshall:  “When General Marshall comes to talk to us, we forget whether we are Democrats or Republicans.  We just remember that we are in the presence of a man who is telling the truth.””

 Public relations took the next step toward professionalism in 1918 as Edward Bernays advised the President of the new country of Czechoslovakia to announce independence on a Monday, rather than on a Sunday to get maximum press coverage.  In 1923, Bernays published “Crystallizing Public Opinion,” in which he established several public relations principles.  He said that public relations had these functions:

•  To interpret the client to the public, which means promoting the client

•  To interpret the public to the client, which means operating the company in such a way as to gain the approval of the public  Bernays and Lee were stressing the idea that the corporation should accept social responsibility.  Bernays’ ideas about social responsibility led to his refusal to accept unethical clients.  He created the concept that there are many publics and each public needs to be appealed to.  He advised public relations professionals to seek out group leaders and other key communicators (opinion leaders), who would be able to pass along ideas to other members of the public.  Other Bernays concepts include:

a. Public relations is a public service

b. Public relations should promote new ideas and progress

c. Public relations should build a public conscience

 Bernays put his ideas into practice when he took on as clients Proctor and Gamble and the Columbian Rope Company. Proctor and Gamble had produced a radio commercial, which was offensive to African-Americans.  Bernays took these steps:

a.  He changed the commercial

b. He got the company to offer African-Americans significant jobs

c. He invited them to tour the plant

d. He featured African-Americans in the company newsletter

The Columbian Rope Company had an anti-union image.  Bernays took these steps:

a. He produced a radio program featuring union and management panelists

b. He induced the company to bargain with the union

c. He offered tours of the plant

d. He convinced the company to sponsor a vocational program

Edward Bernays may truly be called the father of public relations and Ivy Lee the first public relations counselor. 

HISTORICAL OVERVIEW OF PR IN THE PHILIPPINES

PR has been practiced in the Philippines for more than half a century. The country is, in fact, considered as the “Pacific birthplace of public relations.”  Introduced by the Americans in the mid-l940s, the field started with the public information officers of the U.S. Army regularly issuing news releases to members of the Philippine media. Because of sustained friendly relations between the two countries, PR in this archipelago of about 75 million people has largely maintained its Western influence.

After initial exposure to American-style public information, it did not take long for the practice to spread to Philippine businesses. In 1947, the Business Writers Association of the Philippines was organized to promote the idea of corporate social responsibility and to underscore the growth in the Philippine economy. Through the Business Writers Association of the Philippines Awards, outstanding business persons were recognized not only for their entrepreneurial success, but also, what is more important, for their contributions to the community.

Notable of the early Filipino PR pioneers are Pete Teodoro and Jose Carpio. Teodoro, then PR director of Elizalde & Company, a paint manufacturer, is credited with having undertaken the first organized PR campaign. Teodoro’s company was competing directly with a large American corporation thus his program was geared toward winning the goodwill and patronage of local architects and contractors. Carpio, on the other hand, managed the first major association campaign. As the Manila-based manager of the Philippine Association, a business and civic organization formed in 1949, Carpio, with the help of business leaders, helped restore a favorable investment climate in the Philippines. The country at that time was reeling from the ravages of World War II and the Japanese occupation as well as a communist-led insurgency by the Hukbalahap in the countryside.

In 1966, San Miguel Corporation, one of the biggest Filipino companies since its founding in 1890 and better known worldwide for San Miguel beer, established the first PR department. Carpio organized and headed the department.

Marking another milestone was Baldomeo Olivera of the Philippine Long Distance and Telephone Company. He was the first to be retained by a large corporation and given top managerial rank as vice president for PR.

Significant strides were likewise achieved in the government sector. Major departments had press relations officers. In 1954, the Office of the Press Secretary was elevated to cabinet rank.

The imposition of Martial Law in 1971 and the urgency to sell former President Ferdinand Marcos’ “New Society” to the Filipinos, however, gave PR a double-edged sword. Although the practice grew in stature as evidenced by the 1973 reorganization of the Office of Press Secretary into a full-fledged department called the Department of Public Information, the period was also characterized by restrictions on corporate speech and muzzling of the Philippine press. Francisco Tatad, a former newspaperman, was the first Information Secretary to become a cabinet member.

It was during Marcos’ time that private corporations were increasingly tapped to support government programs. Development communication that focused on the use of information to serve the developmental needs of Third World economies was gaining currency, and PR found itself merging paths with public information.

Among noteworthy examples of corporate promotion of government programs were:

1) The 1977 National Quiz Bee, a nationwide contest on Philippine history and culture and mathematics and science, sponsored by the Herdis Group of Companies. The competition supported Marcos’ project to make the next 10 years the “Decade of the Filipino Child” and

2) “Batarisan,” a manpower development initiative for out-of-school youth members of the government’s Kabataang Barangay was undertaken by Delta Motor Corporation.

The People’s Revolution that ended the Marcos regime in 1986 and restored most of the country’s constitutional freedoms signaled a new era of Philippine PR.

The Public Relations Society of the Philippines

The Public Relations Society of the Philippines (PRSP) is the country’s premier organization for public relations professionals. In its roster are practitioners who represent business and industry, government, non-profit organizations, hospitals, schools, hotels and professional services among others. PRSP is a non-stock, non-profit organization established on February 19, 1957 by leading PR practitioners in the country.

The Society’s mission is to advance the practice of public relations by (1) uniting those engaged in the profession; (2) encouraging continuing education of practitioners; (3) generating public confidence in the profession by promoting high ethical practice and encouraging high standards of public service; (4) playing the active role in all matters affecting the practice of public relations; and (5) strengthening the relationships of public relations professionals with employees and clients, government at all levels, educators, with media and the general public.

Like the Public Relations Society of America, the PRSP hosts annual Anvil Awards, an awards ceremony that recognizes outstanding programs, projects and PR techniques. The ceremony, according to Culbertson and Chen, is known as the “Oscars of Public Relations.” A campaign to save the Philippine eagle won the coveted Grand Award in 1993.

 PR IN THE PHILIPPINES

PR has become a very important part of Philippine government. Filipino PR practitioners understand that strategic government PR creates awareness and generates acceptance of public policies and programs. It also projects an image of good, legitimate governance.

But PR has never been more prominent in Philippine history than during the Marcos years (1965-1986). From the time martial law was declared in 1972 until Marcos’s presidency was forcibly ended in 1986, the government put on a massive and sustained propaganda campaign, locally and worldwide. The emphasis was on ensuring sustained U.S. government and military support.

The success of this campaign was due to Marcos’s well-funded nationwide media structure. The two succeeding governments of Presidents Aquino and Ramos maintained the “monolithic government media and information system” (Culbertson and Chen, 1996). Today, three broadcast networks and a newspaper chain still remain under government control.

  PR is a concept from the West that has been transplanted to Asia. But Philippine PR has drawn its sustenance from its own soil. Philippine PR practitioners have been faithful to their culture, making PR in the Philippines relevant to Filipinos — especially when the government is involved. Philippine PR is self-propelled, dynamic and professional.

In the Philippines, we have a phrase, suntok sa buwan (literally, a jab at the moon), which captures part of the humble beginnings of public relations practice in my country. We would churn out what appeared and, indeed, appealed as elegant PR plans. Which, more often than not, worked, after a fashion, and in the generous estimation of clients, who perhaps were themselves in no position to know better. Because we almost never did research, except that of the roughest type, we were jabbing at the moon. In spite of that, we lurched on and made points with clients from year to year.

Now, we are some distance from those days, but we are not quite where we need to be. In large and advanced economies characterized by competition for markets and the need for sustaining and enlarging them – and winning the loyalty and good feeling of a wide range of important (at times fickle) audiences – which can turn adversarial almost without warning – effective PR continues to gain preeminence.

This kind of PR is to be strived after. Always, it has to be buttressed by solid public relations research. Which way go the feelings and fears of stakeholders that we need to address? Or the biases and prejudices of media in markets where our clients do or plan to operate? What kind of corporate decisions and initiatives do our clients or principals have to make to create meaningful presence in domestic or foreign markets? How might important audiences think or what will they look like five years from now? 

As PR professionals, they should be aware of this and eventually become good at it because social media is the responsibility of PR, not just the Marketing Department. PR is all about the flow of brand communication on the grassroots level. It’s about getting influencers and mavens to start talking so that it cascades down to the rest of the prospects. The only difference is that instead of columnists you have bloggers and you have social networks instead of print and magazines. 

In the 2009 Digital Readiness Report made by iPressroom, it was revealed that PR companies in the US are leading the charge for social media and not traditional advertising agencies. This makes perfect sense because it’s the brand image management is the core essence of social media campaigns. As social media and internet marketing gets more traction locally, more and more companies will be turning to their PR agencies to come up with ideas on how to tap bloggers and how to use Facebook or Twitter. To the PR professionals and companies, now is that you should have your people trained properly so that when the time comes that a client asks for this, you are ready to deliver exceptional campaigns that will really have an impact on the bottom line of the business.

ADVERTISING

              Advertising is paid communication by a company or organization that wants its information disseminated. It is mass communication an advertiser pays for in order to convince a certain segment of the public to adopt ideas or take actions of benefit to the advertiser .

              Advertising as it is known today is the product of centuries of slow evolution and rapid growth. Advertising is a strong part of our culture, business, and institutions. Without ads most media could hardly exists. Advertising may be in any form of presentation. It may be a sign, symbol and illustration, an ad message in a magazine or newspaper, a commercial on the radio or television, on a billboard or a poster or a banner on the net.

BRIEF HISTORY OF ADVERTISING

Advertising started way back in earlier civilizations. Early in history, advertisements were cut in stone and placed in strategic locations so the people could see them. Hence, outdoor advertising is said to be the oldest form of advertising. Another way of advertising then, is through the town crier. The town crier was an advertising man who broadcast his advertising copy by walking up and down the streets shouting information about the wares of his employer.

With the invention of the printing press and movable type in 1447 by Johannes Gutenberg, a German goldsmith, Advertising took a leap forward and printing was made possible. In the nineteenth and early twentieth century, advertising flourished where different means of advertising was introduced. Numerous newspapers and magazine articles began appearing in the late 1980’s and early 1990s.

In the Philippines, the earliest Filipino traders engaged also in some form of advertising. Before the advent of the Spaniards in 1521, they made use of printed signs and town criers to communicate their business messages. As early as 1637, the first Philippine newsletter, Succesos Felices, appeared fifty three years before the first American newspaper, Publick Occurrence Both Foreign and Domestrik, came out. It was, however, only in the 19^th century, when the first newspaper in the country, Del Superior Govierno, was printed. This newspaper kept the readers abreast of the local developments as well as the war then between Spain and France.

With the development of printing and journalism in the Philippines, the growth of advertising also arises. In 1821, when the Philippines was governed directly by Spain and in 1834, when the Manila was formally exposed to world trade with the opening of the Suez Canal, the scenario for mass advertising was built. With the advancement in the technology, advertising continue to grow. Today, such media as newspapers, magazines, outdoor signs, radio, and television are used to advertise products.

ADVERTISING IN THE PHILIPPINES 

Today, advertising is recognized as an important social institution. Its applications as an influence on public opinion and as a stimulus to public action are certain to expand both here and abroad. Breaking into the advertising field is primarily a matter of formal education and work experience. It requires imagination and the ability to work hard, plus willingness to start at the bottom and continue to study the many complex activities of a fascinating dynamic field. And according to Canadian philosopher, scholar and communications theorist Marshall McLuhan, “Advertising is the greatest art form of the 20^th century.”

            The placement of ads in the print media such as the news paper and magazines start in the year 1735 through the publication named Pennsylvania Gazzette. With this, the magazines provided the first national medium for advertisers to place their ads. And in the turn of the century, magazines were financially supported by the finances from the advertisement rather than the readers of the magazines.

            In the Philippines, the development of printing and journalism gave birth to the advertisement being placed on print media. It was on December 1, 1846 when the first Philippine Daily, La Ezperanza, emerged with paid advertisement and the other dailies and weeklies followed; by the year 1896, majority of the Philippine news paper and magazines was subsidized by advertising.

Another medium that advertisers can use to place their ads is through the use of sound waves coming from the radio. The very first radio ad was broadcast on WEAF in 1922 wherein the cost for a 10-minutes spot is. The principal attribute of radio as an advertising medium is that the advertisement depends only on the spoken word. With this, listeners can hear the programs and commercials while doing other things that unlike the other media, radio does not require the concentration of its listeners.

            Advertiser do enjoy radio as a medium because radio allow advertisers to access the homogenous group of listeners that the product can be pitched. Moreover, radio as an advertising medium is said to be effective since radio is using the human voice, the most natural way for people to communicate with each other.

Another medium that entertain us through movies, dramas, comedies, reality shows and sports is television. It also offer its audience lot of persuasion through advertising since TV is one of the most used medium in advertising.

            From the time when television was invented, this medium has changed the way teacher teach, government governs and the way we organize our home. It even changed the nature, operation, and relationship to their audiences of books, magazines, movies and etc. it was in the 1884 when Paol Nipkow first developed a workable device for generating signals suitable for the transmission the scene of people and it was in the year 1948 when the television was opened to the public consumption and the advent television advertising.

            According to the study conducted by the Neuro focus, Television is the most effective medium of advertising and has the highest levels of viewer engagement. Television advertising is the result when you combine the two good points of print and radio as medium for advertisement; the ads visualization and the ads that can be heard.

Currently, the best way to advertise here in the Philippines is through the tri-media which are print, radio and especially television. Because Filipinos are still tri-media dependent and television still holds the title as the most powerful and influential medium.

Rowan University Communication Institute, 2005

http://www.accessmylibrary.com/article-1G1-64333358/philippine-public-relations-industry.html

http://prsociety-philippines.blogspot.com/

http://www.davedolak.com/pr.htm

http://www.questia.com/PM.qst?a=o&d=48972355

http://sarahaasullivan.wordpress.com/2011/02/05/pr-in-the-philippines/

http://www.newmedia.com.ph/filipino-pr-professionals-should-be-social-media-savvy/

http://www.instituteforpr.org/2009/08/making-pr-more-than-a-jab-at-the-moon/

hulingkembotsakolehiyo:

As both a business pioneer and a creative powerhouse, Activision has left an indelible impact on gamers everywhere. From its humble beginnings as the original third-party console developer to their present day incarnation as the industry’s leading publisher, Activision didn’t just innovate great games over the years, it evolved the way they’re produced, marketed, and sold. Without them, the industry could be a very different place.

Civil Unrest at Atari

Atari’s mighty VCS console, launched in 1977, changed the way we play games at home.

Along with the earlier Fairchild Channel F, and its main rival Intellivision, it introduced consumers to a new kind of console, where inexpensive cartridges could deliver wildly diverse new worlds of gaming. The arcade giant had the right combination of high-profile brands, development talent, and versatile hardware to transform videogames from a short-lived toy to a true mass-market platform, with a wide array of titles for all kinds of gamers.

It was not, however, a business controlled by the creative talent responsible for this highly profitable software. In these early days of blocky sprites and primitive sound, game designers could be true auteurs, creating every aspect of a game on their own. Yet these designers were not given a percentage of sales like a recording artist or the author of a book, instead receiving a scant salary of about $30,000 for all their work, regardless of the success of their output.

By the time Atari launched its first console, founder Nolan Bushnell had already sold the company to Warner Communications, and the infusion of corporate blood into the company created an environment with little understanding of the role of creative talent. Analogies to other content-driven businesses like film and television might seem obvious now, but in 1979 videogames were still thought of as toys. Before diving into this new form of entertainment we know as gaming, many of Atari’s game designers were electronics engineers who designed toys and gadgets, and they were paid as such.

Atari’s founder Nolan Bushnell seemed to understand that game designers need incentives. The company had announced its intent to reward game designers with bonuses based on the sale of game cartridges, but when Bushnell was forced out of the company in 1978, plans changed. David Crane, one of Atari’s leading programmers at the time, recalls his frustration: “The president of Atari at the time was asked about it and he said ‘What bonus are you talking about?’ They basically pretended that it didn’t exist.”

David Crane

Unrest began to ripple through the Sunnyvale office over the following months. Atari was experiencing runaway success of the sort no one could anticipate, and the developers weren’t allowed to share in it. The last straw came in the form of a memo sent out by the marketing department to show which games were selling the most. The memo revealed that the now-famous “Gang of Four,” – David Crane, Bob Whitehead, Alan Miller, and Larry Kaplan – were responsible for around 60% of the company’s game sales, with the other 30 or so employees at the company responsible for another 20% and the rest the work of staff that had already left the company. Clearly the company had its power players, and they wanted to be paid as such.

“We looked at each other,” Crane remembers, “and said ‘We know we’re pretty good at this and our games sell well, but Atari sold $100 million worth of cartridges last year. So we four guys making about $30,000 a year made Atari $60 million? There’s something wrong here!’” With concrete proof of their market value, the four developers were resolute in their demands. They approached Atari president Ray Kassar in the hopes of seeing just a fraction of the money they had earned the company.

“He looked us in the eye,” Crane recalls, “and said ‘You guys are no more important to this product than the people on the assembly line who put the cartridges together.” Those famous last words cemented the four programmers in their decision to move on. The implications were immediately apparent. “Even the vice president, who had shown us into the president’s office, shook his head and said ‘Well, whatever you guys decide to do, I hope we can do business in the future,’” says Crane. “He knew we were gone.”

At the time, console development was a strictly first-party affair, and Atari didn’t even have a system for licensing third-parties. After all, why would they want competition? The options available to the refugee developers weren’t immediately clear. At the very least, they knew they could form a small four-man software company to make games, but they also had bigger dreams of designing, manufacturing, and publishing their own VCS games to go head-to-head with Atari’s titles. They knew they had the talent to create real blockbusters.

They met with a lawyer to discuss their options. Their plan sounded familiar, and the lawyer referred them to a friend of his, Jim Levy. Levy, an experienced businessman, was courting venture capital companies to help him start a new game developer that would make software for the computers of the day. The ex-Atari programmers met with Levy and suggested developing carts for Atari’s console instead. Levy’s investors loved the idea, and The Gang of Four soon became the Gang of Five. The newly appointed CEO chose the name Activision in order to appear above Atari in alphabetical lists, and the brand was born.

The newly formed company now had the finances and the leadership to realize their dream of being a full-fledged third-party developer. Atari, of course, was not about to take this lying down. “It’s tradition in Silicon Valley that if a group of people spin off from one company, the original company is going to sue them,” David jokes. Activision set aside a legal budget from the start, and took every precaution not to use anything that could be construed as Atari property, even engineering new tools in order to develop games without any official hardware.

That didn’t stop Atari from filing suit. They claimed the new offshoot was privy to trade secrets, and also demanded damages for “unfair competition.” The suit went on until 1982, but it didn’t slow Activision down. The fledgling company proved that it had what it took to compete with Atari’s onslaught of big-name arcade games.

Having no brands or licenses of their own may have put them at an early disadvantage, but it forced them to build something even stronger. Atari’s hardware was never very good at replicating the arcade games of the day, and in focusing on original content, Activision was able to create the kinds of games that wouldn’t have to live in the shadows cast by superior coin-op versions.

Their developers knew Atari’s hardware better than anyone. Unlike other developers (including Atari) they established certain rules and techniques across all of their games that created a distinctive look. Only the most appealing colors were used, and black borders were employed to keep color bleeding down. Gamers might not have been able to pick out exactly why Activision games looked so good, but they knew that they did.

Anticipating the coming onslaught of competition, Activision worked tirelessly to establish a recognizable brand. They emblazoned the developer’s names on the boxes, effectively turning them into brands. It wasn’t a move of vanity; it bred a kind of loyalty with consumers. They also designed a uniform package design, and used the logo in-game to reinforce brand identity. Even though their only competition was Atari, Activision knew more would soon be on the way, and they wouldn’t all be good.

Third-Party to the First

As the only third-party on the shelves, Activision had to fight against the image of being an “off-brand.” Keystone Kapers developer Garry Kitchen remembers when he first became aware of his future employer: “Someone called me up and said ‘Hey, there’s another company making games for the Atari machine.’ I remember thinking ‘These are going to be complete garbage,’” he admits with a laugh.

But Activision’s games were some of the best the system had to offer. By 1982, they had released some groundbreaking titles that were shaming their Atari contemporaries, especially as the first-party’s in-house studio was wracked by poor management. Games like Chopper Command and River Raid showed that the aging hardware could pull off some slick scrolling shooters, and Crane’s own 1982 classic Pitfall! delivered an instantly captivating blend of platforming and exploration that spanned a massive map.

In 1982, the court ruled in favor of Activision, making the 2600 officially an open platform. With their legal troubles over, the company went public to overnight success. With third-party development approved by the courts, the consumers, and the stock market, venture capital companies seemed willing to fund just about any upstart developer that could scrape together a few programmers, opening up the floodgates to a massive boom in development. New publishers looking to stand out started snatching up any license they could.

Garry Kitchen landed one of the most coveted of all. Not long after Activision brought its first games to market, Kitchen had reverse engineered Atari’s hardware, and created a technically impressive scrolling shooter called Space Jockey. In the early days of third-party development, this made him part of a very elite club of programmers with real experience on Atari hardware, so when Coleco made a high profile bid to publish home versions of Atari’s Donkey Kong, there were few people available who could get the job done right and still have it done in time for Christmas. Many thought the game couldn’t be done justice on Atari’s primitive hardware, but Kitchen proved them wrong.

Competition drove him to work even harder. One of the most daunting aesthetic challenges might seem simple today. “The way the Atari’s background chip works, you couldn’t have tilted ramps on the first screen. The left side had to be a copy of the right side or a mirror image,” he explains. He showed the working prototype with its flat ramps to Activision’s Vice President of Product Development in the hopes of landing his next job, and he presented Kitchen with a challenge. “I showed him Donkey Kong, and he said snidely ‘If you were making this for Activision, those ramps would be tilted.’” Being told it was possible gave Kitchen the drive to get it done, and when Donkey Kong shipped in late 1982, it had its signature tilted ramps.

By 1983, he had pulled together a small team in New Jersey, including his brother Dan and John Van Ryzin, who would later go on to program Activision classics like H.E.R.O. and Cosmic Commuter. They interviewed for the industry’s major players and had their choice of offers. “We ended up choosing Activision because we liked their games best,” Kitchen says bluntly.

In June of 1983, Kitchen’s team became Activision’s new East Coast studio, their first satellite team outside of their office in California. The team went on to create some of the company’s premier titles over the next few years, including Crackpots, Keystone Kapers, and the sprawling side-scroller, H.E.R.O., perhaps the company’s most ambitious game up to that point.

1983 was good to the fledgling expansion and to their parent company, and the following year saw its share of Activision hits, including much-anticipated sequels to Pitfall and River Raid. The good times were about to end, however, and the console industry was about to learn one of its hardest lessons.

A Great Trial by Fire

The cyclic machinations of the business might be routine now, but when gaming’s first generation of cart-based consoles began to wane, no one knew if it would ever recover. Activision’s success had opened the floodgates for a lot of aspiring developers and publishers, many of which had no solid business plan and were simply doomed to failure from the start. Meanwhile, Atari itself was in shambles, releasing titles that seemed to be rapidly declining in quality as the whip cracked on programmers to turn out games in two-month cycles.

Only the naïve thought the halcyon days of Atari would last forever, but few realized just how fast the change would come. “It was something we were one step away from predicting,” laments David Crane. “One year we went to the Consumer Electronics show and there were 30 new game companies that weren’t at the show six months ago.” They knew right then that it was simply an unsustainable level of growth on a system that was already reaching the end of its natural life.

What Activision didn’t anticipate was the damage that these fly-by-night upstarts would do to the existing power players. When these companies failed, it flooded store shelves with very low-price surplus stock, sold from warehouses of defunct publishers for less than the cost of manufacture. These wound up on store shelves, often for as little as $3 or $4, alongside new Activision titles that were selling for $40.

Some of these games were good, many were bad, and very few were up to par with the quality of Activision’s work, but in a market of uneducated consumers, it didn’t matter. There was no real mainstream game media at the time, just a handful of magazines of questionable integrity, leaving consumers to gauge quality largely from looking at a box. Many of the games in the bargain bin seemed perfectly appealing at a glance, and the temptation of low-price games was too much to resist.

Activision weathered 1984 with some memorable successes, but by the time Nintendo’s NES console revived the console market, the Atari platform was simply gutted, and retailers (mostly toy stores at the time) had lost all their confidence in anything to do with videogames. It was an overreaction, and the market for Atari games was still there (ironically it had only been cannibalized by the retailers’ own price-slashing, not a decrease in overall sales), but that didn’t make the damage any less real. Activision’s main rival, Imagic, was one of the unlucky companies full of talent that still couldn’t survive the fallout.

By the time the Atari crash hit full force, Activision had grown to over 300 employees, and the market simply couldn’t sustain them. Jim Levy took a unique approach to restructuring, opting to “hire” employees into the “new” version of the company, often under revised roles, and those that didn’t fit in his new structure were laid off.

A new direction was needed. This was inevitable from the time Activision was formed, but the transition was much harder than they had predicted. “In 1979, when we first wrote our business plan,” remembers Crane, “we saw it as a five year plan, because we saw the home computer coming. Our plan was to be 100% focused on home computer software by 1984. The reality of the situation in ‘84 was exactly what we planned on, but we had drawn our curve much gentler.” No one saw the massive boom of new publishers and subsequent crash as a result, and Atari developers were caught unprepared.

“Activision was never the same after that,” laments Garry Kitchen. “People weren’t just questioning what we were doing wrong, they were questioning what we were doing right.” Much of the management was shaken up in addition to the creative staff, and there was an almost desperate attempt to find something, anything different than what they were doing.

“After I did Pressure Cooker, there was a mantra at Activision: ‘Games are dead,” Kitchen jokes hyperbolically. “‘Think new and original,’ they told me.” His next products were The Designer’s Pencil, a sort of interactive toy based on a simple scripting language, and Garry Kitchen’s Gamemaker, which allowed users to make their own arcade-style games for the Commodore 64 – a product that has been imitated and built upon countless times since. Crane likewise moved away from the arcadey fare he was known for and released Little Computer People, a game widely considered the distant forerunner to The Sims.

Failing to see another, narrower crash, Activision bought out Infocom, the leading developer of text adventure games, in 1986. By this time, the graphic adventure genre was already looming with games like King’s Quest and Space Quest from Sierra, and Infocom’s quirky interactive fiction was in its final days of commercial viability. After the buyout, Jim Levy was put on the stake by the board of directors and held accountable for many circumstances beyond his control. Bruce Davis, who had briefly helmed Imagic as it went into bankruptcy, was made the new CEO of Activision.

“It completely ruined the creative environment at the company,” Crane says. Davis rebranded the company “Mediagenic,” despite the incredible market value of the Activision brand. Frustrated and afraid for their jobs, Activision’s East Coast staff, as well as David Crane, left to form Absolute Entertainment (once again named to appear alphabetically above their old employers).

Activision continued to bleed developers until there was hardly anything left. By the time the console market rebounded, Activision no longer had the resources to develop Atari games internally. When Toys R Us finally admitted their mistake to Activision and Atari and asked for 2600 games to feed the consumer demand, there was no one left at either company that still knew how to make them.

Absolute jumped on board and began publishing Atari games with some success, and soon Activision and Atari wanted in too. They contracted with Absolute, the very same people who had just left their company, to develop the kinds of games they had been forbidden from making while on staff. “At one point there were three companies doing 2600 games, Atari, Activision, and Absolute, and we were developing all of them,” Kitchen says.

Activision continued to publish computer and console games over the coming years, jumping on the NES bandwagon at its peak, and publishing some quality titles like Mechwarrior, but they continued to bleed money. With most of their creative staff gone, they were relegated primarily to production and publishing, competing with countless other companies and with little to offer other than their rapidly depleting funds. By the close of the ’80s, Mediagenic was little more than a shell, teetering on bankruptcy.

Activision’s Rebirth

The final blow for Mediagenic came when the court ruled in favor of Magnavox – a broad-reaching patent infringement suit that touched nearly every videogame manufacturer at the time. The company would soon be forced to sell or shut down.

Bobby Kotick had been looking to get into the software business for some time. He had previously tried to develop a failed graphical interface for the Apple II and then made a bid for Commodore with the hopes of turning them into a videogame company. When the deal fell through, he looked at the skeletal Mediagenic and saw an opportunity to revive one of gaming’s most esteemed brands. At the beginning of 1991, they sold a 25% share of the company to entertainment executive Bobby Kotick, who appointed himself the company’s new CEO.

On the surface, this sounds like the deal of a lifetime. It would take untold tens of millions in marketing to create the kind of brand recognition the Activision name carried, and the company was still reporting a narrow profit. But when Kotick opened the books, he found things were not nearly what they seemed. “I had breakfast with [Kotick] shortly thereafter,” recalls Crane, “and he said ‘I may have spent [$440,000], but I think I’m $20 million in debt now.’”

It was looking like Kotick may have bought a lemon, and the struggle to rebuild the company was a slow one. He shut down the Silicon Valley office and set up shop in Santa Monica, just outside of Los Angeles, effectively starting the company off fresh. It was a slow build, and Activision’s output dropped to almost nothing in 1991 and 1992, with the notable exception of Hunter, an independently developed 3D sandbox action-adventure that innovated many of the gameplay ideas that would later be associated with Grand Theft Auto.

Activision began recruiting development talent in SoCal to spearhead their return to form. In 1993, Infocom (still under Activision ownership) released Return to Zork, a completely graphical CD-ROM adventure that paved the way for games like Myst that would follow soon after. In 1994, Pitfall: The Mayan Adventure became the first new game developed internally at Activision’s SoCal office. The thoroughly modern re-imaginining of David Crane’s seminal classic proved to be a hit, giving Activision a notable presence on both console and PC.

Before long, Activision had recruited a truly world-class development team. In 1995, it released Mechwarrior 2, a hard-nosed mech simulator that completely eclipsed its predecessor and proved to be a critical and commercial smash. Although Activision continued to anthologize the company’s old Atari and Infocom games, it built a new fan base with a string of innovative classics on the PC, including Interstate ‘76, and the action/strategy hybrid Battlezone. They also partnered with id Software for Quake II as the shareware pioneer shifted to a strictly retail-based model – an arrangement that has endured until just recently.

The Activision brand stood for quality once again. Under the leadership of Bobby Kotick and talented producers like Scott Krager and Pandemic Studios founder Josh Resnick, the name Activision was synonymous with great PC games, but they still had a long way to go before truly conquering the mainstream.

Serious Purchasing Power

Activision had a strong internal team by the end of the ’90s, but it was Activision’s partnerships with independent studios that took them to the next level. Throughout the next decade, Activision developed a reputation for huge annual franchises and a series of high profile buyouts that would eventually make them the biggest publisher in the world.

Their breakthrough came in 1999, when they released Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater, developed by Neversoft. The innovative take on the sport revived a genre that had lost nearly all of its traction in the gaming world, spawning an endless army of imitators and outselling them all. It soon became an annual franchise, a familiar friend that would arrive each fall.

Activision purchased Neversoft soon after THPS’s release, but kept the studio’s offices and management. Kotick believed that a culture of respect for the independent spirit of its studios would be key to their long term success, and took little role in the artistic direction of the series. At the same time, Activision assigned Neversoft to develop new Tony Hawk and Spiderman games every year, creating a steady, dependable cashflow to impress investors. Likewise, Activision launched a series of other extreme sports games to capitalize on Tony Hawk’s success and fend off the seemingly endless army of competing brands, but none of them had the same kind of traction that Tony Hawk did.

It wasn’t until 2003 that Activision would hit the same kind of pay dirt again. Preying on the folly of industry leader Electronic Arts, they invested in a new studio, Infinity Ward, made of veteran developers formerly employed by 2015 Inc, developers of the critically and commercially successful Medal of Honor: Allied Assault. Their aim was to take EA head -on at their own game with the very people that helped to build their franchise. They announced Call of Duty as a series even before the first game had launched. Infinity Ward was placed at the helm for the time being, and given considerable creative control.

By the middle of the decade, Activision had grown large enough to simply buy hot properties, without the need to risk their investment in new ideas. In 2006, Activision bought out RedOctane, hot on the heels of the wildly successful Guitar Hero. Under Activision’s guidance, several of their internal teams were put in charge of porting the rhythm game to nearly every feasible platform, with an endless stream of expansions and downloadable content to go with it.

Activision had become conquerors in the gaming landscape, and Bobby Kotick’s tendency to be outspoken with his business philosophies led to a somewhat adversarial relationship with the gaming media. His dedication to annual releases in the company’s big series – almost to the exclusion of any stand-alone releases – and his aggressive purchasing of esteemed independent companies like Bizarre Creations made Activision a darling to the investors he was responsible to, but controversial in the gaming press.

This controversy reached its crescendo in 2007, when Kotick set his sights on his biggest target to date, Vivendi Universal. The French media giant (which also encompasses Universal Music Group) had never really found an individual direction in the market, but thanks to a number of mergers and buyouts had inherited many current and classic gaming franchises, including Blizzard’s World of Warcraft, the most profitable game of all time. Blizzard’s MMORPG was the envy of the gaming industry, raking in money month after month with subscription fees and not just purchases.

Convinced that monetizing online play was the future of gaming, Kotick made an aggressive offer nearly equal to Activision’s net worth. When the merger was finalized in the summer of 2008, the newly minted Activision Blizzard became the largest game developer and publisher on the market, with Kotick at the helm.

Kotick was primarily interested in Blizzard, and not Vivendi itself, and treated the developer with the utmost respect, tolerating its development culture and notoriously vague (and languid) release schedule out of respect for their success. The rest of Vivendi was not so lucky. The production and publishing staff was gutted, and games like Brutal Legend, WET, and Ghostbusters that didn’t fit in with Activision’s annual franchise business plan were summarily dropped, while long-declining series like Spyro the Dragon and Crash Bandicoot were kept because of their yearly release schedule.

Since the merger, many of Activision’s decisions show a change in the principles that helped to build the company. In 2009, Bobby Kotick infamously endorsed a corporate culture of “skepticism, pessimism, and fear” to keep its development staff loyal, a stance that echoes the gaffes made at Atari that ultimately led its talent to leave and form Activision. They have backed this up with a number of high-profile firings and studio closings justified by waning sales of series that many would argue have simply become over-exposed due to the frequent release schedule.

Doubly ironic is the departure of much of Infinity Ward’s staff, which comes partly as the result of Activision’s failure to deliver promised bonuses, just as Atari had done in 1979. The move also echoes Infinity Ward’s foundation, which had served as proof that the talent behind a game was more important than even a mighty brand like Medal of Honor. Unsurprisingly, the orphaned staff has already formed a new studio, and is undoubtedly aiming to make their point a second time.

But Activision has yet to show any bruises. With consumers and investors generally uninterested in the machinations of the company’s management, they continue to sell games as they always have, often with strong review scores to back them up. “The business is so different now,” reflects David Crane, “With literally hundreds of people working on each game, it’s hard to say who’s really responsible.” Activision’s controversial decisions may be bitter medicine, but could also prove to be truth. Conversely, they may be foolhardy and cynical and leave an opening for their competitors as their reliable money makers inevitably decline (as every non-sports annual franchise in gaming has). Either way, Activision’s success or failure will likely color the way games are made and sold for years to come.

HISTORICAL TIMELINE

1979:  Activision opens its doors as the first independent developer and distributor of entertainment software.

1981:  Activision launches a series of multi-million selling Atari 2600 titles, including Kaboom! (1981), the Pitfall! series and River Raid (1982).

1983:  Activision completes initial public offering becoming a leading international developer/publisher of video games for video game console systems.

1987:  Activision purchases Infocom, the leading adventure game developer and producer. Infocom had introduced the first officially published version of Zork, in 1982 and subsequently released four text-adventures sequels and two spin-offs, Enchanter and Sorcerer.

1988:  Activision changes name to Mediagenic and broadens focus to include business application software.

1989:  Mediagenic publishes the first interactive entertainment product on CD-ROM, The Manhole.

1990:  BHK Corporation, a company controlled by Activision’s current executive management team, purchases a controlling interest in Mediagenic.

1992:  Activision opens Australian office.

1992:  Activision relocates to Los Angeles from Northern California.

1993:  Activision opens office in United Kingdom.

1994:  Activision raises $42.5 million in equity to boost production and distribution of new titles.

1994:  Activision releases Return to Zork as the first fully interactive MPEG adventure game.

1995:  Activision introduces several new multimedia titles, Shanghai: Great Moments, Atari Action Packs, MechWarrior 2, Ghost Bear’s Legacy, Pitfall: The Mayan Adventure and Earthworm Jim for Windows 95.

1996:  Activision launches revolutionary CD-ROM thriller Spycraft: The Great Game.

1996:  Activision releases Zork Nemesis, the sequel to the hit game Return to Zork and the seventh title in the blockbuster Zork series.

1997:  Activision acquires worldwide interactive rights to the Heavy Gear giant robot role-playing universe.

1997:  Activision acquires worldwide rights to id Software’s Quake II.

1997:  Activision forms German subsidiary with the acquisition of Take Us!, a German marketing firm

1997:  Activision acquires premier game developer Raven Software.

1997:  Activision expands its pan-European publishing and distribution infrastructure with the acquisitions of CentreSoft Ltd., one of the largest and most respected independent distributors of interactive entertainment software in the United Kingdom, and NBG Distribution, a German-based distributor of entertainment software products.

1997:  Activision completes $60,000,000 private placement of seven-year Convertible Subordinated Notes to finance its product development and product acquisitions efforts.

1998:  Activision opens office in France.

1998:  Activision acquires worldwide rights to id Software’s Quake III Arena.

1998:  Activision signs deal with Marvel to develop games based each of on the X-MEN and Spiderman for the PlayStation game console.

1998:  Activision acquires Head Game Publishing, a leading developer and publisher of value-priced outdoor sports and lifestyle PC CD-ROM games.

1998:  Activision signs multi-title deal with Disney Interactive to publish video games based on Disney animated feature properties.

1998:  Activision and LucasArts Entertainment Company enter into exclusive publishing and distribution partnership in the United Kingdom and 45 additional countries including Scandinavia, Central Europe, the Middle East and certain African countries.

1998:  Activision acquires CD Contact Data, a leading distributor of entertainment software products with offices in Belgium and the Netherlands.

1998:  Activision signs long-term agreement with world-renowned skateboard champion, Tony Hawk, to develop a line of video games.

1999:  Activision acquires Neversoft Entertainment, a leading console software developer headquartered in Los Angeles, CA.

1999:  Activision expands its relationship with Marvel Enterprises and signs a licensing agreement to develop and publish games based on Marvel’s X-MEN and Blade franchises.

1999:  Activision signs long-term agreement with Cabela’s, the world’s largest hunting outfitter.

2000:  Activision acquires rights to develop sequel to id Software’s legendary first person shooter game Wolfenstein.

2000:  Activision makes an equity investment in Gray Matter Interactive Studios, to develop the follow up to one of the most revered PC games of all time, id Software’s Return to Castle Wolfenstein.

2000:  Activision announces strategic restructuring plan to accelerate the development of games for the next-generation consoles.

2000:  Activision’s Board of Director’s authorizes the purchase of up to $10 million in shares of common stock and convertible subordinated notes.

2000:  Activision’s Board of Director’s approves additional $5 million increase to previously approved $10 million repurchase authorization.

2000:  Activision signs licensing agreement with Nokia, a pioneer in mobile Internet technology, to encode text-adventure games for WAP enabled devices.

2001:  Activision’s Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 2 ranks as best-selling video game in the U.S. for the PlayStation game console during calendar 2000, according to NPD’s TRSTS Data.

2001:  Activision consolidates its value operations. Company restructures Head Games to operate as Activision Value incorporating certain assets from Expert Software and Elsinore Multimedia.

2001:  Activision acquires exclusive worldwide interactive entertainment rights to Columbia Picture’s multi-million dollar feature film “Spider-Man.”

2001:  Activision completes full redemption or conversion of its 63/4% convertible subordinated notes due 2001 reducing its debt by $60 million.

2001:  Activision wins three PlayStation Choice Award – Spider-Man named “Game of the Year,” Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 2 voted “Best Extreme Sports Game” and Disney/Pixar’s Toy Story Racer won “Best Children’s Title.”

2001:  Activision named licensee of the year in the sports/special events category in recognition of Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 2 by International Licensing Industry Merchandiser’s Association.

2001:  Activision strengthens leadership position as top publisher of superhero games with the acquisition of worldwide interactive rights to Marvel’s Fantastic Four and Iron Man properties.

2001:  Activision is the only interactive entertainment company to be selected by Fortune Magazine as one of the top 100 fastest growing publicly held companies in the U.S.

2001:  Activision acquires Treyarch Invention LLC, a leading console software developer with a focus on action and action-sports video games.

2001:  Activision’s Board of Directors approves three-for-two split of its outstanding common shares.

2001:  Activision files a shelf registration for potential future public offerings of 7.5 million shares of its common stock.

2002:  Activision has exercised its option to acquire the remaining 60% equity interest in Gray Matter Interactive Studios, the developer of Activision’s holiday season blockbuster PC game, Return to Castle Wolfenstein™.

2002:  Activision joins the S&P Midcap 400 Index.

2002:  Activision acquires software developer Shaba Games LLC, further enhancing its internal console development capabilities and bolstering its ability to create games for the next-generation consoles.

2002:  Activision acquires distribution rights id Software’s DOOM III™, the latest installment in one of the most successful franchises in PC gaming history.

2002:  Activision makes 30% equity investment in Infinity Ward, a newly formed studio comprised of 22 of the individuals who developed the critically acclaimed PC title Medal of Honor Allied Assault.

2002:  Activision acquires Z-Axis Ltd., the award-winning creative studio behind the million-unit selling franchise Dave Mirra Freestyle BMX.

2002:  Activision completes a public offering of 7.5 million shares of its common stock raising $248 million.

2002:  Activision announces $150 million repurchase program.

2002:  Activision acquires software developer Luxoflux Corporation with whom the company has collaborated since 1997, most recently on LucasArts Entertainment’s Star Wars Demolition.

2002:  Activision is named master videogame licensee for Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events, the best-selling children’s book series that is in development for a feature film by Paramount Pictures and Nickelodeon Movies.

2003:  Activision and DreamWorks SKG today jointly announced a strategic multi-year, multi-property publishing agreement that grants Activision the exclusive interactive rights to publish games based on DreamWorks’ three upcoming computer-animated feature films: “Sharkslayer,” “Madagascar,” and “Over the Hedge.”

2003:  Activision announces additional $200 million to company’s repurchase program.

2003:  Activision announces strategic partnership with Valve L.L.C. to publish upcoming games created by the premiere PC game developer.

2003:  Activision announces that Ron Doornink has been elected to the Board of Directors.

2003:  Activision expands publishing and distribution role for LucasArts Entertainment Company’s video game console and PC products in Europe.

2003:  Activision’s Board of Directors approves three-for-two split of its outstanding common shares.

2003:  Activision exercises its option to acquire the remaining 70% of outstanding common stock in Infinity Ward.

2003:  Activision terminates co-development and co-publishing deal with TDK and signs agreement directly with DreamWorks to develop and publish video games based on DreamWorks’ upcoming animated theatrical “Shrek 2” feature film.

2003:  Activision appoints Robert J. Corti and Peter J. Nolan to its Board of Directors following the resignation of Steven Mayer.

2004:  Activision’s Board of Directors approves three-for-two split of its outstanding common shares.

2004:  Activision acquires rights to develop and publish games based on Columbia Pictures/Marvel Enterprises, Inc.’s upcoming feature film “Spider-Man 3,” which is set for release in May 2007.

2005:  Activision acquires game developer Vicarious Visions, the creative studio behind the #1 best-selling third-party Nintendo® DS title, Spider-Man 2™.

2005:  Activision’s Board of Directors approves four-for-three stock split of its outstanding common shares.

2005:  Activision acquires game developer Toys for Bob, the studio that developed its DreamWorks Animation’s Madagascar™ video game.

2005:  Activision acquires game developer Beenox, Inc., which provides the company with a foothold in Quebec, Canada one of the fastest growing development talent pools in North America.

2005:  Activision appoints Richard Sarnoff to its Board of Directors.

2005:  Activision’s Board of Directors approves four-for-three stock split of its outstanding common shares.

2005:  Activision acquires rights to develop games based on DreamWorks Animation’s “Bee Movie,” “Kung Fu Panda,” “Rex Havoc” and “How to Train Your Dragon.” The deal also extends Activision’s video game rights beyond “Shrek 3” to include potential future films in the “Shrek” franchise.

2006:  Activision acquires the global rights, excluding Japan, to develop console, handheld and PC games based on Hasbro’s renowned TRANSFORMERS brand.

2006:  MGM Interactive and EON Productions Ltd. award Activision the rights to develop and publish interactive games based on the James Bond license through 2014.

2006:  Activision acquires video game publisher RedOctane, inc. the publisher of the popular Guitar Hero franchise.

2007:  Activision acquires DemonWare, the leading provider of network middleware technologies for console and PC games.

2007:  Activision acquires U.K.-based video game developer Bizarre Creations, one of the world’s premier video game developers and a leader in the racing category.

2007:  ctivision and Vivendi announces that they have signed a definitive agreement to combine Vivendi Games with Activision, to create the world’s largest pure-play online and console publisher. On close of the transaction, Activision will be renamed Activision Blizzard and will continue to operate as a public company traded on NASDAQ under the ticker ATVI.

hulingkembotsakolehiyo:

Twitter is an online social networking service and microblogging service that enables its users to send and read text-based posts of up to 140 characters, known as “tweets”. It was created in March 2006 by Jack Dorsey and launched that July. The service rapidly gained worldwide popularity, with over 300 million users as of 2011, generating over 300 million tweets and handling over 1.6 billion search queries per day. It has been described as “the SMS of the Internet.”   

Twitter Inc. is based in San Francisco, with additional servers and offices in New York City.

A blueprint sketch, c. 2006, by Jack Dorsey, envisioning an SMS-based social network.

CREATION 

Twitter’s origins lie in a “daylong brainstorming session” held by board members of the podcasting company Odeo. Dorsey introduced the idea of an individual using an SMS service to communicate with a small group. The original project code name for the service was twttr, an idea that Williams later ascribed to Noah Glass, inspired by Flickr and the five-character length of American SMS short codes. The developers initially considered “10958” as a short code, but later changed it to “40404” for “ease of use and memorability.” Work on the project started on March 21, 2006, when Dorsey published the first Twitter message at 9:50 PM Pacific Standard Time (PST): “just setting up my twttr”. 

“…we came across the word ‘twitter’, and it was just perfect. The definition was ‘a short burst of inconsequential information,’ and ‘chirps from birds’. And that’s exactly what the product was.” – Jack Dorsey 

The first Twitter prototype was used as an internal service for Odeo employees and the full version was introduced publicly on July 15, 2006. In October 2006, Biz Stone, Evan Williams, Dorsey, and other members of Odeo formed Obvious Corporation and acquired Odeo and all of its assets – including Odeo.com and Twitter.com – from the investors and shareholders. Williams fired Glass who was silent about his part in Twitter’s startup until 2011.  Twitter spun off into its own company in April 2007.  

Reaction 

The tipping point for Twitter’s popularity was the 2007 South by Southwest (SXSW) festival. During the event, Twitter usage increased from 20,000 tweets per day to 60,000. “The Twitter people cleverly placed two 60-inch plasma screens in the conference hallways, exclusively streaming Twitter messages,” remarked Newsweek’s Steven Levy. “Hundreds of conference-goers kept tabs on each other via constant twitters. Panelists and speakers mentioned the service, and the bloggers in attendance touted it.”  

Reaction at the festival was highly positive. Blogger Scott Beale said that Twitter “absolutely rul[ed]” SXSW. Social software researcher Danah Boyd said Twitter “own[ed]” the festival. Twitter staff received the festival’s Web Award prize with the remark “we’d like to thank you in 140 characters or less. And we just did!”  

The first unassisted off-Earth Twitter message was posted from the International Space Station by NASA astronaut T. J. Creamer on January 22, 2010. By late November 2010, an average of a dozen updates per day were posted on the astronauts’ communal account, @NASA_Astronauts. NASA has also hosted over 25 “tweetups”, events that provide guests with VIP access to NASA facilities and speakers with the goal of leveraging participants’ social networks to further the outreach goals of NASA. 

In August 2010, the company appointed Adam Bain as President of Revenue from News Corp.’s Fox Audience Network.  

On September 14, 2010, Twitter launched a redesigned site including a new logo.^[ 

Leadership 

As chief executive officer, Dorsey saw the startup through two rounds of capital funding by the venture capitalists who backed the company.  

On October 16, 2008, Williams took over the role of CEO, and Dorsey became chairman of the board.  

On October 4, 2010, Williams announced that he was stepping down as CEO. Dick Costolo, formerly Twitter’s chief operating officer, became CEO. According to a Twitter blog, dated October 4, 2010, Williams was to stay^[with the company and “be completely focused on product strategy.”  

According to The New York Times, “Mr. Dorsey and Mr. Costolo forged a close relationship” when Williams was away. According to PC Magazine, Williams was “no longer involved in the day-to-day goings on at the company”. He is focused on developing a new startup, but he became a member of Twitter’s board of directors, and promised to “help in any way I can”. Stone is still with Twitter but is working with AOL as an “advisor on volunteer efforts and philanthropy”. 

Dorsey rejoined Twitter in March 2011, as executive chairman focusing on product development. His time is split with Square (where he is CEO), whose offices are within walking distance of Twitter’s in San Francisco.  

In September 2011, Board Members and investors Fred Wilson and Bijan Sabet resigned from Twitter’s Board of Directors.  

Growth 

The company experienced rapid growth. It had 400,000 tweets posted per quarter in 2007. This grew to 100 million tweets posted per quarter in 2008. In February 2010, Twitter users were sending 50 million tweets per day. By March 2010, the company recorded over 70,000 registered applications. As of June 2010, about 65 million tweets were posted each day, equaling about 750 tweets sent each second, according to Twitter. As of March 2011, that was about 140 million tweets posted daily. As noted on Compete.com, Twitter moved up to the third-highest-ranking social networking site in January 2009 from its previous rank of twenty-second.  

Twitter’s usage spikes during prominent events. For example, a record was set during the 2010 FIFA World Cup when fans wrote 2,940 tweets per second in the thirty-second period after Japan scored against Cameroon on June 14, 2010. The record was broken again when 3,085 tweets per second were posted after the Los Angeles Lakers’ victory in the 2010 NBA Finals on June 17, 2010, and then again at the close of Japan’s victory over Denmark in the World Cup when users published 3,283 tweets per second. The current record was set during the 2011 FIFA Women’s World Cup Final between Japan and the United States, when 7,196 tweets per second were published. When American singer Michael Jackson died on June 25, 2009, Twitter servers crashed after users were updating their status to include the words “Michael Jackson” at a rate of 100,000 tweets per hour.  

Twitter acquired application developer Atebits on April 11, 2010. Atebits had developed the Apple Design Award-winning Twitter client Tweetie for the Mac and iPhone. The application, now called “Twitter” and distributed free of charge, is the official Twitter client for the iPhone, iPad and Mac.  

From September through October 2010, the company began rolling out “New Twitter”, an entirely revamped edition of twitter.com. Changes included the ability to see pictures and videos without leaving Twitter itself by clicking on individual tweets which contain links to images and clips from a variety of supported websites including YouTube, Flickr, as well as a complete overhaul of the interface, which shifted links such as ‘@mentions’ and ‘Retweets’ above the Twitter stream, while ‘Messages’ and ‘Log Out’ became accessible via a black bar at the very top of twitter.com. As of November 1, 2010, the company confirmed that the “New Twitter experience” had been rolled out to all users. 

On April 5, 2011, Twitter tested a new homepage, as well as phased out the “Old Twitter.” However, a glitch came about after the page was launched, so the previous “retro” homepage was still in use until the issues were resolved; the new homepage was reintroduced on April 20.  

On December 8, 2011, Twitter overhauled its website once more to feature the “Fly” design, which the service says is easier for new users to follow and promotes advertising. In addition to the Home button, the Connect and Discover buttons were introduced along with a redesigned profile and timeline of Tweets. The site’s layout has been compared to that of Facebook.  

Features 

Tweets are publicly visible by default; however, senders can restrict message delivery to just their followers. Users can tweet via the Twitter website, compatible external applications (such as for smartphones), or by Short Message Service (SMS) available in certain countries. While the service is free, accessing it through SMS may incur phone service provider fees. 

Users may subscribe to other users’ tweets – this is known as following and subscribers are known as followers or tweeps (Twitter + peeps). The users can also check the people who are un-subscribing them on Twitter better known as unfollowing via various services.  

Twitter allows users the ability to update their profile by using their mobile phone either by text messaging or by apps released for certain smartphones / tablets.  

Twitter has been compared to a web-based Internet Relay Chat (IRC) client. In a 2009 Time essay, technology author Steven Johnson described the basic mechanics of Twitter as “remarkably simple”: 

As a social network, Twitter revolves around the principle of followers. When you choose to follow another Twitter user, that user’s tweets appear in reverse chronological order on your main Twitter page. If you follow 20 people, you’ll see a mix of tweets scrolling down the page: breakfast-cereal updates, interesting new links, music recommendations, even musings on the future of education. 

In June 2008, Twitter launched a verification program, allowing celebrities to get their accounts verified. Originally intended to help users verify which celebrity accounts were created by the celebrities themselves (and therefore are not fake), they have since been used to verify accounts of businesses and accounts for public figures who may not actually tweet but still wish to maintain control over the account that bears their name - for example, the Dalai Lama. Verified accounts can be identified by a white check in a blue background, known as a verification badge, next to the user’s full name, on the profile itself or next to the name in search results. 

Messages 

Users can group posts together by topic or type by use of hashtags – words or phrases prefixed with a ”#” sign. Similarly, the ”@” sign followed by a username is used for mentioning or replying to other users. To repost a message from another Twitter user, and share it with one’s own followers, the retweet function is symbolized by “RT” in the message. 

In late 2009, the “Twitter Lists” feature was added, making it possible for users to follow (as well as mention and reply to) ad-hoc lists of authors instead of individual authors.  

Through SMS, users can communicate with Twitter through five gateway numbers: short codes for the United States, Canada, India, New Zealand, and an Isle of Man-based number for international use. There is also a short code in the United Kingdom which is only accessible to those on the Vodafone, O2and Orange networks. In India, since Twitter only supports tweets from Bharti Airtel, an alternative platform called smsTweet was set up by a user to work on all networks. A similar platform called GladlyCast exists for mobile phone users in Singapore, Malaysia and the Philippines. 

The messages were initially set to 140-character limit for compatibility with SMS messaging, introducing the shorthand notation and slang commonly used in SMS messages. The 140-character limit has also increased the usage of URL shortening services such as bit.ly, goo.gl, and tr.im, and content-hosting services, such as Twitpic, memozu.com and NotePub to accommodate multimedia content and text longer than 140 characters. Twitter uses its own t.co domain for automatic shortening of all URLs posted on its website. 

Tweet contents 

 

 

Content of Tweets according to Pear Analytics.  

  News 

  Spam 

  Self-promotion 

  Pointless babble 

  Conversational 

  Pass-along value 

San Antonio-based market-research firm Pear Analytics analyzed 2,000 tweets (originating from the US and in English) over a two-week period in August 2009 from 11:00 AM to 5:00 PM (CST) and separated them into six categories:  

• Pointless babble – 40% 
• Conversational – 38% 
• Pass-along value – 9% 
• Self-promotion – 6% 
• Spam – 4% 
• News – 4%^[65] 

Social networking researcher Danah Boyd responded to the Pear Analytics survey by arguing that what the Pear researchers labelled “pointless babble” is better characterized as “social grooming” and/or “peripheral awareness” (which she explains as persons “want[ing] to know what the people around them are thinking and doing and feeling, even when co-presence isn’t viable”). 

Rankings

Twitter is ranked as one of the ten-most-visited websites worldwide by Alexa’s web traffic analysis. Daily user estimates vary as the company does not publish statistics on active accounts. A February 2009 Compete.com blog entry ranked Twitter as the third most used social network based on their count of 6 million unique monthly visitors and 55 million monthly visits. In March 2009, a Nielsen.com blog ranked Twitter as the fastest-growing website in the Member Communities category for February 2009. Twitter had annual growth of 1,382 percent, increasing from 475,000 unique visitors in February 2008 to 7 million in February 2009. It was followed by Zimbio with a 240 percent increase, and Facebook with a 228 percent increase. Twitter has a user retention rate of forty percent.

Adding and following content

There are numerous tools for adding content, monitoring content and conversations including Twitvid (video sharing),^[71] TweetDeck, Salesforce.com, HootSuite, and Twitterfeed. Less than half of tweets are posted using the web user interface with most users using third-party applications (based on analysis of 500 million tweets by Sysomos).

Trends

A word, phrase or topic that is tagged at a greater rate than other tags is said to be a trending topic. Trending topics become popular either through a concerted effort by users or because of an event that prompts people to talk about one specific topic. These topics help Twitter and their users to understand what is happening in the world.

Trending topics are sometimes the result of concerted efforts by fans of certain celebrities or cultural phenomena, particularly Lady Gaga (known as Monsters), Justin Bieber (Beliebers), One Direction (Directioners), and the Twilight and Harry Potter novels. Twitter have altered the trend algorithm in the past to prevent manipulation of this type.

Twitter’s 30 March 2010 blog post announced that the hottest Twitter trending topics will scroll across the Twitter homepage. Users will also be able to find out why a specific topic got to be a trending topic.

There have been controversy surrounding the Twitter trending topics: Twitter censored hashtags that their users found offensive. Twitter censored the #Thatsafrican^[77] and the #thingsdarkiessay hashtags after users complained that they found the hashtags offensive.

Authentication

As of August 31, 2010, third-party Twitter applications are required to use OAuth, an authentication method that does not require users to enter their password into the authenticating application. Previously, the OAuth authentication method was optional, it is now compulsory and the user-name/password authentication method has been made redundant and is no longer functional. Twitter stated that the move to OAuth will mean “increased security and a better experience.”

Demographics

Twitter.com Top5 Global Markets by Reach (%)

Country

Percent

Indonesia

Jun 2010

  

20.8%

Dec 2010

  

19.0%

Brazil

Jun 2010

  

20.5%

Dec 2010

  

21.8%

Venezuela

Jun 2010

  

19.0%

Dec 2010

  

21.1%

Netherlands

Jun 2010

  

17.7%

Dec 2010

  

22.3%

Japan

Jun 2010

  

16.8%

Dec 2010

  

20.0%

Note: Visitor age 15+, home and work locations. Excludes visitation from public computers such as Internet cafes or access from mobile phones or PDAs.

Twitter is mainly used by older adults who might not have used other social sites before Twitter, said Jeremiah Owyang, an industry analyst studying social media. “Adults are just catching up to what teens have been doing for years,” he said. According to comScore only eleven percent of Twitter’s users are aged twelve to seventeen. comScore attributes this to Twitter’s “early adopter period” when the social network first gained popularity in business settings and news outlets attracting primarily older users. However, comScore as of late, has stated that Twitter has begun to “filter more into the mainstream”, and “along with it came a culture of celebrity as Shaq, Britney Spears and Ashton Kutcher joined the ranks of the Twitterati.”

According to a study by Sysomos in June 2009, women make up a slightly larger Twitter demographic than men — fifty-three percent over forty-seven percent. It also stated that five percent of users accounted for seventy-five percent of all activity, and that New York has the most Twitter users.

According to Quancast, twenty-seven million people in the US used Twitter as of September 3, 2009. Sixty-three percent of Twitter users are less than thirty-five years old; sixty percent of Twitter users are Caucasian, but a higher than average (compared to other Internet properties) are African American (sixteen percent) and Hispanic (eleven percent); fifty-eight percent of Twitter users have a total household income of at least $60,000.

On September 7, 2011, Twitter announced that it has 100 million active users logging in at least once a month and 50 million active users every day.

In an article published on January 6th, 2012, Twitter was confirmed to be the biggest social media network in Japan, with Facebook following closely in second. comScore confirmed this, stating that Japan is the only country in the world where Twitter leads Facebook.

Finances

Funding

 

Twitter’s San Francisco headquarters located at 795 Folsom St.

Twitter raised over US$57 million from venture capitalist growth funding, although exact numbers are not publicly disclosed. Twitter’s first A round of funding was for an undisclosed amount that is rumored to have been between $1 million and $5 million.^[88] Its second B round of funding in 2008 was for $22 million^[89] and its third C round of funding in 2009 was for $35 million from Institutional Venture Partners and Benchmark Capital along with an undisclosed amount from other investors including Union Square Ventures, Spark Capital and Insight Venture Partners.^[88] Twitter is backed by Union Square Ventures, Digital Garage, Spark Capital, and Bezos Expeditions.

In May 2008, The Industry Standard remarked that Twitter’s long-term viability is limited by a lack of revenue. Twitter board member Todd Chaffee forecast that the company could profit from e-commerce, noting that users may want to buy items directly from Twitter since it already provides product recommendations and promotions.

The company raised $200 million in new venture capital in December 2010, at a valuation of approximately $3.7 billion. In March 2011, 35,000 Twitter shares sold for $34.50 each on Sharespost, an implied valuation of $7.8 billion. In August, 2010 Twitter announced a “significant” investment lead by Digital Sky Technology that, at $800 million, was reported to be the largest venture round in history.

Twitter has been identified as a possible candidate for an initial public offering by 2013.

In December 2011, the Saudi prince Alwaleed bin Talal invested $300 million in Twitter. The company was valued at $8.4 billion at the time.

Revenue sources

In July 2009, some of Twitter’s revenue and user growth documents were published on TechCrunch after being illegally obtained by Hacker Croll. The documents projected 2009 revenues of $400,000 in the third quarter and $4 million in the fourth quarter along with 25 million users by the end of the year. The projections for the end of 2013 were $1.54 billion in revenue, $111 million in net earnings, and 1 billion users.^[2] No information about how Twitter planned to achieve those numbers was published. In response, Twitter co-founder Biz Stone published a blog post suggesting the possibility of legal action against the hacker.

On April 13, 2010, Twitter announced plans to offer paid advertising for companies that would be able to purchase “promoted tweets” to appear in selective search results on the Twitter website, similar to Google Adwords’ advertising model. As of April 13, Twitter announced it had already signed up a number of companies wishing to advertise including Sony Pictures, Red Bull, Best Buy, and Starbucks.

The company generated $45 million in annual revenue in 2010, after beginning sales midway through that year. The company operated at a loss through most of 2010. Revenues were forecast for $100 million to $110 million in 2011. Users’ photos can generate royalty-free revenue for Twitter, with an agreement with WENN being announced in May 2011. In June 2011, Twitter announced it would offer small businesses a self serve advertising system.

Technology

Implementation

The Twitter Web interface uses the Ruby on Rails framework, deployed on a performance enhanced Ruby Enterprise Edition implementation of Ruby.

As of April 6, 2011, Twitter engineers confirmed they had switched away from their Ruby on Rails search-stack, to a Java server they call Blender.

From the spring of 2007 until 2008 the messages were handled by a Ruby persistent queue server called Starling, but since 2009 implementation has been gradually replaced with software written in Scala.^[107] The service’s application programming interface (API) allows other web services and applications to integrate with Twitter.

Interface

On April 30, 2009, Twitter adjusted its web interface, adding a search bar and a sidebar of “trending topics” — the most common phrases appearing in messages. Biz Stone explains that all messages are instantly indexed and that “with this newly launched feature, Twitter has become something unexpectedly important — a discovery engine for finding out what is happening right now.”

Outages

 

The Twitter fail whale error message.

When Twitter experiences an outage, users see the “fail whale” error message image created by Yiying Lu,^[111] illustrating eight orange birds using a net to hoist a whale from the ocean captioned “Too many tweets! Please wait a moment and try again.”

Twitter had approximately ninety-eight percent uptime in 2007 (or about six full days of downtime). The downtime was particularly noticeable during events popular with the technology industry such as the 2008 Macworld Conference & Expo keynote address.

• May 2008 – Twitter’s new engineering team made architectural changes to deal with the scale of growth. Stability issues resulted in down time or temporary feature removal.
• August 2008 – Twitter withdrew free SMS services from users in the United Kingdom and for approximately five months instant messaging support via a XMPP bot was listed as being “temporarily unavailable”
• October 10, 2008 – Twitter’s status blog announced that instant messaging (IM) service was no longer a temporary outage and needed to be revamped. It was announced that Twitter aims to return its IM service pending necessary major work.
• June 12, 2009 – In what was called a potential “Twitpocalypse”, the unique numerical identifier associated with each tweet exceeded the limit of 32-bit signed integers (2,147,483,647 total messages). While Twitter itself was not affected, some third-party clients could no longer access recent tweets. Patches were quickly released, though some iPhone applications had to wait for approval from the App Store.

• June 25, 2009 – Twitter crashed at least once and ran very slowly for some time after It recorded over 50,000 tweets about Michael Jackson’s death in just one hour. Michael Jackson was ranked on seven of the top ten trending topics.

• September 22, 2009 – The identifier exceeded the limit for 32-bit unsigned integers (4,294,967,296 total messages) again breaking some third-party clients.

• August 6, 2009 – Twitter and Facebook suffered from a denial-of-service attack, causing the Twitter website to go offline for several hours. It was later confirmed that the attacks were directed at one pro-Georgian user around the anniversary of the 2008 South Ossetia War, rather than the sites themselves.
• December 17, 2009 – A hacking attack replaced the website’s welcoming screen with an image of a green flag and the caption “This site has been hacked by Iranian Cyber Army” for nearly an hour. No connection between the hackers and Iran has been established.
• June–July 2010 – Twitter has a very high service rejection rate (10%-20%) during 2010 FIFA World Cup period, also, the response latency increased a lot.
• November 2010 – A number of accounts encountered a fault that resulted in them seeing the “fail whale” when they tried to login to their accounts. The accounts themselves were not locked out as account holders could still see their “mentions” page, and post from there, but the timeline and a number of other features were unavailable during this outage.

Privacy and security

Twitter messages are public but users can also send private messages. Twitter collects personally identifiable information about its users and shares it with third parties. The service reserves the right to sell this information as an asset if the company changes hands.  While Twitter displays no advertising, advertisers can target users based on their history of tweets and may quote tweets in ads directed specifically to the user.

A security vulnerability was reported on April 7, 2007, by Nitesh Dhanjani and Rujith. Since Twitter used the phone number of the sender of an SMS message as authentication, malicious users could update someone else’s status page by using SMS spoofing. The vulnerability could be used if the spoofer knew the phone number registered to their victim’s account. Within a few weeks of this discovery Twitter introduced an optional personal identification number (PIN) that its users could use to authenticate their SMS-originating messages.

On January 5, 2009, 33 high-profile Twitter accounts were compromised after a Twitter administrator’s password was guessed by a dictionary attack. Falsified tweets — including sexually explicit and drug-related messages — were sent from these accounts.

Twitter launched the beta version of their “Verified Accounts” service on June 11, 2009, allowing famous or notable people to announce their Twitter account name. The home pages of these accounts display a badge indicating their status.

In May 2010, a bug was discovered by İnci Sözlük users that allowed Twitter users to force others to follow them without the other users’ consent or knowledge. For example, comedian Conan O’Brien’s account, which had been set to follow only one person, was changed to receive nearly 200 malicious subscriptions.^[135]

In response to Twitter’s security breaches, the Federal Trade Commission brought charges against the service which were settled on June 24, 2010. This was the first time the FTC had taken action against a social network for security lapses. The settlement requires Twitter to take a number of steps to secure users’ private information, including maintenance of a “comprehensive information security program” to be independently audited biannually.

On December 14, 2010, the United States Department of Justice issued a subpoena directing Twitter to provide information for accounts registered to or associated with WikiLeaks. Twitter decided to notify its users and said in a statement, “…it’s our policy to notify users about law enforcement and governmental requests for their information, unless we are prevented by law from doing so”.

A “MouseOver” exploit occurred on September 21, 2010, when an XSS Worm became active on Twitter. When an account user held the mouse cursor over blacked out parts of a tweet, the worm within the script would automatically open links and re-post itself on the reader’s account. The exploit was then re-used to post pop-up ads and links to pornographic sites. The origin is unclear but Pearce H. Delphin (known on Twitter as @zzap) and a Scandinavian developer, Magnus Holm, both claim to have modified the exploit of a user, possibly Masato Kinugawa, who was using it to create coloured Tweets. Kinugawa, a Japanese developer, reported the XSS vulnerability to Twitter on August 14. Later, when he found it was exploitable again, he created the account ‘RainbowTwtr’ and used it to post coloured messages. Delphin says he exposed the security flaw by tweeting a JavaScript function for “onMouseOver”, and Holm later created and posted the XSS Worm that automatically re-tweeted itself. Security firm Sophos reported the virus was spread by people doing it for “fun and games”, but noted it could be exploited by cybercriminals. Twitter issued a statement on their status blog at 13:50 UTC that “The exploit is fully patched”. Twitter representative Carolyn Penner said no charges would be pressed.

In May 2011, a claimant known as “CTB” (subsequently identified as Ryan Giggs) in the case of CTB v Twitter Inc., Persons Unknown took legal action at the High Court of Justice in London against Twitter.,^[142] requesting that Twitter release details of account holders. This followed gossip posted on Twitter about Giggs’ private life, causing conflict relating to privacy injunctions. Tony Wang, the head of Twitter in Europe, said that people who do “bad things” on the site would need to defend themselves under the laws of their own jurisdiction in the event of controversy, and that the site would hand over information about users to the authorities when it was legally required to do so. He also suggested that Twitter would accede to a UK court order to divulge names of users responsible for “illegal activity” on the site.

On May 29, 2011, it was reported that South Tyneside council in England had successfully taken legal action against Twitter in a court in California, which forced Twitter to reveal the details of five user accounts. The council was trying to discover the identity of a blogger called “Mr Monkey” who allegedly posted libellous statements about three local councillors.

On January 23, 2012, it was reported that Twitter will be acquiring Dasient, a startup that offers malware protection for businesses. Twitter hopes that Dasient will help remove hateful advertisers on the website.

On January 26, 2012, Twitter began offering a feature which would allow tweets to be removed selectively by country. Twitter cited France and Germany as examples, where pro-Nazi content is illegal. Previously, deleted tweets were removed in all countries.

On February 20, 2012, a third-party public-key encryption app (written in Python and partially funded by a grant from the Shuttleworth Foundation) for direct messaging in Twitter, CrypTweet, was released.

Open source

Twitter released several open source projects developed while overcoming technical challenges of their service.^[154] Notable projects are the Gizzard Scala framework for creating distributed datastores and the distributed graph database FlockDB.

URL shortener

t.co is a URL shortening service created by Twitter. It is only available for links posted to Twitter and not available for general use. All links posted to Twitter use a t.co wrapper. Twitter hopes that the service will be able to protect users from malicious sites, and will use it to track clicks on links within tweets.

Having previously used the services of third parties TinyURL and bit.ly, Twitter began experimenting with its own URL shortening service for direct messages in March 2010 using the twt.tl domain,^[155] before it purchased the t.co domain. The service was tested on the main site using the accounts @TwitterAPI, @rsarver and @raffi. On September 2, 2010, an email from Twitter to users said they would be expanding the roll-out of the service to users. On June 7, 2011, Twitter announced that it was rolling out the feature.

Integrated photo-sharing service

On June 1, 2011, Twitter announced its own integrated photo-sharing service that enables users to upload a photo and attach it to a Tweet right from Twitter.com. Users now also have the ability to add pictures to Twitter’s search by adding hashtags to the tweet. Twitter also plans to provide photo galleries designed to gather and syndicate all photos that a user has uploaded on Twitter and third-party services such as TwitPic.

Use and social impact

 

Dorsey (left) said after a Twitter Town Hall held in July 2011, that Twitter received over 110,000 #AskObama tweets.

Main article: Twitter usage

See also: Censorship of Twitter

Twitter has been used for a variety of purposes in many different industries and scenarios. For example, it has been used to organize protests, sometimes referred to as “Twitter Revolutions” and which include the 2011 Egyptian revolution, 2010–2011 Tunisian protests, 2009–2010 Iranian election protests, and 2009 Moldova civil unrest. The governments of Iran and Egypt blocked the service in retaliation. The service is also used as a form of civil disobedience: in 2010, users expressed outrage over the Twitter Joke Trial by making obvious jokes about terrorism; and in the British privacy injunction debate in the same country a year later, where several celebrities that had taken out anonymised injunctions, most notably the Manchester United player Ryan Giggs, were identified by thousands of users in protest to traditional journalism being censored.

Twitter is also increasingly used for making TV more interactive and social. This effect is sometimes referred to as the “virtual watercooler” or social television. Twitter has been used successfully to encourage people to watch live TV events, such as the Oscars, the Super Bowl and the MTV Video Music Awards; this strategy has however proven less effective with regularly scheduled TV shows. Such direct cross-promotions have been banned from French television due to regulations against secret advertising.

In May 2008, The Wall Street Journal wrote that social networking services such as Twitter “elicit mixed feelings in the technology-savvy people who have been their early adopters. Fans say they are a good way to keep in touch with busy friends. But some users are starting to feel ‘too’ connected, as they grapple with check-in messages at odd hours, higher cellphone bills and the need to tell acquaintances to stop announcing what they’re having for dinner.”

Tech writer Bruce Sterling opined in 2007 that using Twitter for “literate communication” is “about as likely as firing up a CB radio and hearing some guy recite the Iliad“.In September 2008, the journalist Clive Thompson mused in a The New York Times Magazine editorial that the service had expanded narcissism into “a new, supermetabolic extreme—the ultimate expression of a generation of celebrity-addled youths who believe their every utterance is fascinating and ought to be shared with the world.” Conversely, Vancouver Sun columnist Steve Dotto opined that part of Twitter’s appeal is the challenge of trying to publish such messages in tight constraints,^[174] and Jonathan Zittrain, professor of Internet law at Harvard Law School, said that “the qualities that make Twitter seem inane and half-baked are what makes it so powerful”.

In 2009, Nielsen Online reported that Twitter has a user retention rate of forty percent. Many people stop using the service after a month, therefore the site may potentially reach only about ten percent of all Internet users. In 2009, Twitter won the “Breakout of the Year” Webby Award. During a February 2009 discussion on National Public Radio’s Weekend Edition, the journalist Daniel Schorr stated that Twitter accounts of events lacked rigorous fact-checking and other editorial improvements. In response, Andy Carvin gave Schorr two examples of breaking news stories that played out on Twitter and said users wanted first-hand accounts and sometimes debunked stories. Time magazine acknowledged growing level of influence in its 2010 Time 100; to determine the influence of people, it used a formula based on famous social networking sites, Twitter and Facebook. The list ranges from Barack Obama and Oprah Winfrey to Lady Gaga and Ashton Kutcher.

After claims in the media that the hashtags #wikileaks and #occupywallstreet were being censored because they did not show up on the site’s list of trending topics, Twitter responded by stating that it does not censor hashtags unless they contain obscenities.

Reception

In 2006, when Twitter launched under the name “Twttr”, Michael Arrington of TechCrunch commented that although he liked the service, he also noted that he felt uncomfortable with the fact that every user’s Twitter page is available to the public.

Change of focus

 

The mobile version of twitter.com

Twitter emphasized its news and information-network strategy in November 2009 by changing the question asked to users for status updates from “What are you doing?” to “What’s happening?” Entertainment Weekly put it on its end-of-the-decade, “best-of” list, saying, “Limiting yourself to 140 characters—the maximum for messages on this diabolically addictive social-networking tool—is easy.”

On November 22, 2010, Biz Stone, a cofounder of the company, expressed for the first time the idea of a Twitter news network, a concept of wire-like news service he has been working on for years.

***

For A Visual History of Twitter (InfoGraphics)

Click here!

Television as we defined it is mere electronic system of transmitting transient images of fixed or moving objects together with sound over a wire or through space by apparatus that converts light and sound into electrical waves and reconverts them into visible light rays and audible sound. This definition may be true but other than that television is hailed as the most powerful and influential media of all time.

So much for that, in the Philippines there are three broadcasting companies that graced and flourish in every Filipino television, and they are the GMA Network, ABS-CBN Corporation, and the TV 5.

GMA NETWORK

GMA NETWORK, INC. is the leading broadcasting company in the Philippines. It operates a network of 47 Very High Frequency (VHF) including 1 affiliate, 13 Ultra High Frequency (UHF) television stations and 23 radio stations throughout the country.

The Network was founded by Robert La Rue Stewart in 1950 as Republic Broadcasting System (RBS) with flagship AM radio station DZBB operating from the Calvo Building in Escolta, Manila.

RBS ventured into television in 1961 and began broadcasting on Channel 7 in the Greater Manila Area. In 1975, the triumvirate of Felipe L. Gozon, Menardo R. Jimenez and Gilberto M. Duavit took over from the Stewarts the management of RBS and renamed it to GMA 7.

The original meaning of the acronym “GMA” was Greater Manila Area, referring to the initial coverage area of the station. As GMA’s reach widened, the meaning of its acronym was changed to Global Media Arts. Today, its corporate name is simply, GMA Network, Inc.

GMA also owns a wide array of media-related businesses apart from its television and radio networks including film production, record publishing and distribution, program acquisition and syndication, international channel operation, production design, talent development and management, marketing and promotions, audio-visual production and new media.

GMA is the most awarded television network in the country. By far, it is the only Philippine media company to has won the coveted Peabody Awards for excellence in journalism (2000 and 2010), and the Best Terrestrial Television Station of the Year (2005) from the Asian Television Awards.

GMA reaches out to millions of Filipinos across the globe through its international channels GMA Pinoy TV, GMA Life TV and GMA News TV International. These channels are available via cable, direct-to-home and IPTV.

GMA’s official tagline is “Kapuso ng Bawat Pilipino (One in Heart with Every Filipino).”

ABS-CBN CORPORATION

ABS-CBN Broadcasting Corporation (ABS-CBN: “Alto Broadcasting System-Chronicle Broadcasting Network”), a Philippine multi-media conglomerate, is the largest integrated media and entertainment company in the Philippines with an asset base of more than PHP32.5 billion (US$666.8 million) as of June 2008. ABS-CBN is principally involved in television and radio broadcasting, as well as the production of television programming for domestic and international audiences and other related businesses. It was founded on June 13, 1946, becoming Asia’s first commercial television broadcaster. It is part of the Lopez Group of Companies. It also broadcasts content to the rest of the world through The Filipino Channel.

The network’s main broadcast facilities, news headquarters, transmitter and satellite operations and studio complex are located at the ABS-CBN Broadcast Center at Barangay Laging Handa, Diliman, Quezon City. In Metro Manila, its terrestrial VHF station is Channel 2 (DWWX-TV) while its terrestrial UHF station is Studio 23 (DWAC-TV). The company is slated to begin broadcasting digital television starting in January 2008,[5][6] although it has been presumably delayed since there were no announcement during the entire month of January that the signal is now digitized. It is now expected to begin its digital broadcasting by the end of 2008.

On March 3, 2008, Executive Vice-President Charo Santos-Concio had been promoted as 5th president of ABS-CBN Broadcasting Corp., taking over from interim president Eugenio Lopez III

In 2003, during the television station’s 50th anniversary, ABS-CBN launched its present slogan, “Kapamilya” (literally means “a member of the family”), which it believes reaffirms the network’s commitment to quality programming that will foster the morals and values that are ostensibly upheld in many Filipino families.

http://kapamilya.org/about.html

TV 5

Associated Broadcasting Company (TV5) is a major commercial television network in the Philippines solely owned by MediaQuest Holdings, Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary of the Philippine Long Distance Telephone Company headed by business tycoon Manuel V. Pangilinan.

Its parent company, the Associated Broadcasting Company, also owns and operates other media properties, including the news channel AksyonTV, and news radio station DWFM in Quezon City.

On October 20, 2009, Media Prima announced that it would be divesting its share in TV5 and selling it to the Philippine Long Distance Telephone Company’s broadcasting division, MediaQuest Holdings, Inc. The acquisition was officially announced by chairman Manuel V. Pangilinan on March 2, 2010, along with the announcement of a new lineup of programming to debut on the network, along with a new campaign branding itself as the “Kapatid” (“sibling”) network. Dream FM and its affiliate stations in other parts of the country remained under the Cojuangco management led by former ABC stockholder Anton Lagdameo. They became collectively known as the Dream FM Network, with TV5 as its licensee until June 2011.

On October 1, 2010, TV5 took over the management of MediaQuest’s Nation Broadcasting Corporation stations; DWFM was re-launched as a TV5-branded news radio station on November 8, 2010, Radyo5 92.3 NewsFM, and DWNB-TV was re-launched as AksyonTV on February 21, 2011, a news channel based off TV5’s newscast Aksyon.

In April 2011, TV5 launched Kapatid TV5, an international channel. The channel will be overseen by Pilipinas Global Network Ltd., a company owned by PLDT and ABC Development Corp. based in the British Virgin Islands

By 2012, the network will complete the construction of its new headquarters, the 6,000-sqm TV5 Media Center located in Mandaluyong.

In June 2011, Sports5 began a deal with the Intercontinental Broadcasting Corporation to produce sports programming for the network under the brand AKTV. Additionally, AKTV would also acquire the rights to the Philippine Basketball Association through a new contract with TV5, displacing Solar Sports’ previous contract.

From here, I decided to review their respective noontime shows. First off, is the longest running noontime show Eat Bulaga! produced by Television And Production Exponents Inc. (TAPE) and aired by GMA Network. The show is broadcast from The New TAPE Studios (Eastside Studio) at the GMA Broadway Centrum in New Manila, Quezon City. Eat Bulaga! is aired Weekdays and Saturdays at 12:00 pm to 2:30 pm. The show is also broadcast worldwide through GMA Pinoy TV. The main hosts of the show are Vic Sotto, Joey De Leon, and Tito Sotto. Co-hosts are: Jimmy Santis, Michael V, Keempee De Leon, Ruby Rodriguez, Julia Clarete, Pauleen Luna, Pia Guanio, Allan K, Jose Manalo, Wally Bayola, Paolo Ballesteros, Ryan Agoncillo, Anjo Yllana, Diana Menezes and recently Isabelle Daza.

Eat Bulaga! Is a variety show in which includes PNB or Pamabato ng Barangay, Pinoy Henyo, and the most popular Juan for All, All for Juan: Bayanihan of the Pipol.  

If the GMA Network have Eat Bulaga, ABS-CBN have their newest noontime show, It’s Showtime. Originally, Showtime is a talent search first aired in October 2009 and modified into a variety show replacing Happy Yippee Yehey. The main hosts are the same, Vice Ganda, Anne Curtis, Vhong Navarro, Karylle, Billy Crawford, Jugs Jugueta, Teddy Corpuz and Kim Atienza. Addition to the original gang are Jhong Hilario, Ryan Bang and Coleen Garcia. It’s Showtime first aired last February 6 from 11:30am to 2:30pm and so far the program is doing great.

Lastly, from the fastest-growing network, TV5, they do not have a noontime show similar to that of the GMA and ABS-CBN. Instead, at 11:30 am, TV5 airs Balitang Tapat with Taffy Tulfo and Amelyn Veloso. From the title show itself, it is all about new and runs for about 45 minutes and later followed by Sine Tanghali which features foreign movies dubbed in Filipino language perhaps to acquire more audience.

With the three networks on the competition for more audience share, no doubt the ABS-CBN and the GMA networks are on the lead where Eat Bulaga still reigns. But then, the people behind the shows and the hosts, what matters to them is the happiness they’ll be able to give in return to the people supporting them all the way. It’s not about the money; it’s about the entertainment they bring to the people that truly matters. This is what I observe as I watched the noontime shows in the three biggest television networks. I have seen their dedication to their jobs which they fulfilled satisfactorily. 

We may define radio as a wireless transmission through space of electromagnetic waves in the approximate frequency range from 10 kilohertz to 300,000 megahertz. It may sound too complicated so let us just say that it is the transmission of programs for the public by radio broadcast. In the Philippines today, radio is used for broadcasting news and also for entertainment. Here are the two FM stations in our country today, 90.7 Love Radio and Tambayan 101.9

Love Radio

MBC’s (Manila Broadcasting Company) leading station on the FM band was previously known by its call letters DZMB, when it started out on AM in 1946 as the pioneer music station in the country. It began broadcasting on FM in 1975, signalling the birth of the Love Radio network.

Back then, it played mainstream pop, later gravitating to easy listening music. Now, pushing into its third decade, 90.7 Love Radio continues to entertain a wide range of listeners with a music format that combines middle-of-the-road (MOR) songs with contemporary hit tunes and the best in alternative / modern rock sounds.

The station broadcasts at 25,000 watts, reaching out to radio listeners in Mega Manila, parts of Quezon, Nueva Ecija, Bataan, Zambales, Rizal Province, Bulacan, Laguna, Cavite, Batangas, Pampanga, Parts of Tarlac and Pangasinan.

90.7 Love Radio is the acknowledged and official #1 radio station in metro and mega-Manila, having consistently topped the ratings for the past seven years, based on surveys by the Radio Research Council.Its taglines “Kailangan pa ba’ngi-memorize ‘yan?” and “Bisyo na ‘to!” have become common everyday expressions of many Filipinos.

Love radio does have specifics for music each day of the week. On Mondays, heart popping beats will pump up your first day of the week, Tuesdays are sure to be in dynamic melody. Wednesdays are absolutely in rhythm. Thursdays are in perfect harmony and Fridays are definitely groovy. Aside from these type of music in everyday, they also have energetic disc jockies and full of sense of humor too, so boredom is absolutely off-limits.

Below are the list of programs and DJs of Love Radio

http://www.loveradio.com.ph/index.php?page=info

Tambayan 101.9

DWRR-FM, branded as Tambayan 101.9, is the flagship FM station of the ABS–CBN Corporation in the Philippines. It is a 24-hour operating station (except on Mondays where it signs-off at midnight) that plays OPM, Hip-Hop, R&B, K-Pop, J-Pop, and Foreign Hit Songs from the USA, Japan, UK, South Korea, and around the world.

Originally founded in 1960 and acquired by ABS-CBN in 1986, it is broadcast live throughout the Philippine archipelago as well as throughout the world via The Filipino Channel (TFC). The studios are located at ABS-CBN Broadcast Center, Sgt. Esguerra Ave., Cor Mo.Ignacia St., Quezon City. Its transmitter is located at the Eugenio Lopez Center, Barangay Sta.Cruz Sumulong Highway, Antipolo City, Province of Rizal.

Among the DJs of Tambayan right now are Arnold Rei, Martin D. (1996–present), China Heart (1997–1998, 1999–present), Cha-Cha, Charlie, Jasmin, Raki, Ronald Duck (formely known as “Parechuy” from MOR Cebu), Carlo Santino (from MOR Cebu), Bea (formerly Bonggang Bea of 93.9 iFM), Cassey and Fiols.

Below are the lists of programs aired in Tambayan 101.9

Request Express (Mondays-Fridays)

Usapang Tambayan (Mondays-Sundays)

Break Mo To (Saturdays)

Tambayer, Kanta Tayo (Sundays)

Tambayan Top 10 (Saturdays)

Ano’ng Meron (Mondays-Saturdays)

Gwapo Files & Raki’s Inbox (Mondays-Fridays)

Gigilan with Arnold Rei and Bea (Mondays-Fridays)

Dear Jasmin (Mondays-Fridays)

Mahiwagang Aklat Ng Kaalaman (Mondays-Saturdays)

Budots Budots (Mondays-Fridays)

One of the similarities that I see is that these two stations capture the heart of the public and the two of them were claiming that they were the number one station. They both have joke times in between the programs and the music they’re playing were all on top today and even before. I guess the one who’ll carry the stations are the disc jockies themselves. How they speak on air, their personalities, their sincerities and their style matters. Because aside from good playlist (which any radio stations can come up with) DJs are also an essential part to keep the listeners with the station. Every day, the DJs have topics for the day and have the listeners given their opinions via text messaging, twitter or facebook.

The two stations also have a program which caters about love and relationships. For tambayan, the have DJ Jasmin for Dear Jasmin and True Love Conversations with Papa Jack for Love Radio, which both give their opinions and suggestions for the problems from their caller or listeners. They both have the same task but then, as what I have said earlier it all goes down to which DJs the listeners prefer. Nonetheless, both of the radio stations have an edge in the FM radio. I’ve been listening to both of them and both of them are good. J

Ataul for Rent is an independent drama film whose cast were led by some of the veteran actors in the Philippines Entertainment business. The lead cast are composed of Joel Torre, Jacklyn Jose, Irma Adlawan, Noni Buencamino, Ronnie Lazaro and Pen Medina. The film was created by the following people behind it.

                Director: Neal Tan

                Producer: Anthony Gedang

                Screenwriters: Anthony Gedang and Neal Tan

                Music: Nonong Buencamino

                Editor: Rocky Ko

                Cinematography: Renato de Vera

                Distributor: Artiste Entertainment Works International

Synopsis

    The story revolves around the lives of a live-in couple who owns a small-time funeral parlor renting out coffins of four different sizes, small, medium, large and extra small. Guido (Joel Torre), the owner, doubles as the embalmer, while his partner, Pining (Jacklyn Jose), does the make-up and uses the same implements for both the dead and the living and is the jueteng kubrador of the neighborhood.

    Gossipers, gamblers, drunkards, drug addicts, ex-convicts, prostitutes, snatchers and other notorious characters regularly hang out in the funeral wakes of the alley either drinking alcohol, in the gaming table, or just gossiping around. These personalities, having been born and growing up in this kind of environment, see themselves as having the right to abuse their own bodies and cause untold miseries to others. These same people do not believe in God but eventually will call on Him in the midst of their deathbeds.

    The story progresses with rental use of three coffins because of the deaths, one after the other, of Tale, the shabu-user mother of a drunkard son who loves her so much;

    Moises (Jet Alcantara), a professional thief who was killed/salvaged by the police and was a husband to a nagging wife with three kids; and Andoy (Denver Olivarez), an addict whose brother Danny (Coco Martin) is a call boy con snatcher and whose gambling laundry woman mother Aling Carmen (Irma Adlawan) became insane after Andoy was killed by a drug lord and gang leader.

    The narrative is told through the eyes of the neighborhood hobo, Batul (Ronnie Lazaro), whose pure heart and innocence witnesses all the daily drama, miseries and evil deeds unfolding within the alley.

    The compound became a haven for scums and other no-good doers and has become a threat to the community and its authorities. Eventually, all houses were demolished in a violent manner that ends the aberrant activities and injustices of the people towards other people, and on the same site, a new church will be constructed and a new hope.

Awards

Ataul for Rent opened in the Philippine cinemas last November 7, 2007. It has been graded “A” by the Cinema Evaluation Board, and was the official selection to the Montreal World Film Festival in November. It has also been selected for competition in the 31st Cairo Film Festival. The movie, starred by a remarkable ensemble of character actors and actresses, has just been selected for the competition section of the 12th International Film Festival of Kerala on December that year at the Trivandrum, Kerala, India. Only 14 films were picked from over 215 entries, making the shortlist truly special.

In the 10th Gawad Pasado Awards which was held last April 30, 2008 at the Fort, Taguig City, Ataul for Rent bagged most of the awards that night which includes the following:

Pinakapasadong Pelikula:
Ataul for Rent together with Endo and Foster Child

Pinakapasadong Aktor:
Joel Torre

 Pinakapasadong Katuwang na Aktor:
Ronnie Lazaro & Pen Medina

Pinakapasadong Katuwang na Aktres:
Irma Adlawan

Pinakapasadong Direktor:
Neil “Buboy” Tan

Pinakapasadong Musika:
Nonong Buencamino

Pasado Aktres ng Dekada:
Jaclyn Jose

On the other hand, in the 56th Filipino Academy of Movie Arts and Sciences or FAMAS awards, this independent film also bagged some of the awards including Irma Adlawan who brought home the Best Supporting award for her arresting portrayal of a mother blinded by cash from her wayward son who met a tragic fate. The film also won the Best Story for Neal “Buboy” Tan and Anthony Guidang  while Tan, who won his first award since started writing screenplays and directing, took home the Best Screenplay for the same movie.

Given all the awards and nomination for this independent film, truly this may be considered as one of the world-class film made by the Filipinos and those awards and nominations are enough to prove its calibre.

Reflection

 The depiction of life in a Philippine slum was quite intriguing and stimulating, though I’m sure conditions are even worse in real life than in the film.  It’s amazing that despite such conditions, Filipinos are such a happy and fun-loving people, but perhaps they have to be to survive. All in all, the film is great because it reached my heart mainly because of the great act by the casts, the production itself and the way the scenes in the film was synchronized. The cinematography is really great because it captures the miserable life seen in the kalyehon and the story itself is presented in such a way that it embodies the stories of different characters without making the film looked so chaotic. However, the ending isn’t good because it was ended fast.

The film showed me that life isn’t just about all the sweet and good things. It showed me the life of those unfortunate people living in a place like kalyehon, their struggles and all. But then, it also shows that no matter how tired and weary we all are; we have someone whom we can all turn to. Someone named God, for he’ll never forsake us because of His unconditional love for all of us.

Sources:

http://www.starmometer.com/2008/05/07/ataul-for-rent-tops-10th-gawad-pasado-awards/

http://www.abs-cbnnews.com/entertainment/11/30/08/lorna-tolentino-jinggoy-estrada-win-famas-awards

http://agimat.net/film/100330.php 

Magazines – a.k.a. periodicals, serials, glossies, slicks – are publications that appear on a regular schedule and contain a variety of articles. 

They are financed by advertising, a purchase price, pre-paid subscriptions or sometimes all three of these means. 

The English word magazine recalls a military storehouse of war materiel and originally was derived from the Arabic word makhazin meaning “storehouses.” The term magazine was coined for this use by Edward Cave, editor of The Gentleman’s Magazine. 

Magazines didn’t look like that until after World War II. The first magazines, in the 1700s, looked like….books.

Magazines began as genteel soapboxes from which literate men expounded their points of view, in essay or satire. Daniel Defoe started the first English magazine, The Review, during or just after his imprisonment for criticizing the Church of England. His purpose: a statesman or man of letters offers his comment, criticism and satire to influence public taste. The audience is composed of members of the same social scene that is the subject of most of the magazine’s writing. Over the course of time, readers come to depend on the regularity of its point of view. The form of the Review set the form for British journals: four small pages, dense print, few illustrations (except some engraved borders and lettering) and most of the compelling force contained in the acerbic, airborne sarcasm of the text.

Until the 1880s, only the upper classes read magazines. They were small soft cover books, carrying stories that appealed to a classically-educated, elite readership that identified with Europe. The poorfolk read newspapers and weekly tabloids. Magazines were expensive, partly because printing technology limited even the most popular to a run of 100,000 copies; it simply took too long to push any more paper through a press.

Suddenly magazines were very attractive to advertisers. Before the turn of the century, even the most popular magazines carried only a small amount of what we call classified advertising and almost no large display ads. But after some resistance, the last of which died out in the 30s, mass market magazines all came to depend on advertising to survive. This changed magazines completely. They no longer sold people information and entertainment; their main purpose was to provide advertisers with a steady, returning audience.

Advertising exploded, but not just because of the magazine. The country was now knit together by railroads, which made large-scale distribution networks possible. New manufacturing technologies (and the productivity gains of Frederick Taylor’s “scientific management”) made it possible to mass-produce goods for unprecedented reach. And the invention of plate glass windows, around the turn of the century, made possible expansive storefronts, which in turn set the tone for the large department stores which placed the most expensive early advertising. But the co-evolution of advertising and mass media was dramatically important. Ads made it possible to sell magazines below production cost, which made it possible to lower their price still more, which increased their audience, which made them even more useful to advertisers.

Advertisers discovered that with full pages and the new language of design, there was room for pictures, slogans, headlines and the psychic symbols of soft sell. Graphic design came to mean sophisticated visual means of developing impact.

MAGAZINES IN THE PHILIPPINES

It is difficult to find for a starting place for a history of magazines in the Philippines. Early publications were not called magazines, but weeklies, fortnightlies, monthlies, reviews, journals and newspapers. However, if by magazine, we mean a publication that appears less frequently than most newspapers, then the first publications in the Philippines were magazines.  If by magazine we mean a publication bearing the appellation “magazine”, then it wasn’t until 1995 that the islands have magazines.

 In the Philippines today, there are a number of magazines published with different target markets. It can either be for teenagers, housewives, business people, women, men and more. And one of the most popular magazines in the racks is the Metro Magazine.

Metro Magazine is about Fashion and lifestyle published under ABS-CBN Publishing Inc. - a Filipino magazine and book publisher and a wholly owned subsidiary of ABS-CBN Corporation. It is operated by the Cable Channels and Print Media Group. It is the largest magazine distributor in the country, covering 200 cities and municipalities throughout the Philippines. ABS-CBN Publishing is also the first Filipino publisher to have significant overseas sales.

StarStudio

StarStudio Magazine, which is ABS-CBN’s most circulated, is an entertainment and celebrity lifestyle magazine. Starstudio has international editions in Guam, Japan and Middle East. It is available in a digital edition at Zinio.

The Buzz

This magazine is inspired by ABS-CBN’s showbiz-oriented talk-show The Buzz.

K Magazine

The largest selling celebrity magazine. The Philippines’ version of O, The Oprah Magazine. A magazine owned by Filipino television and movie personality, The Queen of All Media Kris Aquino. It is available in a digital edition at Zinio.

Metro Society

An entertainment and arts magazine.

Metro Home & Entertaining

Metro Home & Entertaining is a home design and lifestyle magazine. It is available in a digital edition at Zinio.

Metro Weddings

A wedding planning magazine.

Cars by Disney/Pixar

a children-oriented magazine inspired by the motion picture of the same name.

Chalk

Chalk Magazine is a college lifestyle and fashion magazine.

Food

Food Magazine is a culinary magazine. It includes a mix of informational and instructional articles. It is available in a digital edition at Zinio.

Metro Working Mom

A magazine for working mothers.

Myx

A music entertainment magazine that supplements ABS-CBN’s music television channel.

One issue of Metro Magazine was their July 2011 where the actress Angelica Panganiban graced the cover. Her interview with Metro talks about her fierce roles on screen changing to a calmer role. Since this magazine is all about fashion and lifestyle, it does have sections which include Shopping, Beauty Feature, Fashion, Feature, Metro Wear, and Beauty.

Inside the magazine, it tackles about the fashion back at the time where the old glamour then is coming back in fashion. It has an article about the 2011 Metro Beauty Awards given only to the best beauty products in the market. One article that hits me is about celebrating the Filipina Kayumanggi Kaligatan beauties.

Well, it’s about time, we should all be proud of our color and so ending the belief that having white complexion a person can only truly be said beautiful, praising the natural beauty of Filipinos.  METRO magazine is perfect for successful women but you’ll end up scanning the pages and just looking at the pictures if you’re a teenager and still studying.

A Brief History of Tabloids

When John Edwards admitted what the national Enquirer had been saying for months—that he had had an affair with a campaign videographer—it was only the latest in a string of high-profile scandals broken by the supermarket press. But politicians’ foibles weren’t always the target of choice for the tabloids. In the 1950s, their pages were splashed with bloody car accidents and gruesome mutilations. Enquirer owner Generoso Pope dialed down the gore in an effort to appeal to housewives in the checkout aisle, replacing it with alien abductions and medical oddities. Celebrity gossip took over by the late 1960s, as the Enquirer and rival Globe feasted on Chappaquiddick, Jackie Kennedy’s remarriage and the death of Elvis. (The Enquirer paid a Presley relative to snap a picture of the King in his coffin.) Rupert Murdoch’s Star joined in soon after. Weekly World News, billing itself “The World’s Only Reliable Newspaper,” carried on the mantle of the weird, covering miraculous cancer cures and zombie sightings. “When we inform people, it’s usually by accident,” admitted its editor.

Tabloid circulation peaked in the 1980s, but the O.J. Simpson trial prompted a rapid—and ironic—reversal of fortune. Broadcast coverage of the spectacle eclipsed anything that could be done in print, setting a template for sensational TV journalism that would drive the tabs’ circulation down 30% by the mid-’90s.

Celebrity print media has bounced back in recent years, thanks to Britney and Paris, although mostly in the glossy magazine format that Star switched to in 2004. And as it is with most papers, the Internet is impinging on tabloids’ turf. The new medium has already claimed Weekly World News, which folded in 2007—but readers looking for the latest on the ALIEN BABY LOVE CHILD can still find it online.

In the Philippines, there are quite a number of tabloids published and circulated. Five among these are: The People’s Journal Tonight, PM (Pang-Masa), Bulgar, Balita, and Pilipino Star Ngayon. These are a small-format popular newspaper with a simple style, many photographs, and sometimes an emphasis on sensational stories which are popular among the masses. 

People’s Journal Tonight is one of the two tabloids published in the English language (aside from Tempo). This newspaper is part of the Philippines’ biggest group of daily tabloids, The Journal Group of Publications.

Just like any tabloids, People’s Journal Tonight has lesser pages than the broadsheets. But then, it is divided into sections: Metro, News, Editorial, Sports, Miscellaneous, Classifieds and Entertainment. As I scan the newspaper, I noticed that this one is more on news, about 5 pages. From its editorial, an article was written by Atty. Persida Rueda-Acosta, the law consultant in the hit show of TV5, Face to Face. Miscellaneous here includes comics, crosswords and horoscope to add entertainment to the readres.

As for the advertisements, it includes ChickBoy, Ever Bilena, an advertisement to the Sharon and Martin Once in a lifetime Concert and the Ms. Women’s Cover Girl Search.

On the other hand, we also have PM or Pang Masa. Honestly, I am not familiar with this tabloid. I encountered this one in the office where I’m having the OJT. So anyway, it is published in Filipino and its sections are: Weather Report, Police Metro, Punto Mo- which is the editorial part-, Pang Movies, Para Malibang and PM Sports.  One thing that got my attention here are the writers in the editorial part, which includes Gus Abelgas of ABS-CBN and Bettina Carlos an actress. It also has crossword, word hunt and horoscopes for entertainment.

Probably one of the popular tabloids in the Philippines is Balita, which is a part of the Manila Bulletin Publications published in the native language. The contents of this newspaper are more on news divided into three categories: Local, World and Province. It has Anunsyo Klasipikado commonly known as Classified Ads, Sports, Opinyon, Showbiz and Libangan.

 Bulgar. This newspaper is the most popular to me because jeepney drivers, tricycle drivers and even some common people I pass by have one. Really, at first I do not like to read it because I thought it was porn and all. But I am wrong, yes it’s not full of porn articles, it’s not full of news either. Instead, mostly in this newspaper are more on the entertainment, more on the show business.

Furthermore, Korina Sanchez has an article here in the editorial section titled: “Isyung K”, Atty. Rueda- Acosta also has an article here entitled: “Magtanong kay Attorney”, Jinggoy Estrada for “Kakampi”, and Fred S. Lim for “Katapat”. Other than show business news here, it laso have Balitang Probinsya, Health News, Classified ads and Sports section. The only advertisement I’ve seen here is the promo by Petron: Doble Panalo.

   
Pilipino Star Ngayon. The sister publication of The Philippine Star in the national language. It was the first tabloid in the country to come out in full colour and also the first one to establish its presence on the web. One thing that could distinguish Pilipino Star Ngayon among the piles of tabloids, is its section called Litra-Talks where they create a humorous conversation among the people of the hour or the people involved in controversial issues. Other sections here include Bansa, Probinsya, Metro, Opinyon, Palaro, Showbiz, True Confession, Dr. Love Webisode, Dr. Love, Kutob and Komiks.

It is really hard to compare these five tabloids issued today, January 27, 2012,  but one thing that they all have in similar, which is part of their nature, is their target market which is the Masang Pilipino.  One thing that i noticed is its contents. For example is the Bulgar which is mostly about showbiz news while the others have their news from the Metro, World News and from the Province. Another thing is that their news section is mostly write-ups and articles while showbiz is particularly more with the pictures of the stars involved in the issues. In addition, entertainment section is always present mostly with Horoscope, Comics, and Crossword that truly captures the heart of the Masang Pilipino.

*sorry don’t have the actual pics of the newspaper
 http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1832868,00.html#ixzz1o39dVuEx