Digital Information Ecosystems

Smart Press

Dominique Augey, Marina Alcaraz

• Publisher: Wiley-ISTE
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781786304148
• eBook ISBN: 9781119579724
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Popular Culture
• Index: Social Sciences

Digital information, particularly for online newsgathering and reporting, is an industry fraught with uncertainty and rapid innovation. Digital Information Ecosystems: Smart Press crosses academic knowledge with research by media groups to understand this evolution and analyze the future of the sector, including the imminent employment of bots and artificial intelligence. The book adopts an original and multidisciplinary approach to this topic: combining the science of media economics with the experience of a practicing journalist of a major daily newspaper. The result is an essential guide to the opportunities of the media to respond to a changing global digital landscape. Independent news reporting is vital in the contemporary democracy; the media must itself become a new "smart press".

1
How Do the Economy and the Press Influence Each Other?

This question is one of the key topics studied by the press economy that we will be presenting here. In order to do this, let us start by defining the concepts of media and information, before asking ourselves how the media and press economy developed in the early 2000s.

1.1. The concept of media

The dictionary defines media (noun) as “any medium for the dissemination of information constituting both a means of expression and an intermediary transmitting a message”. There are also other terms such as medium and news (in this spelling, the name becomes invariable). The word media comes from the Latin words medialis and medians, the origin of median words. The francization of the word média with an acute accent and an s in the plural dates back to 1973.

The expression mass media dates back to the 1950s. It was invented in the United States to describe a new phenomenon: the media likely to reach a very large audience (television, cinema). The term mass media is often used with a negative, media-phobic connotation. Mass media are often accused of manipulating minds, misinforming etc.

There is also the acronym MEDIA, which stands for “Measures to Encourage the Development of the Industry of Audiovisual Production”, a European program launched in 1991¹.

The word media has given rise to many neologisms: médiacratie (mediacracy) – a word popularized in France in 1984 by a political journalist named François Henri de Virieu, who chose it as the title of one of his books.

In addition to the definition mentioned above (media transmits a message), which is described as a narrow definition of media, there is also a definition of media in the broader sense. Media not only conveys a message, but also brings together distinct realities (mainly four): the technique – the media uses technology, writing, printing, television, the Internet and so on; the uses – uses are sometimes expected (a viewer is expected to watch television), but also deviated or diverted (zapping – the viewer does not necessarily watch a program in its entirety which was probably made with the aim of being viewed from beginning to end); the public – it can be limited to one person or be very broad; the reception of the message can be different according to the members of the public; the genre – an identifiable or supposed form of expression such as journalism or advertising (we are now talking about hybridization of genres, for example, with infomercials).

Media can also be classified into three types: autonomous media, which does not require any connection to a network (the newspaper); broadcast media, which allows a wide audience to be reached (television); and communication media, which allows two-way communication (telephone, Internet).

Media are classified by advertisers into two categories (Adary et al. 2015; De Baynast and Landrevie 2014). The first is mass media/media above the line. There were formerly five types, but there are now six: television, press, radio, display, cinema and Internet. The second is other media (media below the line) of which there are eight. In fact, these are promotional operations: direct advertising (direct mail), merchandising, POS advertising (point-of-sale advertising), exhibitions, fairs and salons, sponsorships, telephone marketing and public relations (including press relations). This is a global definition because all means of reaching the customer are taken into account. The media is a “raw material” for advertising.

One of the most well-known and popular reflections on media is by Marshall McLuhan. The Canadian Herbert Marshall McLuhan (1911–1980) published Gutenberg Galaxy in 1962 and Understanding Media in 1964. He gives a new definition of media: all the technological extensions of man. McLuhan is best known for his phrase: the medium is the message. This means that what matters is not the content conveyed by the media, but how the media influences the reception of the message. It influences the ways of thinking and feeling the message. It transforms the nature of the message through its technical specificities (another expression that can be found is: “the message is the massage”). The media has cultural and historical responsibilities. Continuing with this aphorism, the work of another Canadian researcher and professor named Harold Innis at the University of Toronto (Innis 1942) identifies three stages in the history of humanity:

1. 1) The tribal state characterized by a pre-social state. The human was total;
2. 2) The Gutenberg galaxy, based on printed writing that allowed knowledge sharing. However, the tribal subject becomes an individual. The printing industry would therefore have a responsibility for the development of a society based on individualism;
3. 3) The Marconi galaxy, inaugurated with electricity, television and new technologies, brings us into the era of the global village. People are again connected to people. McLuhan’s books had a profound impact on their era because they highlighted the importance of the nature of media.

1.2. The concept of information

The Oxford English Dictionary (Pearsall 2002) offers two different meanings of the noun information and three different meanings of the verb to inform. For information:

1. 1) facts or knowledge provided or learned;
2. 2) what is conveyed or represented by a particular sequence of symbols, impulses, etc.

For inform:

1. 1) give facts or information to;
2. 2) give incriminating information about (someone) to the police or other authority;
3. 3) give an essential or formative principle or quality to. Both words stem from the Latin informo, meaning “to give form”.

Information is the core business of journalists. Thus, in an article in Le Monde on February 1, 2017, the Decoders² questioned what information is and proposed the following answer:

“Media and journalists are no longer the only ones with effective ways to relay messages – just think of all the permanent posts on social networks such as Facebook, Twitter and Snapchat. However, this multiplication of statements of all kinds, coming from various sources, raises a simple question whose answer is less obvious than it seems: what is information? The word itself, in its media sense, refers to facts brought to the attention of a public. But to be considered as such, an ‘information’ must meet at least three criteria: it must be of interest to the public, it must be factual, and it must be verified”.

Claude Shannon (1916–2001), a researcher at MIT, developed mathematical information theory in the 1950s in order to optimize message transmission systems (initially the telegraph and then the telephone). The amount of information or entropy of a system is the measure of uncertainty or complexity of the system. An application of this logic can be found in the political will of US Vice-President Al Gore in his 1992 speech on information highways. He promoted an optimistic and proactive vision based on the development of networks so as to create links between individuals and facilitate economic growth.

For economists, the concept of information is essential. It is either used in the Shannonian sense of reducing uncertainty, or as a synonym of knowledge, as in Friedrich Von Hayek’s founding article (Hayek 1945). In the first case, the concept of information is at the heart of decision theory, rational expectations, incentive theory, contract theory and game theory.

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Box 1.1. Game theory

Game theory has a strange name. It is in fact a mathematical model that describes the choices of each individual, called a player, as well as the interactions between several players. Each individual assesses the gains and losses of a choice according to their objectives and the information they have about their environment and the choices of others. Depending on the amount of information each player has, the choices of individuals will be very different. A player can be a person, a company, etc.

The information can be complete (the player knows all the rules of the game and the possible strategies for him and the other players), perfect (the decisions previously ma...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Table of Contents
• Foreword
• Introduction
• 1 How Do the Economy and the Press Influence Each Other?
• 2 Can We Trust the Press?
• 3 What are the Links between the Press and Politics?
• 4 Does the Press Need Advertisers?
• 5 Is the Printed Newspaper Gamble Crazy?
• 6 Are There Dangerous Links between Media and Social Networks?
• 7 Will Fake News Kill Information?
• 8 Are Robots and AI the Future of the Media?s
• References
• Index
• End User License Agreement