Producers Challenges In Television Program Production

Mass Communication

In television program production, producers face a myriad of challenges that span creative, logistical, and financial dimensions. Crafting compelling content that resonates with diverse audiences while adhering to tight schedules and budgets remains a formidable task. Balancing the creative vision of writers, directors, and other stakeholders with the constraints of time and resources requires adept management skills and strategic decision-making. Additionally, staying abreast of rapidly evolving technological advancements and audience preferences presents an ongoing challenge, necessitating continual adaptation and innovation. Furthermore, navigating the competitive landscape of the television industry, with its ever-changing market dynamics and shifting distribution platforms, demands a keen understanding of market trends and audience behavior. Producers must adeptly navigate these complexities to ensure the success and longevity of their productions, fostering collaboration, creativity, and resilience in the face of multifaceted challenges.

ABSTRACT

Television is widely used for educational purposes but has still not achieved its fullest potential neither in developed nor in developing countries. This worldwide under performance invite experts and academics to join hands to search causes and provide suggestions to make television a better and popular learning tool. Guided by this philosophy, the present paper analyzes the educational television broadcasting in Nigeria from different perspectives. The focus of analysis includes measures and practices adopted by Nigeria institutions/broadcasters to promote educational television. Besides dealing with these issues, the paper discusses existing challenges facing producer during program production

TABLE OF CONTENTS

COVER PAGE

TITLE PAGE

APPROVAL PAGE

DEDICATION

ACKNOWELDGEMENT

ABSTRACT

CHAPTER ONE

1.0 INTRODUCTION

- BACKGROUND OF THE PROJECT

- ROLE TELEVISION PROGRAM PRODUCER

- OBJECTIVE OF THE STUDY

CHAPTER TWO

LITERATURE REVIEW

- REVIEW OF TELEVISION BROADCASTING

- TYPES OF TELEVISION PRODUCERS

- FACTORS RESPONSIBLE FOR THE GROWTH OF TELEVISION

- INCREASE IN POPULATION AND NEED FOR INFORMATION

CHAPTER THREE

METHODOLOGY

- PROGRAM PRODUCTION CHALLENGES

- CHALLENGES FACING PRODUCERS AND HOW TO OVERCOME THEM

- THE CHALLENGES AND EMERGING FOCUS FOR CONTENT PRODUCERS IN NIGERIA

- OTHER ISSUES FACING THE PRODUCERS OF FACTUAL PROGRAMMING

CHAPTER FOUR

- RESULT

CHAPTER FIVE

- CONCLUSION

- RECOMMENDATION

- REFERENCES

CHAPTER ONE

- INTRODUCTION

A television producer is a person who oversees all aspects of video production on a television program. Some producers take more of an executive role, in that they conceive new programs and pitch them to the television networks, but upon acceptance they focus on business matters, such as budgets and contracts. Other producers are more involved with the day-to-day workings, participating in activities such as screenwriting, set design, casting, and directing.

There are a variety of different producers on a television show. A traditional producer is one who manages a show’s budget and maintains a schedule, but this is no longer the case in modern television. Currently, the producer and writer are usually the same person.

In the course of tv program production, producers face many different difficulties and issues when creating a factual programme. These issues have to be addressed in order to ensure that the factual programme is effective and don’t offend any audiences or influence them. If any media producers do create a media piece that causes offense they could actually face legal action. This will happen via Ofcom. This is an organization that regulates everything which is broadcasted via TV. This is to protect the audience from being harmed offended or misled. In this essay I will analyze the issues these include; accuracy, balance, impartiality, objectivity, subjectivity, opinion, bias, representation, access, privacy, and contract to viewer. This is an organization that regulates everything which is broadcasted via TV. This is to protect the audience from being harmed offended or misled.

1.1 BACKGROUND OF THE STUDY

Television (TV) Program as a powerful medium of communication with tremendous potential to inform, to entertain and to educate has literally captured the world. Television became an important part of our life, so much that it is difficult to say whether it is a luxury or necessity. TV has deep impact on culture, ideas, way of living and thinking. Sargent (1997: 63) claims ‘Television continues to be the most important medium for conveying information, news and culture in its broadest sense. It is universal in its availability and it is still free at the point of use to its viewers’. MacGregor (2007:15) agrees with this by stating that ‘Television has the greatest impact of all media: it is viewed by people for long periods, commonly between 14 and 28 hours a week; it is visual and entertaining; it can convey quite complex and educational ideas in understandable ways; and because of its impact it is influential among decision makers and governments’.

Television Program is generally assumed to be an important environmental factor that influences child development. Television program viewing even for very small children is considered an active interpretative process of meaning making (Bordwell, 1989), although, of course, their sign-reading competence develops only gradually (Nieding and Ohler, 2006). In our media-rich society, television is one of the core components of media-literacy initiatives advocating for “fundamental competency for literate citizens” (National Communication Association [NCA], 1998), to empower citizens to actively engage with media messages and fully participate in media culture (Jenkins, 2003).

The studies clearly spell that under favourable conditions, television is one of the best media to bring desirable change in the knowledge, understanding, attitude and behaviour of viewers. This impact can be best described in the words of Fisch (2004:03) ‘If we believe that children can learn negative lessons from television, then it stands to region that they can learn positive lessons, too. The same medium that leads children to learn product information from a commercial should also be able to help them learn science concepts from an educational program. And the same medium that influences children to act aggressively after exposure to violent programming should also be able to influence them toward cooperative behaviour after watching prosocial programming’.

Among several uses, educational use of television is a prominent one. As MacGregor (2007:15) points out ‘Television is a powerful medium with key roles to play in education – in providing news and information, including about education issues, policies and developments; in the form of dramas, soap operas and other programmes with educational messages; and in the delivery of educational support programmes to the public and to schools’. Educational relevance of television is a well researched issue. Zechowski (2006) writes ‘Educational television is similar throughout the industrialized world. The combination of formal classroom instruction and enrichment programming define the genre. Educational television in the developing world also includes programming which directly affects the quality of life of its viewers’. Similarly, Calvert and Kotler (2003:326) observe ‘The comparison of educational to non educational favourite programs revealed beneficial effects of educational programs, particularly in the social and emotional area’.

The main challenge to the educational television today is well described by Fisch (2005:10) ‘often, far less attention has been paid to the positive effects that educational television programmes can hold’. Palmer (1999) observes ‘the record of accomplishments is impressive, yet TV is drastically underutilized as a teaching tool in countries that have the highest prevalence of urgent and otherwise unmet education needs. The large gap that exists between the state of the art and the state of practice in the use of television for development has many causes, including a major lapse of international attention to national capacity building and application’.

This situation motivates us to learn from those countries where television has been legally assigned to cater the educational needs of society. Nigeria is one such country. With 36.5 million TV households, Nigeria is the one largest television market in Africa (IDATE, 2000). Towards the end of the first half of 2006, 37 free-TV channels (eight of which were general-interest channels), 50 pay-TV channels and two channels in mobile-TV format were broadcasted in Nigeria. The unique feature of public service broadcasting in Nigeria is that television channels must provide programming in the fields of information, entertainment and education for people of all ages and social groups and in any format (such as generalized channels, thematic channels, multimedia services, teletext or other content services, with or without interactivity). Adopting this mandate, majority of public television channels in Nigeria broadcasts educational programs. This legally established tradition of educational broadcasting motivates us to analyze educational television in Germany with an intention to propose adoptable policies to promote educational television in global perspectives.

1.2 ROLE TELEVISION PROGRAM PRODUCER

Although the medium’s technical complexity demands that any television program is a collective product involving many talents and decision makers, in Nigeria television it is the producer who frequently serves as the decisive figure in shaping a program. Producers assume direct responsibility for a show’s overall quality and continued viability. Conventional wisdom in the industry consequently labels television “the producer’s medium”–in contrast to film, where the director is frequently regarded as the key formative talent in the execution of movie.

In fact, producers’ roles vary dramatically from show to show or organization to organization.. They may take an active role in conceiving new programs and pitching (presenting them for sale) to networks, but once a show is accepted they are likely to concentrate on budgets, contracts, and troubleshooting, handing over day-to-day production to their staffs, and exercising control only in a final review of episodes. Other producers are more intimately involved in the details of each episode, participating actively in screenwriting, set designs, casting and–like James Burrows–serving as a frequent director for their programs. Still others serve as enabling mid-managers who delegate crucial activities to directors, writers, and actors, but who choose such personnel carefully, and enforce critical standards, while working to insulate the creative staff from outside pressures. Many producers dispatch their duties within studio hierarchies, while others own independent companies, sometimes contracting space, equipment, and personnel from studios.

Some scholars consider the producer television’s auteur, suggesting that shows should be considered above all extensions of the producer’s individual, creative sensibility.Rather than creators freely following a vision, however, producers typically function as orchestrators of television programs, applying the resources available within an organization to the problem of mounting a show each week. Those resources–and deeper cultural presumptions about television’s social roles and limits–may shape the producer’s ambitions as much as he shapes them (Gitlin, 1983).

Beginning in the mid-1970s, Hollywood embraced an auteurist theory of its own, when the success of well-written comedies produced by small, writer-centered independent companies led to the presumption that the literate writer-producer was the single most indispensable creative resource for generating new shows attractive to demographically desirable audiences. Both studios and networks began an escalating trend of signing promising writer-producers to long-term, concessionary contracts. The most notorious–and arguably the most successful–was ABC and 20th Century-Fox’s 1988 agreement with Steven Bochco to underwrite and air the next ten shows he conceived–a decision which offered Bochco room to experiment, sometimes disastrously, with shows like Cop Rock, an attempt to bring opera to prime time. The emphasis on the producer-as-author marked the culmination of a concerted shift from 1950s industry procedure, which regarded the networks’ relationships with particular studios as the most decisive aspect in generating new programming. Arguably, the shift represented a move away from a factory system whose emphases were standardization and cost containment, and whose most desirable TV producer was an effective employee or bureaucrat, toward an arts and crafts model of TV whose emphasis was differentiation and variety, and whose most desirable producer was a talented visionary with a track record. (The shift manifests the transformation of filmmaking from studio-centered Hollywood to the talent packages of the New Hollywood.)

The expanding syndication market assured that producers–who can negotiate part-ownership of their shows–could enjoy not only creative scope but considerable financial reward as well. By the 1990s, observers within the industry noted that college graduates once eager to become network executives or studio employees now arrived hoping to become producers–a shift in the sociology of television production with potential import to the comparatively new medium.

Respect for producers’ creativity, however, did not mitigate Hollywood’s strong inclination to treat producers as specialists in specific genres. When, for example, the successful action-adventure producer Steven Cannell tried to diversify into comedy in the early 1980s, the networks were unreceptive, on the grounds that Cannell had no demonstrated skill in comedy. As with many commercial artists, then, the television producer’s scope of innovation is generally delimited by convention, and often amounts to a variation in formula rather than a dramatic break with practices or expectations held by the industry or the producer’s audiences (Newcomb and Alley, 1983; Selnow and Gilbert, 1993).

1.3 OBJECTIVE OF THE STUDY

Media producers face many different difficulties and issues when creating a factual programme. These issues have to be addressed in order to ensure that the factual programme is effective and don’t offend any audiences or influence them and thereby affect the production of tv program. The objective of this work is to analyse challenges usually face the producers of tv programs.