Mac129 Med102 journalism and the internet

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Journalism and the Internet

MAC129 MED102

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• “The internet is the new printing press. It’s the mass medium that is changing how we read and digest content”

• (Tom Anderson, IT Blogger)?!?!

The end of “BIG MEDIA”

• “In the 20th Century making the news was almost entirely the province of journalists… The economics of publishing and broadcasting created large, arrogant institutions – call it Big Media…

• “Big media … treated the news as a lecture. We told you what the news was…. Tomorrow’s news reporting and production will be more of a conversation, or a seminar…• (Gillmor, 2004:xiii)

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We the media?

• July 7th 2005

5http://moblog.net/view/77571/

Helen Boaden, BBC director of news

• Minutes after the bombings occurred in London last Thursday, newsrooms around the capital were being deluged with pictures and video clips sent directly from the scene. The long-predicted democratisation of the media had become a reality, as ordinary members of the public turned photographers and reporters.

• Julia Day, July 11th 2005, 'We had 50 images within an hour’ http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2005/jul/11/mondaymediasection.attackonlondon

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We the media?

• “As cameras become just one more thing we carry everyday, everyone’s becoming a photographer (Gillmor, 2004:34)

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Scale

• 2000: 200 million web users with over 800 million pages of content (Hall, 2001)

• 2008: 1.46 billion web users

• 2010: 1.97 billion web users

• 2012: 2.41 billion web users• http://www.internetworldstats.com/stats.htm

The Internet

• ‘For all its global range and its millions of users it refuses to fit neatly into the category of mass media. For media producers and the advertisers who underwrite them new paradigms seeking junctions and commonalities of geography, age, gender, income, race and niche interests are required. How do they deliver news to an audience that is at once local and global?’ • (Jim Hall, 2001: 2)

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History: news online

• 1994: TIME magazine used web to communicate between journalists and readers

• For overview see Stuart Allan, 2006.

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Breaking News?

• Oklahoma City bombing, April 19th 1995, was of major importance

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• Maps of Oklahoma City• The latest AP news feed• Graphics of terrorist bombs• Emotional eyewitness accounts of the

excavation• Listings of survivors and hospital phone

numbers• Newsgroups expressing ‘rage’• Dedicated chat-rooms• ISPs (AOL) offering aggregated news feeds

and wire services

Content included:

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AOL: Timothy ‘Mad Bomber’ McVeigh

• Sunday Mirror:• HELLO, I’M THE MAD BOMBER

… BOOM!; SICK MESSAGE FLASHED WORLDWIDE; OKLAHOMA BOMB SUSPECT LEAVES MESSAGE ON INTERNET

• Later revealed as a fake

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More ‘teething problems’

• 1996 July 17th• TWA flight from New York

to Paris exploded• Conspiracy theories• November: former ABC

journalist, Pierre Salinger, claimed to have evidence proving US forces shot down plane

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Obvious advantages:

• Immediacy – updates can be added as and when more info is available

• No limit to the amount of content

• Interactivity – capacity for questions to be asked and for greater accountability

Alexa Stats (News)

Nov 20111. Yahoo News

2. CNN Interactive

3. The Huffington Post

4. New York Times

5. BBC News

6. Google News

7. The Weather Channel

8. Reddit

9. My Yahoo

10. NBC News and MSNBC News

Nov 20121. Yahoo News

2. CNN Interactive


4. New York Times

5. BBC News


7. Google News

8. Reddit

9. FoxNews.com

10. The Guardian

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Alexa Stats (Global)

20121. Yahoo News

2. CNN Interactive


4. New York Times

5. BBC News


7. Google News

8. Reddit

9. FoxNews.com

10. The Guardian

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Alexa Stats (Global)

Total1. Yahoo News

2. CNN Interactive


4. New York Times

5. BBC News


7. Google News

8. Reddit

9. FoxNews.com

10. The Guardian

News producers only

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1. CNN Interactive


3. New York Times

4. BBC News

5. FoxNews.com

6. The Guardian

7. The Times of India

8. The Wall Street Journal Interactive Edition

9. Washington Post

10. NBC News

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• 1997: UK = 4 million web users• 1998: 8.17 million page impressions• 2006: BBC one of the largest news-gathering

organizations in the world:• 42 foreign bureaus• 13 domestic news centres. • annual budget of around £350 million• expertise of over 2000 journalists• 250 correspondents around the world• online team composed of 40 journalists

• 2012: facing huge DQF cuts and crisis in public trust (Newsnight affair)

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Key issues:

• Do newspapers have a future?

• Does paper have a role in the future of news?• Will there be such a thing as ‘print journalism’ in a

decade’s time?• Do the answers to these questions even matter as

long as there is something called journalism available to the British public on some platform in a few years time?

Newspaper circulation: 2000s

Tabloid/mid-market circulation: 2000s

Quality & specialist circulation: 2000s

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The newspaper industry: business trends in the last 2 decades

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Newspaper trends 2008

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Newspaper trends 2010

Oct 2012 Monthly change % Yearly change %

The Sun 2,445,361 -2.29 -10.27

Daily Mirror 1,072,687 -1.47 -6.22

Daily Star 586,743 -2.26 -13.87

Daily Express 543,912 -1.2 -11.94

Daily Mail 1,884,815 -1.53 -6.17

Daily Telegraph 560,398 -4.06 -7.71

The Times 406,711 -0.25 -5.32

The Guardian 204,937 +0.33 -11.88

The Independent 81,245 -0.68 -54.09

i 282,995 +0.52 +53.47

Financial Times 287,895 +2.77 -16.45

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• National newspapers have fallen by more than 50% in the last two decades (1988-2007), including the Mirror and the Express.

• Some increases - Financial Times (overseas sales)

• Total daily circulation of national daily newspapers has dropped from over 15 million to around 11.5 million, or 25% (McNair, 2007).

Newspaper trends

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Ownership and control

• Concentration of ownership

• Impact on democracy?

• Rupert Murdoch:• 1988 = 31% of UK paper market• 2007 = 32.3%• 140 of his publications around the

world supported the war in Iraq

Against all this…

• The Independent launches a sister paper, i, in October 2010

• First UK paper launch since 1986

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• Murdoch:

• ‘power is moving away from the old elite in our industry – the editors, the chief executives and, let’s face it, the proprietors’ • (http://www.newscorp.com/news/news_285.html).

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Technology and Trends

• Dumbing down?• Murdoch: ‘many of us have been

unaccountably complacent’ in the wake of the digital revolution

• Citizen journalists?• Salem Pax? Where_is_Raed?

• http://dear_raed.blogspot.com/

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Murdoch (2005):

• ‘There are of course inherent risks in this strategy -- chief among them maintaining our standards for accuracy and reliability. Plainly, we can’t vouch for the quality of people who aren’t regularly employed by us – and bloggers could only add to the work done by our reporters, not replace them. But they may still serve a valuable purpose; broadening our coverage of the news; giving us new and fresh perspectives to issues; deepening our relationship to the communities we serve, so long as our readers understand the clear distinction between bloggers and our journalists.’

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• July 2006, Patrick Barkham:

• ‘the first big British political story to be driven by bloggers’

• deputy-PM John Prescott’s sex life

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Bloggers and Aggregators

• Mike Drudge: The Drudge Report

• Since February 1995

• Republican supporter

• Faced a $30 million libel lawsuit

• January 13th 1998 he broke the story of Clinton’s affair with Monica Lewinsky.

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Mike Drudge:

• I’m a citizen first and a reporter second … The people have a right to know, not the editors who think they know better. You should let people know as much as you know when you know’ (cited in AP, 1 February 1998)

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The Future?

• Kim Fletcher (2005)

• ‘In all this talk about the end of papers, no one suggests that people don't want news or information or entertainment any more. On the contrary, they seem to want more and more of all three. That demand will be met by an expansion rather than a retraction in journalistic output.’

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National newspaper website traffic October 2007National newspaper website traffic October 2007Source: Audit Bureau of CirculationsSource: Audit Bureau of Circulations

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National newspaper website traffic September 2008National newspaper website traffic September 2008Source: Audit Bureau of CirculationsSource: Audit Bureau of Circulations

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Daily browsers

Monthly browsers

Monthly change %

Yearly change %

Mail Online 6,671,641 106,095,618 +4.48% +34.31%

Guardian 3,909,514 71,766,288 +9.84 n/a

Telegraph 2,887,948 56,919,647 +10.72% +25.62%

Sun Online 1,544,721 25,926,115 -2.07% +3.85%

Independent 825,861 17,900,904 9.78% +29.02%

Mirror Group 764,277 16,319,000 +3.67% +3.31%

Metro 276,478 6,971,225 -6.62% -14.74%

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Funding issues…

•BBC and license fee

•Guardian owned by Scott Trust charity

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Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger (2007)

• ‘We've moved from being in competition with a small pool of British broadsheets to being in competition with just about everyone, but it's true. We're no longer a once-a-day text medium for a predominantly domestic audience. Increasingly - around the clock - we use a combination of media in telling stories, and in commentary, to millions of users around the globe’

Ex-Guardian editor, Peter Preston (2007):

• The thought of a news collection and distribution organisation without print or paper raises the prospect of a quite different future for journalists: one where few of the old skills and few of the new convergences are particularly relevant, one where a start-up news gathering operation on the net would train and hire web people, not converts from print with ink on their hands.’

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Sources• Stuart Allan, 2006, Online News, Maidenhead: Open University Press.

• Patrick Barkham, September 22nd 2006, ‘Giving it all away’, The Guardian, available at http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2006/sep/22/pressandpublishing.lifeandhealth

• Peter Cole, 2007, ‘The paradox of the pops’, The Guardian, available at http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2007/aug/27/mondaymediasection.pressandpublishing

• Dan Gillmour, 2004, We The Media, Sebastopol, CA.: O'Reilly

• Kim Fletcher, December 19th 2005, ‘A bright picture for newspapers’, The Guardian, available at http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2005/dec/19/mondaymediasection

• Jim Hall, 2001, Online journalism : a critical primer, London: Pluto Press

• Brian McNair, 2007, ‘The British Press, 1992-2007’ unpublished conference paper presented at Future of Newspapers conference, Cardiff, September 2007.

• Rupert Murdoch, 2005 speech given at the American Society of Newspaper Editors, available at http://www.newscorp.com/news/news_247.html

• Rupert Murdoch, 2006, speech given at the Annual Livery Lecture at the Worshipful Company of Stationers and Newspaper Makers, available at http://www.newscorp.com/news/news_285.html

• Salem Pax, 2003-4 ‘Where is Raed?’ available at http://dear_raed.blogspot.com/

• BBC, Reuters & Media Centre, 2006, ‘Trust in the Media’, May, available at http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/shared/bsp/hi/pdfs/02_05_06mediatrust.pdf

Mac129 Med102 journalism and the internet

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