ABSTRACT
Responding to the media: genre codes The term genre is used to classify media products into groups or categories and, as such, is an important means by which we understand media texts. The term is perhaps most commonly associated with film and television texts, but in fact it can be used to categorise almost any media product available for consumption. It is tempting to think of a genre simply as a group of media products which belong to the same category – for example, rock and jazz in music, or horror and gangster for film – and this is a reasonable starting point, but at GCE level the study of genre is more than simply the categorisation of media products.
