International News in the Digital Age

East-West Perceptions of A New World Order

Judith Clarke, Michael Bromley

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781136642272
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Lingue e linguistica
• Subtopic: Giornalismo

The new research presented in this volume suggests that general perceptions (cultural, psychological, geographical), allied to the customs and values of journalism, and underpinned by the uses of technology, significantly shape international news. This gives rise to a blend of the old and the new; traditions of cultural centredness and innovative practices; anchorages of place and the rootlessness of globalization. Technology per se has not swept all before it. On the other hand, its uses have altered the means and methods of international news sourcing, construction and dissemination. Consequently, the uptake of technology has contributed to fundamental changes in style and form, and has greatly facilitated cross-cultural exchanges. The category 'international news' is now more of a hybrid, as recognized by the BBC and others. The chapters in this book demonstrate that this hybridity is unevenly distributed across geo-political domains, and often across time. Nevertheless, as the contributors to this volume show, the concept of 'international news' relies on tightly interwoven elements of orthodox journalism, social media, civic expression and public assembly.

Part I

Introduction

1 Continuity and Change in International News

An Introduction

Michael Bromley and Judith Clarke

Introduction

On the eve of the twenty-first century Wu (2000) believed that “the prediction framework of international news coverage”—the configuration of systemic determinants, such as trade volume, and the presence of international news agencies—had almost certainly changed following the end of the cold war. Since then, 9/11, the so-called “war on terror”, and the global financial crisis have also intervened in the shaping of international news. Furthermore, the first decade of the century brought the consolidation of the emergence of the economies of the People’s Republic of China and India which impacted on the original paradigm. Finally, the uptake of a raft of rapidly developing media tools has ensured that international newsmaking has extended in scope, scale and speed, and it now embraces bloggers, tweeters, texters and citizen journalists alongside conventional correspondents. At the beginning of the second decade of the century there was greater uncertainty about what constituted “international news” and who made it and what might comprise “international news” into the future. Take as an example the eruption of the Eyjafjallajökull volcano in 2010 which impacted directly on people as far away as Canada and Kenya. As Wasserman (2010) pointed out, sending a foreign correspondent to Iceland would have revealed nothing about the global consequences of the event, whereas digitally networked citizens were able to exchange vital relevant information to and from almost anywhere in the world.

For many, particularly in the west, this uncertainty was cast as a crisis: international news was on the verge of extinction, and foreign correspondents were near to being “redundant” (Barton 2009; Kester 2010, 51–2; Sambrook 2010). Although not posited as the only cause, technology repeatedly emerged as a major factor in the supposed decline of international news. Digitization accelerated the process of making international news and foreshortened, or even eradicated, the space between producer and receiver, leading to more immediacy with its danger of greater superficiality (Kester 2010, 52–3). The proliferation of alternative sources, facilitated by the spread of the internet and the uptake of mobile connectivity, threatened to supplant “the reliability, trustworthiness and authenticity of the full-time foreign correspondent” (Barton 2009, 89). The resulting plethora of content fostered information overload, which neither journalists nor the public, who were expected to work increasingly together, could satisfactorily manage in order to make sense of the world (Sambrook 2010, 46). Perhaps the most extreme example of this was the posting by the online media organization WikiLeaks of millions of previously secret documents from around the world between 2006 and 2010, described by a newspaper reporter as “a bottomless labyrinth of raw data … about subjects that are arcane and impenetrable to the layman” (The Australian 2010). The editor-at-large of the Australian Canberra Times calculated that by 2010 the amount of material (perhaps three-quarters of it circulating internationally) readily available to his journalists had multiplied 200 or 300 times in forty years and was between 2,000 and 3,000 times as much as was published each day (Waterford 2010).

On the other hand, Rupert Murdoch (2010) was quite sanguine about the effects of technological change: “ … the next generation of people accessing news and information, whether from newspapers or any other source, have a different set of expectations about the kind of news they will get, including when and how they will get it, where they will get it from, and who they will get it from.” He remained optimistic that the capabilities of various technologies could be mobilized to further traditional news operations. Certainly, digital technologies seemed to offer more opportunities to produce and consume more news globally and 24/7 (Cushion and Lewis 2010). Mobile technologies especially provided a new gateway to “news in the interstices” where it had previously not existed (Dimmick, Feaster, and Hoplamazian 2010). In India, successive burgeonings of technologies—print, audio cassettes, television, digital—liberated public discourse (Mehta 2009, 30). Any decline in formal foreign correspondence (and the legacy media with which it was associated) was seen as being accompanied by a corresponding rise in citizen journalism (on digital platforms) (Meier 2008). Debates around the role(s) of citizen journalism, its relationships to mainstream media editorial functions and its capacity to promote “public dialog and argument … [through] sharing … with a global audience”, continued more or less unabated (Antony and Thomas 2010).

Arriving at a single satisfactory analysis of the “turmoil and uncertainty” surrounding news was not straightforward (Kaye and Quinn 2010, 173). The new research presented in this volume suggests that general perceptions (cultural, psychological, social, geographical), allied to the customs and values of journalism, and underpinned by the uses of technology significantly shape international news. This gives rise to a blend of the old and the new; traditions of cultural centeredness, and innovative practices; anchorages of place, and the rootlessness of globalization (local–global dichotomies and glocalism). Technology per se has not swept all before it. On the other hand, its uses have altered the means and methods of international news sourcing, construction, dissemination and, above all, participation. Consequently, the uptake of technology has contributed to fundamental changes in style and form and has greatly facilitated cross-cultural exchanges. The category “international news” is now more of a hybrid, as recognized by the BBC and others. This hybridity is unevenly distributed across geo-political domains (place), often across time, and sometimes across practices. Nevertheless, the concept of “international news” relies on tightly interwoven elements of orthodox journalism, social media, civic expression and public assembly; witness the representation of events in June 2009 in Teheran, where all these elements appeared together to undermine the state media in informing both Iran and the world (for example, see http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9_hr7G4At84) (Sohrabi-Haghighat and Mansouri 2010).

The Present Condition

If the established international news providers of the west—news agencies, transnational television stations and newspaper websites—still seem to be in control of the international news agenda, the convention that news is about the developed countries for the developed countries is changing. Because, for a variety of reasons, the developing world has been more shut off from international news in the past, the effect of the new media there is likely to be even greater than in the developed countries (Berger 2009). China now has more internet users than the United States, and major events in India, Iran, Taiwan, Kenya and Nigeria are being “reported” to the world by local citizen journalists. As the post-cold war international power shifts set in, this collection of papers, inspired by and in some cases presented to the conference “The changing world of international news in the 21^st century: The impact of digital technology” held by Hong Kong Baptist University on April 14–16, 2009, takes an inter-regional approach, moving away from the western perspective of other current studies.

Making sense of the changes going on today is blurred by our own rootedness in the past, yet this past is surprisingly recent. If, as Mitchell Stephens (2007, xi) says, news dates back 100,000 years to the origins of language, our modern news system is only a blip in the millennia, a product of the emergence of democracy, the rise of the middle class and the consolidation of western empires, all occurring in the last 300 years or so. Yet from a contemporary aspect it feels entrenched: the older generation can barely remember when there was no television, let alone radio, and even their great-great-grandparents would have known newspapers. Under the conditions of this longstanding media system, our knowledge of the world beyond our own borders was fairly uniform, wherever we were placed in the world: it came from our national press and broadcast media, whose information was mostly supplied by a handful of international news agencies through monopolistic agreements (Boyd-Barrett and Rantanen 2009).

The breaking down of barriers in that system has taken place almost incomprehensibly quickly. Today university students find it difficult to envision a world without Facebook (founded 2004), let alone Google (founded 1999), the World Wide Web (set up in 1993) and mobile phones. In 1990 the internet was used by very small numbers, and even fewer had mobile phones. At the end of 2010 the International Telecommunication Union (2010) said that, globally, two billion people were using the internet, and mobile phone subscriptions ran to 5.3 billion, with 90 percent of the world connected to mobile phone networks. The world of the news has been turned on its head, and our view of the world has been turned on its head. Unprepared for the speed of these changes—even if we should not be—we find our tools for understanding and explaining them far from adequate.

Digital technology takes a central place as perpetrator of change. A mobile phone today holds more computing power then the desktops of twenty years ago, and a small laptop can produce sophisticated documents and presentations, store vast databases, run a business and keep in touch with the world at large over a variety of networks. New platforms, new players and new possibilities are constantly appearing. Smartphones and tablets took off in 2010, led by Apple’s new iPhone 4 and iPad. In early 2011 Digitimes was reporting component makers as saying that Apple had sold 47 million iPhones in 2010 and was preparing to ship another twenty to twenty-one million in 2011 (http://www.digitimes.com/news/a20101226PD203.html). With digitization and new modes of production, prices have dropped dramatically. High-end electronic equipment once affordable only to the best-funded professionals is now a common retail purchase, popular with a wide range of users whose work—written, captured or created—can be quickly and easily uploaded to spaces on phone and internet networks for viewing anywhere in the world.

As Stephen Quinn and Trisha Lin show below in this volume, this digital revolution has improved and sped up the work of journalists, but it has also led to an intertwining of roles as amateurs move on to their domain, “tweeting” eyewitness accounts, uploading videos and blogging not only their views but their own reporting. But if the first is threatened by the second, the two can work alongside each other. In 2010 Google’s then CEO and the head of the company’s ideas department saw a combined role for amateur and professional: “For the media, reporting will increasingly become a collaborative enterprise between traditional news organizations and the quickly growing number of citizen journalists” (Schmidt and Cohen, 2010). The ways in which this combination, examined in this volume by Levi Obijiofor and Pradip Thomas in Africa and India and by Zhou Xiao in China, is developing are constantly changing. It is in this dynamic composition of international newsmakers that perhaps the key to determining change and continuity in the category of international news lies.

Two “Golden Ages”

News agencies—organizations which traded in news using electronic communications technology (originally the telegraph, the evolution of which dated from 1809)—operated globally from the first half of the nineteenth century (Rantanen 1997). The telegraph represented “a watershed in communication,” according to Carey (1989, 156ff); a foundation stone of modernity intimately tied to the global diffusion (slowly over many decades) of “the news paradigm”, made up of the noted event, news values, journalistic interviewing, the inverted pyramid, a commitment to accuracy, fairness and balance (“objectivity”) and facticity (Chalaby 1996; Høyer and Pöttker 2005, 11). Schudson (2001, 166) has pointed out that developments in this news paradigm were the products of both the available “cultural environment” and the elements in that environment which were deemed to be “attractive” and convincing to newsmakers as a more or less cohesive and controlling grouping. Neither technological nor economic circumstances (as in the contemporary obsession with “the business model” of journalism; for example, see Levy and Nielsen 2010) on their own explain why international or any type of news was at any time the way it was (Schudson 2001, 158–61). Where technologies and economics have intruded is in the disruptive reformation of the newsmaking groupings into many more “differentiated ‘tribes’ ” producing multiple “journalisms” (Cottle 2000, 23; Deuze 2003), promising variegated orientations.

Something very much like international news (“Newes from Forraine parts”) was central to the earliest periodical press (news pamphlets, corantos and newsbooks) from the sixteenth century in places such as Germany, the Netherlands, France and Britain, not least because of prohibitions on printing domestic news (Craven 1992, 2; O’Hara 2003, 179–80). This news reverberated in original forms, copies, translations and reprints around Europe—to and from cities such as London, Amsterdam, Prague, Vienna, Venice and Cologne (Dahl 1949, 170ff; Fritz 2001, 70–4). This was the initially largely private “traffic in … news” as an accompaniment of “the rise of long-distance trade”, which was a precursor to new forms of public knowledge and the novelty of publicness (Habermas 1991, 15–26). Interestingly, in many crucial ways these newspapers changed little over the succeeding 250 years (Fritz 2001, 81–2). By the middle of the nineteenth century news—original, copied, translated and reprinted—was still ricocheting from place to place through both formal exchange agreements and simple plagiarism. For example, accounts of the execution of the Emperor Maximilian in Mexico in 1867 were passed among Paris, London and Vienna, but also Washington, New Orleans and the Southern Tablelands of New South Wales in Australia (see Braidwood Independent, September 18, 1867, 5; The Times, July 5, 1867, 5; July 10, 1867, 5). News exchanges occurred between the United States (Boston, Philadelphia, Stockton), New Zealand (Auckland, Wellington) and Australia (Sydney, Hobart), and also internally; for example, among cities within New Zealand (Harvey 2002, 24–5, 29–30; Putnis 2004, 68). What had changed, expanding beyond correspondents based mainly in European capitals and aided by a range of emerging technologies and new business models, was the “news community” (Picone 2007, 99; Read 1992, 40). Dedicated foreign correspondents began to be appointed in the 1830s (Della’Orto 2002, vii), and by the time of the Crimean war they were becoming more professional (Hohenberg 1965, 35–6).

The news agencies were central to this expansion: they were “the first international or, indeed, global media organizations, and are among the first of the world’s transnational or multinational corporations” (Boyd-Barrett and Rantanen 1998, 1). The latter part of the nineteenth century was seen as a “golden age” of international news (Hohenber...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• Part I: Introduction
• Part II: The New World of International News
• Part III: The New Technology of International Journalism
• Part IV: The Socialized Effects of Digitized International News
• Part V: International News and International Relations in the Digital Twenty-First Century
• Part VI: Conclusion
• Contributors
• Index