This week we are
going to look at the complex interaction between news and new technology. This
will involve identifying what we mean by news, and then taking a sweep through
the history of news. We are then going to look in detail at a contemporary example
of a news story in order to discuss the applicability of the theories of remediation,
media-morphosis and convergence to this important sector of the media. Finally
we are going to look at news as presented by new media.
In his book, A History of News, Mitchell Stephens tackles the difficult subject of trying to pin down a definition of news. He notes that it is:
“New information about a subject of some public interest that is shared with some portion of the public” (Stephens pg4)
In doing so, he makes the point that news-gathering and dissemination have a long history, reaching backwards into the earliest periods of human language. In his book, he notes that exchanging news still has a very important function in oral cultures which is conducted quickly and efficiently without the use of newspapers or television. Stephens notes that European colonists in Zululand in the 19th Century, for example, were surprised to find out that the oral news that passed from family to family was often more update and accurate than their own printed newspapers. This is hardly surprising, as Stephens points out:
“Perhaps the most valuable news we can receive is warning of a clear and present danger” (Stephens pg24)
The peer-to peer passing of news (such as recent deaths, marriages, war and disease) between different social groups still occurs on an oral basis ( though is often treated gossip until confirmed by a written report in literate cultures). This passing of critical information has often been intimately associated with important social institutions such as tribal gatherings. For many societies news-sharing is an important cultural act. As Stephens notes:
“The rapid circulation of news is evidence of more than just the desire of individuals to know and tell; it is evidence of a societal commitment” (Stephens pg 15)
In ancient Greece, for example, the agora (the central gathering point at the centre of a city) was a place where citizens went to be active citizens; and to hear and pass on news. The success of the agora was critical to democracy in Greek city states. Of particular interest to these Greek citizens were the reports of events brought back by traders and travellers from overseas. News was considered valuable (warfare, politics and trade) and was discussed at length.
However, distance, time and cultural differences between societies meant that stories often took months or even years to pass a few hundred miles and most news of one part of the globe never made it to other parts at all.
The important
news-disseminating function was often formalised as societies grew larger and
‘runners’ were employed by local rulers to carry news from place to place. These
runners acted as agents for the ruler, controlling news dissemination and bringing
new laws to wide areas of land. Perhaps the most famous news runner of all time
was the Greek Pheidippedes, who ran over 25 miles in a single day to bring news
of the Greek victory at the Battle of Marathon.
It is important to note that in taking over news-disseminating rulers often incurred costs, but also acquired considerable power over their subjects (as they were able to influence what information was available to them). This equation of cost and control is still relevant today.
Arguably the first great technological leap to speed up the dissemination of news was when humans learnt to ride horses. News is a time-dependent phenomenon and there are great rewards for being able to deliver a news story first. Sometimes the value of the message was that its bearer had outpaced the outriders of an invading army!
The great empires of the past, Ancient Rome in the West,the Han dynasty in the East, the Inca in South America also invested in roads and fleets - to facilitate trade and their armies, but also to speed up the dissemination imperial edicts over their considerable empires.
It has been argued that the ability to communicate accurately and in a timely fashion over great distances was one of the key features in the maintenance of long-term stability of these large empires.
Timeliness is still an important factor in defining what news is. As Hodgson notes,a news story:
“involves gathering, compiling and presenting of a message so that it reaches its audience within a time limit which will ensure its maximum effectiveness and relevance. A news item….must obey a deadline which will allow the information to retain its newness by the time it is read or listened to.”(Hodgson pg 5)
It is tempting to say that news isn’t news if it has already told by someone else! However, is this really true? Think about the role of the media in creating and maintaining identity mentioned in lecture two.
Another great technology to effect news dissemination was the invention of writing. This meant that messages became fixed and available for contemplation and reflection. As Stephen’s notes:
“The content of a written message…will not vary, no matter how far it is carried” (Stephens pg 53)
The role and reach of news dissemination was changed by the rise of literacy. For example, the proceedings of the senate of Ancient Rome were written down on a news sheet called the ‘acta’. At first these proceedings were kept private in Rome. However, in 59 BC Julius Caesar introduced a change that had wide-sweeping ramifications. He ordered that a copy of these proceedings were pinned up in a public place. These official notes were copied by scribes, who then sent copies off to important governors and military commanders spread throughout the Empire. This accurate record of life in Rome allowed these important men to keep ‘abreast of the times’ and to continue to play an active role in the life of the Empire despite being away from the Rome. A number of historians have noted that economics also played a role in the rise of written documents in Rome. The Roman Empire had recently conquered Egypt. This conquest brought many riches to Rome, including a ready supply of papyrus which made written documents durable and cheaper to produce. It is also interesting to note that many later Roman Emperors tried to censor and control the senate and its reports.
The importance of having a fixed record is still important in news gathering. Videos, tapes and transcripts of documents are considered to be evidence of the truth by the general public. During the events of September 11th 2001, a number of media pundits noted that many people considered it to be important to ‘see what happened with their own eyes’. Recordings can also be used to review or re-enforce a news message as we see later.
The history of the modern news-gathering began in Western Europe towards the end of the 16th Century. The newly introduced printing technology brought about changes in the level of literacy and also allowed the mass-production of writing for the first time. Cultural changes in European society also supported the quest for new lands, personal wealth, written knowledge and self-improvement.
Initially this news was printed in pamphlets which only dealt with one story and were produced on a one-off basis. Gradually though they became to be produced on a regular basis and dealt with a variety of subjects (e.g. Venetian Gazetta (1566).
In London and Paris, these news sheets grew up around the oral culture of gossip that existed in the coffee houses. The coffee houses were places of trade (the great financial institutions of capitalist such as the London Stock Exchange, Lloyd’s insurers and the Baltic exchange all grew out of this ‘exchange’ culture). Interestingly, even then these coffee houses often specialised in the type of news being told. Those people with time and interest often use to pass from one house to another passing on news as they went. However, these pamphlets were not what we would recognise as newspapers.
Elizabeth Grey characterises the modern newspaper as having the following characteristics:
It took
another few hundred years to develop the industrialised economy to support and
produce a mass circulation daily newspaper. The Times, for example only appeared
in the 1840s. The newly-built railway network, the mechanised printing press
and cheap paper allowed mass-produced papers to produced and then distributed
throughout the country. It also took a number of cultural changes as well; widespread
literacy, the standardisation of spellings and grammar, the rise of capitalism,
the increased wealth of the mercantile classes and representative democracy.
It also required the development of a news reporting culture with distinctive
laws (such as the US’s first amendment), social habits and ethics. As Michael
Schudson notes:
“The Reporter, and reporting were inventions of the nineteenth century, middle-class public and its institutions.” ( Schudsen 1995 pg 95)
The 20th century saw the predominance of mass-communicated news. Again technology was a factor in the changes. The invention, exploitation and regulation of the electricity, telegram, camera, telephone, cine-camera, radio, television and networkable computer all contributed to increases in speed and the power of dissemination of news. They have also all increased the costs and size of the organisation structure involved in their production. It is important to note that news production has become an expensive, corporate activity. Carl Hausman, in Crafting the News for Electronic Media describes a typical news room that comprises of; news director, studio and field producers, assignment editors, photographers, sound crew, video crew, sports reporter, weather reporter, anchors and writers. This list does not mention the other important players of course, the owners, the sponsors and the listeners.
Because of its cost and complexity, news gathering and dissemination has become vested in the hands of a few, powerful enterprises that are either privately-owned or controlled by governments. These enterprises have effectively turned news into a commodity which they have almost sole control over. Globalisation further concentrated this power in a process of media ‘convergence’. As Boyd-Barrett and Rantanen note:
The collection and dissemination of this commodity was organised and rationalised on behalf of media and non-media clients by a small group of powerful agencies, acting globally and as a cartel. (Boyd-Barrett and Rantanen pg 2)
MIT Professor, Nicholas Negroponte claims that the digital media will challenge this state of affairs. In his seminal book Being Digital he notes that:"Mass media will be redefined by systems for transmitting and receiving personalized information and entertainment" (Negroponte 1995:6)
To what extent do we agree with this view of the digital media?
As I
mentioned earlier, being first with the news has always been important. This
need has been particularly true of broadcast TV news in the late 20th century.
In his 1995 article for Convergence the journalist Brent MacGregor notes the
dramatic changes that had occurred in the last 30 years. In particular, he noted
the speeding-up of the delivery of stories.
Historically, film reels (shot on cine-cameras) had to be chemically processed. This took time, and this technically-imposed time lag had a couple of interesting effects of news production. It allowed the journalist time to check their stories and to produce a well thought-out account of what had happened. It also meant that the journalist had to write their story before seeing their images. Their accounts, therefore, did not synch with the images. WW2 news reels, therefore shows a wallpapering effect, whereby the commentary only vaguely refers to the images being shown.
In the 1960s, light 16mm cameras and synchronous recorded sound were introduced. In the Vietnam War, however, the film still had to be air freighted to Tokyo or Hong Kong before being sent on to New York and London.
As MacGregor notes, telecommunications satellites greatly increased the speed by which news was transferred from continent to continent. ENG – U-matic video tape was introduced in the 1970s which allowed editing in-country. By 1985 portable land stations had been developed weighing about 70lb which allowed a team to produce a report from anywhere in the world (providing it had power and telephone connections).
This ‘fly- away’ technology is now extremely light and flexible; ‘video phones’ were used extensively in the 2001 Afghanistan War and 2003 Gulf War. Channels like CNN and BBC 24 make extensive use of these technologies and claim to present ‘live’ news coverage of the whole globe.
There are a number of criticisms of synchronous 24 hour news coverage, however:
It has been argued that the new media are bringing about the de-massification of the existing media. What do we mean by de-massification in this context? What kinds of news is the new media presenting? Is it different from broadcast media? Is new media news gathering re-mediating mass media news? How and why is it doing this?
Since the early days of the Internet (prior to the www) it has been used to pass news between research groups. As the numbers of users on the Internet rose a number of protocol technologies arose to aid these exchanges. The most successful were Usenet and listserv. As the Usenet FAQ’s note:
“Usenet is the set of people who exchange articles tagged with one or more universally-recognized labels, called "newsgroups" (or "groups" for short)” (Usenet FAQ)
The tagging effectively brings together large bodies of information, authored by a number of writers on a related theme. Listserv is a technological system that allows you to create, manage and control electronic "mailing lists" on a corporate network or on the Internet. These technologies are very actively used by a number of disparate groups discussing a mutual interest such as pets or open-source programming.
As well as these formal news protocols, Internet Relay Chat (IRC), chat rooms, Multi-user Dungeons (MUDs) and bulletin boards were also used to exchange news (often characterised as gossip or sexual innuendo).
As we have seen all of the large news gathering agencies, newspapers, television and radio have all invested in producing news websites. One of the world leaders has been the BBC which has been able to invest time and effort into developing the technology. One of the issues they have been addressing has been interaction with its users and the economics of creating personalised news.
One recent subject of interest has been the rise of reality TV shows. In the UK, Big Brother (see URL below) and then ITV’s Survivor created great public interest in the activities of the participant of these shows. In fact the participants became celebrities in their own right. Websites were set up by the producers of these programmers to provide ‘news’ of the programme. The website also fed the idea of 24 hour coverage with webcams, video clips and sound clips, with regularly updated features on the participants. The BBC’s Fame Academy is the latest show in the UK using the reality TV formats. The producers of these web sites claim they provide a forum for the public to discuss the show and also it generates real-time feedback and interaction between the producers and their audience.
Outside of the traditional media sector, one of the more commented features of the world-wide-web has been the widespread provision of news information by organisations other than the traditional mass media. In many cases, these news sites have replaced or complimented the organisation’s traditional press releases and membership newsletter. These website allow these organisations to present up-to-date campaign information in addition to their role in news management. The NGO Greenpeace, for example, an international environmental pressure group has a website that deals with its latest global campaigns. Government agencies also provide news coverage. The UK’s Environment Agency, for example, has a website which has details of flood warnings which are updated every 15minutes, 24 hours a day. There are also peer-to-peer sites that provide news and analysis. Webmonkey is a peer-to-peer site providing code and technical news to programmers.
Of course, one of the ways that we all get personal news is via e-mail and SMS text messages. Both of these services are now used by commercial news agencies to deliver headlines and news items such as the weather.
In her 2000 book Virtual Ethnography Christine Hines studies the websites set-up to disseminate news and views about Louise Woodward case. She notes that when Judge Hiller Zobel decided to announce his ruling in the case over that for a brief period of time:
the Internet became the place to be to receive the latest and most authoritative news: a privileged location
After a few false-alarms and a few technical break-downs, however:
the newspapers and television were reasserting their reliability and immediacy over the Internet, which failed the test.( Hines 2000:70)
The Sun newspaper described the judge as being a 'Internut'. It is interesting to note that a number of the negative characterisation of the Internet have been disseminated by the other media ( TV and newspapers in particular). Can we trust their judgement of their media rival?Slashdot is a peer-to- peer news site dealing with the computer industry. Often this news acts more like a ‘source’ in the traditional mass-communications model of the media. Analysis and commentary must be provided by the reader. There is no editorial board or central decision making process at work. How does another reader know which comments are insightful? What can a reader do if she finds an article that he knows to be untrue?
A number of news websites also provide the opportunity to enter contact details. Regular ‘circular-style’ e-mail bulletins are sent to the list of subscribers. Webartery, for example, is a peer-to-peer exchange of artists working with the new media (see webartery website).E-mails and text messages, however, also pass between individuals and it is coming to be recognised that they act as an important, though informal way in which news and views are brought to the attention of individuals.
Truthfulness and trust have always been an important issue in newsgathering. It is always worthwhile asking yourself -how do I know that an article or feature reported on any medium is accurate? However, these issues have come to have particular resonance when dealing with the Internet. How do you know that an article on Webartery, for example, is relevant, accurate and up-to-date? It is noteworthy that early users of the Internet devloped a whole hosts of terms such as 'trolling' and 'spamming' to recognize that a number of postings are worthless.
It is easy to be sceptical. For example Peter Kollock begins an article noting:
The Internet is filled with junks and jerks. It is a commonplace for inhabitants of the Internet to complain bitterly about the lack of cooperation, decorum, and useful information. ....Yet the wonder of the Internet is not that there is so much noise, but that there is any significant cooperation at all." (Kollock 1999:220)
However, in his book Emergence, Steven Johnson discusses this issue in the context of Slashdot ( pg 152-162) and flags-up a pecularly cybercultural solution to the issue of 'cranks and lurkers'. Slashdot has a peer-moderated system which awards points to contributors. The items that are posted by 'reliable' contributors ( i.e. contributors with a very high point score) are then given the highest ranking as news. All of the ranking is done by the software so that it does not require a bureaucratic editorial procedure. The system resembles the news-disseminating traditions noted by Stephens at the start of this lecture. In particular, it relies on the efforts of the individuals within the community demonstrating their 'societal commitment ' by acting as honest and effective moderators.There has been an enormous rise in printed lifestyle magazines in the last twenty years. These are aimed at a niche market, providing in-depth coverage of a limited subject area. For example, Computer Arts magazine (see hand out) specialises in a computer graphics. A number of these traditional print format magazines have also created websites. Computer Arts, for example, uses its website as an advert, a source of revenue and as a resource to support the tutorials in the printed magazine.
There are also a new group of e-zines that have grown up which are only produced in electronic form. In contrast to traditional websites, e-zines are produced in editions or issues which are only updated periodically. Naturally one of the subjects of interest to the publishers of e-zines has been ‘cyberculture’ and the Internet. The Beehive (see Beehive below), for example, is a quarterly magazine dealing with new media art theory and practice that only ‘publishes’ in an electronic format.