Media glossary

• Action code - happens in a narrative which tells the audience action will follow
• Active audience - audiences who actively engage in selecting media products to consume and interpret
• Anchorage- words that accompany an image and give the meaning associated with that image
• Appeal - the way in which products attract and interest audiences
• Aspirational - encourages the audience to want more money, up market consumer and a higher social position
• Attract - how media producers appeal to audiences and encourage them to consume the product
• Audience categorisation- how media produces group audiences (eg age, gender) to target audiences
• Audience consumption - the way in which audiences engage with products
• Audience interpretation- the way in which audiences read the meanings and make sense of products
• Audience response- how audiences react to media products
• Brand identity - the association the audience make with the brand
• Broadsheet - a larger newspaper that publishes more serious news
• Caption - words that accompany an image to explain its meaning
• Channel identity - aspects which make a channel recognisable and different from others
• Circulation - how media products are spread
• Colloquial language - conversational language that is less formal
• Commercial channels - channels that raise money through advertisements
• Convergence- when separate media industries come together
• Connotation - suggested meanings attached to something
• Conventions - what the audience expects to see in a particular text
• Cover lines - suggests the content to the reader and sometimes contains teasers
• Cross platform marketing - a text that is exhibited across a range of media forms and platforms
• Demographic category - how media producers group audiences
• Denotation - the description of what you can see and hear
• Diegetic sound - sound that can be seen on screen
• Disruption - changes the balance in a story
• Four c’s - cross cultural consumer characteristics
• Encoding and decoding - producers encode messages for audiences to interpret
• Feature - the main or one of the main stories
• Equilibrium - a state of balance or stability
• Enigma code - increase tension and interest by only releasing bits of info
• Diversification- when media organisations specialised in one form move into producing for a range
• Housestyle - what makes the magazine recognisable
• Global - worldwide
• Fan - an enthusiast of a particular form/product
• Franchise - an entire series
• Gatekeepers - responsible for deciding the most appropriate stories for a newspaper
• Genre - texts that can be grouped into genres that share similar conventions
• Hybrid genre - texts that incorporate elements of more than 1 genre
• Mass audience - idea of one large audience