Narrowcasting Quotes

It's no secret that the media has fragmented in recent years, that audiences have been cut into slivers, and that more and more people get their news from ever narrower outlets.

Tom Snyder was born to broadcast. He loved television and it loved him back. In that, he was a member of a vanishing breed, especially as narrowcasting displaces broadcasting, 'online' replaces 'on the air,' and any Tom, Dick or Mary can be monarch of a desktop domain, uplinking themselves to satellites in space.

When you're still in the broadcast business, you're still trying to reach tens of millions. You're trying to still aim for a broader audience, and I think that's a more difficult task to spread yourself across that audience, connect with them, as opposed to a very, very small, pinpointed audience. Difficult to do.

When I started out as an activist, the issues were much clearer. There's advantage to the new media, but on the other hand, you miss the ability to frame an issue that you had when there were just three TV networks: CBS, NBC, and ABC. So the whole world could see the same police dogs. The same Bull Connor and his white tank. Now you've got narrow-casting. The media is all fragmented. It's so hard to get people to focus in a sustained way.

Canadian comedians are generally more well-rounded... They have to do a lot more. In order to have a career in this country, you have to do everything. And in the States you can narrow-cast, you can be just a sitcom performer or a stand-up comedian or a sketch performer.

I do think that in the near future, if it hasn't happened already, people will be able to use technology to design their own novels, perhaps with individuals themselves as the main character. In other words, everything is being individualized and narrowed.

Radio is so heavily programmed; you have to fit into a certain box. So it's harder for anything different to get through.

Sure, it can happen that the director sees you in a particular genre, and they like your work in that genre; they tend to think that you can only do well in that genre.

When you can program your own life, you're just going to program what you already like. Because of that, people's taste becomes much more narrow-minded.

In the industry, once people see you in a certain mold, you start getting offered only those kind of roles.