![Al Jazeera English Newsdesk](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/36/Al_Jazeera_English_Newsdesk.jpg)
News is
information
Information is an abstract concept that refers to that which has the power to inform. At the most fundamental level information pertains to the interpretation of that which may be sensed. Any natural process that is not completely random ...
about current events. This may be provided through many different
media
Media may refer to:
Communication
* Media (communication), tools used to deliver information or data
** Advertising media, various media, content, buying and placement for advertising
** Broadcast media, communications delivered over mass el ...
:
word of mouth
Word of mouth, or ''viva voce'', is the passing of information from person to person using oral communication, which could be as simple as telling someone the time of day. Storytelling is a common form of word-of-mouth communication where one pe ...
,
printing
Printing is a process for mass reproducing text and images using a master form or template. The earliest non-paper products involving printing include cylinder seals and objects such as the Cyrus Cylinder and the Cylinders of Nabonidus. The ea ...
,
postal systems
Postal may refer to:
Places
* The Italian name for Burgstall, South Tyrol in northern Italy
* Postal, Missouri
* Postal Square
* Postal Museum (Liechtenstein), a postal museum in Vaduz, Liechtenstein
People
* Fred Postal, former co-owner o ...
,
broadcasting
Broadcasting is the distribution (business), distribution of sound, audio or video content to a dispersed audience via any electronic medium (communication), mass communications medium, but typically one using the electromagnetic spectrum (radio ...
,
electronic communication
Telecommunication is the transmission of information by various types of technologies over wire, radio, optical, or other electromagnetic systems. It has its origin in the desire of humans for communication over a distance greater than that fe ...
, or through the testimony of
observers and witnesses to events. News is sometimes called "hard news" to differentiate it from
soft media.
Common topics for news reports include
war
War is an intense armed conflict between states, governments, societies, or paramilitary groups such as mercenaries, insurgents, and militias. It is generally characterized by extreme violence, destruction, and mortality, using regular o ...
,
government
A government is the system or group of people governing an organized community, generally a state.
In the case of its broad associative definition, government normally consists of legislature, executive, and judiciary. Government is a ...
,
politics
Politics (from , ) is the set of activities that are associated with making decisions in groups, or other forms of power relations among individuals, such as the distribution of resources or status. The branch of social science that studies ...
,
education
Education is a purposeful activity directed at achieving certain aims, such as transmitting knowledge or fostering skills and character traits. These aims may include the development of understanding, rationality, kindness, and honesty. Va ...
,
health
Health, according to the World Health Organization, is "a state of complete physical, mental and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease and infirmity".World Health Organization. (2006)''Constitution of the World Health Organiza ...
, the
environment
Environment most often refers to:
__NOTOC__
* Natural environment, all living and non-living things occurring naturally
* Biophysical environment, the physical and biological factors along with their chemical interactions that affect an organism or ...
,
economy
An economy is an area of the production, distribution and trade, as well as consumption of goods and services. In general, it is defined as a social domain that emphasize the practices, discourses, and material expressions associated with the ...
,
business
Business is the practice of making one's living or making money by producing or Trade, buying and selling Product (business), products (such as goods and Service (economics), services). It is also "any activity or enterprise entered into for pr ...
,
fashion
Fashion is a form of self-expression and autonomy at a particular period and place and in a specific context, of clothing, footwear, lifestyle, accessories, makeup, hairstyle, and body posture. The term implies a look defined by the fashion in ...
,
entertainment
Entertainment is a form of activity that holds the attention and interest of an audience or gives pleasure and delight. It can be an idea or a task, but is more likely to be one of the activities or events that have developed over thousa ...
, and
sport
Sport pertains to any form of Competition, competitive physical activity or game that aims to use, maintain, or improve physical ability and Skill, skills while providing enjoyment to participants and, in some cases, entertainment to specta ...
, as well as
quirky or unusual events. Government proclamations, concerning
royal ceremonies,
laws
Law is a set of rules that are created and are law enforcement, enforceable by social or governmental institutions to regulate behavior,Robertson, ''Crimes against humanity'', 90. with its precise definition a matter of longstanding debate. ...
,
taxes
A tax is a compulsory financial charge or some other type of levy imposed on a taxpayer (an individual or legal entity) by a governmental organization in order to fund government spending and various public expenditures (regional, local, or ...
,
public health
Public health is "the science and art of preventing disease, prolonging life and promoting health through the organized efforts and informed choices of society, organizations, public and private, communities and individuals". Analyzing the det ...
, and
criminals
In ordinary language, a crime is an unlawful act punishable by a State (polity), state or other authority. The term ''crime'' does not, in modern criminal law, have any simple and universally accepted definition,Farmer, Lindsay: "Crime, definit ...
, have been dubbed news since ancient times.
Technological
Technology is the application of knowledge to reach practical goals in a specifiable and reproducible way. The word ''technology'' may also mean the product of such an endeavor. The use of technology is widely prevalent in medicine, science, ...
and
social developments, often driven by government communication and
espionage
Espionage, spying, or intelligence gathering is the act of obtaining secret or confidential information (intelligence) from non-disclosed sources or divulging of the same without the permission of the holder of the information for a tangibl ...
networks, have increased the speed with which news can spread, as well as influenced its content.
Throughout history, people have transported new information through oral means. Having developed in China over centuries,
newspapers
A newspaper is a periodical publication containing written information about current events and is often typed in black ink with a white or gray background.
Newspapers can cover a wide variety of fields such as politics, business, sports ...
became established in Europe during the
early modern period. In the 20th century,
radio
Radio is the technology of signaling and communicating using radio waves. Radio waves are electromagnetic waves of frequency between 30 hertz (Hz) and 300 gigahertz (GHz). They are generated by an electronic device called a transmit ...
and
television
Television, sometimes shortened to TV, is a telecommunication medium for transmitting moving images and sound. The term can refer to a television set, or the medium of television transmission. Television is a mass medium for advertisin ...
became an important means of transmitting news. Whilst in the 21st, the
internet
The Internet (or internet) is the global system of interconnected computer networks that uses the Internet protocol suite (TCP/IP) to communicate between networks and devices. It is a '' network of networks'' that consists of private, pub ...
has also begun to play a similar role.
Meaning
Etymology
The
English
English usually refers to:
* English language
* English people
English may also refer to:
Peoples, culture, and language
* ''English'', an adjective for something of, from, or related to England
** English national ide ...
word "news" developed in the 14th century as a special use of the plural form of "new". In
Middle English
Middle English (abbreviated to ME) is a form of the English language that was spoken after the Norman conquest of 1066, until the late 15th century. The English language underwent distinct variations and developments following the Old English p ...
, the equivalent word was ''newes'', like the French ''
nouvelles'' and the German ''Neues''. Similar developments are found in the
Slavic languages
The Slavic languages, also known as the Slavonic languages, are Indo-European languages spoken primarily by the Slavic peoples and their descendants. They are thought to descend from a proto-language called Proto-Slavic, spoken during the Ear ...
– namely cognates from
Serbo-Croatian
Serbo-Croatian () – also called Serbo-Croat (), Serbo-Croat-Bosnian (SCB), Bosnian-Croatian-Serbian (BCS), and Bosnian-Croatian-Montenegrin-Serbian (BCMS) – is a South Slavic language and the primary language of Serbia, Croatia, Bosnia and ...
''
novost'' (from ''
nov'', "new"),
Czech
Czech may refer to:
* Anything from or related to the Czech Republic, a country in Europe
** Czech language
** Czechs, the people of the area
** Czech culture
** Czech cuisine
* One of three mythical brothers, Lech, Czech, and Rus'
Places
*Czech, ...
and
Slovak ''
noviny'' (from ''
nový'', "new"), the
Polish
Polish may refer to:
* Anything from or related to Poland, a country in Europe
* Polish language
* Poles, people from Poland or of Polish descent
* Polish chicken
*Polish brothers (Mark Polish and Michael Polish, born 1970), American twin screenwr ...
''nowiny'', the
Bulgarian
Bulgarian may refer to:
* Something of, from, or related to the country of Bulgaria
* Bulgarians, a South Slavic ethnic group
* Bulgarian language, a Slavic language
* Bulgarian alphabet
* A citizen of Bulgaria, see Demographics of Bulgaria
* Bul ...
''novini'' and
Russian
Russian(s) refers to anything related to Russia, including:
*Russians (, ''russkiye''), an ethnic group of the East Slavic peoples, primarily living in Russia and neighboring countries
*Rossiyane (), Russian language term for all citizens and peo ...
''novosti'' – and likewise in the
Celtic languages
The Celtic languages ( usually , but sometimes ) are a group of related languages descended from Proto-Celtic. They form a branch of the Indo-European language family. The term "Celtic" was first used to describe this language group by Edward ...
: the
Welsh
Welsh may refer to:
Related to Wales
* Welsh, referring or related to Wales
* Welsh language, a Brittonic Celtic language spoken in Wales
* Welsh people
People
* Welsh (surname)
* Sometimes used as a synonym for the ancient Britons (Celtic peop ...
''newyddion'' (from ''newydd'') and the
Cornish ''nowodhow'' (from ''nowydh'').
["News", ''Oxford English Dictionary'', accessed online, 5 March 2015. "Etymology: Spec. use of plural of new n., after Middle French ''nouvelles'' (see novel n.), or classical Latin ''nova'' new things, in post-classical Latin also news (from late 13th cent. in British sources), use as noun of neuter plural of ''novus'' new (compare classical Latin ''rēs nova'' (feminine singular) a new development, a fresh turn of events). Compare later "]
Jessica Garretson Finch
Jessica Garretson Finch (August 19, 1871 – October 31, 1949) was an American educator, author, women's rights activist, founder of the Birch Wathen Lenox School, Lennox School for girls, and founding president of Finch College.
Early life
F ...
is credited with coining the phrase "current events" while teaching at
Barnard College
Barnard College of Columbia University is a private women's liberal arts college in the borough of Manhattan in New York City. It was founded in 1889 by a group of women led by young student activist Annie Nathan Meyer, who petitioned Columbia ...
in the 1890s.
Newness
As its name implies, "news" typically connotes the presentation of new information.
[Stephens, ''History of News'' (1988), p. 13.][Smith,''The Newspaper: An International History'' (1979), p. 7. "In the information which ]he newspaper
He or HE may refer to:
Language
* He (pronoun), an English pronoun
* He (kana), the romanization of the Japanese kana へ
* He (letter), the fifth letter of many Semitic alphabets
* He (Cyrillic), a letter of the Cyrillic script called ''He'' in ...
chose to supply, and in the many sources of information which it took over and reorganized, it contained a bias towards recency or newness; to its readers, it offered regularity of publication. It had to be filled with whatever was available, unable to wait until information of greater clarity or certainty or of wider perspective had accumulated." The newness of news gives it an uncertain quality which distinguishes it from the more careful investigations of history or other scholarly disciplines.
[Pettegree, ''The Invention of News'' (2014), p. 3. "Even as news became more plentiful in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the problem of establishing the veracity of news reports remained acute. The news market—and by the sixteenth century it was a real market—was humming with conflicting reports, some incredible, some all too plausible: lives, fortunes, even the fate of kingdoms could depend upon acting on the right information."] Whereas
historians
A historian is a person who studies and writes about the past and is regarded as an authority on it. Historians are concerned with the continuous, methodical narrative and research of past events as relating to the human race; as well as the stu ...
tend to view events as causally related manifestations of underlying processes, news stories tend to describe events in isolation, and to exclude discussion of the relationships between them.
[Park, "News as a Form of Knowledge" (1940), pp. 675–676. "News is not history because, for one thing among others, it deals, on the whole, with isolated events and does not seek to relate them to one another either in the form of causal or in the form of ]Teleological
Teleology (from and )Partridge, Eric. 1977''Origins: A Short Etymological Dictionary of Modern English'' London: Routledge, p. 4187. or finalityDubray, Charles. 2020 912Teleology" In ''The Catholic Encyclopedia'' 14. New York: Robert Appleton ...
sequences." News conspicuously describes the world in the present or immediate past, even when the most important aspects of a news story have occurred long in the past—or are expected to occur in the future. To make the news, an ongoing process must have some "peg", an event in time which anchors it to the present moment.
Relatedly, news often addresses aspects of reality which seem unusual, deviant, or out of the ordinary. Hence the famous dictum that "Dog Bites Man" is not news, but "Man Bites Dog" is.
Another corollary of the newness of news is that, as new technology enables new media to disseminate news more quickly, 'slower' forms of communication may move away from 'news' towards 'analysis'.
Commodity
According to some theories, "news" is whatever the news industry sells. Journalism, broadly understood along the same lines, is the act or occupation of collecting and providing news. From a commercial perspective, news is simply one input, along with paper (or an electronic server) necessary to prepare a final product for distribution. A news agency supplies this resource "wholesale" and publishers enhance it for retail.
[Boyd-Barrett & Rantanen, ''The Globalization of News'' (1998), p. 6. "News agency news is considered 'wholesale' resource material, something that has to be worked upon, smelted, reconfigured, for conversion into a news report that is suitable for consumption by ordinary readers. It has also suited the news agencies to be thus presented: they have needed to seem credible to extensive networks of 'retail' clients of many different political and cultural shades and hues. They have wanted to avoid controversy, to maintain an image of plain, almost dull, but completely dependable professionalism."][Phil MacGregor, "International News Agencies: Global eyes that never blink", in Fowler-Watt & Allan (eds.), ''Journalism'' (2013).]
Tone
Most purveyors of news value impartiality, neutrality, and
objectivity, despite the inherent difficulty of reporting without political bias. Perception of these values has changed greatly over time as sensationalized '
tabloid journalism
Tabloid journalism is a popular style of largely sensationalist journalism (usually dramatized and sometimes unverifiable or even blatantly false), which takes its name from the tabloid newspaper format: a small-sized newspaper also known as ...
' has risen in popularity.
Michael Schudson
Michael S. Schudson
Michael S. Schudson (born November 3, 1946) is professor of journalism in the graduate school of journalism of Columbia University and adjunct professor in the department of sociology. He is professor emeritus at the Universi ...
has argued that before the era of World War I and the concomitant rise of
propaganda
Propaganda is communication that is primarily used to influence or persuade an audience to further an agenda, which may not be objective and may be selectively presenting facts to encourage a particular synthesis or perception, or using loaded ...
, journalists were not aware of the concept of
bias in reporting, let alone actively correcting for it. News is also sometimes said to portray the
truth
Truth is the property of being in accord with fact or reality.Merriam-Webster's Online Dictionarytruth 2005 In everyday language, truth is typically ascribed to things that aim to represent reality or otherwise correspond to it, such as beliefs ...
, but this relationship is elusive and qualified.
Paradoxically, another property commonly attributed to news is
sensationalism
In journalism and mass media, sensationalism is a type of editorial tactic. Events and topics in news stories are selected and worded to excite the greatest number of readers and viewers. This style of news reporting encourages biased or emotion ...
, the disproportionate focus on, and
exaggeration
Exaggeration is the representation of something as more extreme or dramatic than it really is. Exaggeration may occur intentionally or unintentionally.
Exaggeration can be a rhetorical device or figure of speech. It may be used to evoke str ...
of, emotive stories for public consumption.
This news is also not unrelated to
gossip
Gossip is idle talk or rumour, especially about the personal or private affairs of others; the act is also known as dishing or tattling.
Gossip is a topic of research in evolutionary psychology, which has found gossip to be an important means ...
, the human practice of sharing information about other humans of mutual interest. A common sensational topic is violence; hence another news dictum, "if it bleeds, it leads".
Newsworthiness
Newsworthiness is defined as a subject having sufficient relevance to the public or a special audience to warrant press attention or coverage.
News values seem to be common across cultures. People seem to be interested in news to the extent which it has a big impact, describes conflicts, happens nearby, involves well-known people, and deviates from the norms of everyday happenings. War is a common news topic, partly because it involves unknown events that could pose personal danger.
History
Folk news
Evidence suggests that cultures around the world have found a place for people to share stories about interesting new information. Among
Zulus
Zulu people (; zu, amaZulu) are a Nguni ethnic group native to Southern Africa. The Zulu people are the largest ethnic group and nation in South Africa, with an estimated 10–12 million people, living mainly in the province of KwaZulu-Natal ...
,
Mongolians
The Mongols ( mn, Монголчууд, , , ; ; russian: Монголы) are an East Asian ethnic group native to Mongolia, Inner Mongolia in China and the Buryatia Republic of the Russian Federation. The Mongols are the principal member of ...
, Polynesians, and American Southerners,
anthropologists
An anthropologist is a person engaged in the practice of anthropology. Anthropology is the study of aspects of humans within past and present societies. Social anthropology, cultural anthropology and philosophical anthropology study the norms and v ...
have documented the practice of questioning travelers for news as a matter of priority. Sufficiently important news would be repeated quickly and often, and could spread by word of mouth over a large geographic area. Even as printing presses came into use in
Europe
Europe is a large peninsula conventionally considered a continent in its own right because of its great physical size and the weight of its history and traditions. Europe is also considered a Continent#Subcontinents, subcontinent of Eurasia ...
, news for the general public often travelled orally via monks, travelers,
town crier
A town crier, also called a bellman, is an officer of a royal court or public authority who makes public pronouncements as required.
Duties and functions
The town crier was used to make public announcements in the streets. Criers often dress ...
s, etc.
The news is also transmitted in public gathering places, such as the Greek forum and the Roman baths. Starting in
England
England is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. It shares land borders with Wales to its west and Scotland to its north. The Irish Sea lies northwest and the Celtic Sea to the southwest. It is separated from continental Europe b ...
,
coffeehouses
A coffeehouse, coffee shop, or café is an establishment that primarily serves coffee of various types, notably espresso, latte, and cappuccino. Some coffeehouses may serve cold drinks, such as iced coffee and iced tea, as well as other non-caf ...
served as important sites for the spread of news, even after telecommunications became widely available. The history of the coffee houses is traced from Arab countries, which was introduced in England in the 16th century. In the Muslim world, people have gathered and exchanged news at mosques and other social places. Travelers on pilgrimages to Mecca traditionally stay at
caravanserai
A caravanserai (or caravansary; ) was a roadside inn where travelers ( caravaners) could rest and recover from the day's journey. Caravanserais supported the flow of commerce, information and people across the network of trade routes covering ...
s, roadside inns, along the way, and these places have naturally served as hubs for gaining news of the world. In late medieval Britain, reports ("tidings") of major events were a topic of great public interest, as chronicled in Chaucer's 1380 ''
The House of Fame
''The House of Fame'' (''Hous of Fame'' in the original spelling) is a Middle English poem by Geoffrey Chaucer, probably written between 1374 and 1385, making it one of his earlier works. It was most likely written after ''The Book of the Duchess' ...
'' and other works.
Government proclamations
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Before the invention of newspapers in the early 17th century, official government bulletins and
edicts
An edict is a decree or announcement of a law, often associated with monarchism, but it can be under any official authority. Synonyms include "dictum" and "pronouncement".
''Edict'' derives from the Latin edictum.
Notable edicts
* Telepinu Pro ...
were circulated at times in some centralized empires. The first documented use of an organized
courier
A courier is a person or organisation that delivers a message, package or letter from one place or person to another place or person. Typically, a courier provides their courier service on a commercial contract basis; however, some couriers are ...
service for the diffusion of written documents is in Egypt, where Pharaohs used couriers for the diffusion of their decrees in the territory of the State (2400 BC).
Julius Caesar
Gaius Julius Caesar (; ; 12 July 100 BC – 15 March 44 BC), was a Roman general and statesman. A member of the First Triumvirate, Caesar led the Roman armies in the Gallic Wars before defeating his political rival Pompey in a civil war, and ...
regularly publicized his heroic deeds in Gaul, and upon becoming dictator of Rome began publishing government announcements called ''
Acta Diurna
''Acta Diurna'' (Latin: ''Daily Acts'', sometimes translated as ''Daily Public Records'' or poetically as ''Daily Gazette'') were daily Ancient Rome, Roman official notices, a sort of daily gazette. They were carved on stone or metal and presented ...
''. These were carved in metal or stone and posted in public places.
[Allan, ''News Culture'' (2004), p. 9.] In medieval England, parliamentary declarations were delivered to
sheriffs
A sheriff is a government official, with varying duties, existing in some countries with historical ties to England where the office originated. There is an analogous, although independently developed, office in Iceland that is commonly transla ...
for public display and reading at the market.
Specially sanctioned messengers have been recognized in
Vietnamese culture
The culture of Vietnam (Vietnamese: Văn hoá Việt Nam) is highly multicultural. The early culture in Vietnam started with the Bronze Age Dong Son culture, Đông Sơn culture considered to be one of its most important progenitors for its Anc ...
, among the
Khasi people
The Khasi people are an ethnic group of Meghalaya in north-eastern India with a significant population in the bordering state of Assam, and in certain parts of Bangladesh. Khasi people form the majority of the population of the eastern part of M ...
in India, and in the
Fox
Foxes are small to medium-sized, omnivorous mammals belonging to several genera of the family Canidae. They have a flattened skull, upright, triangular ears, a pointed, slightly upturned snout, and a long bushy tail (or ''brush'').
Twelve sp ...
and
Winnebago Winnebago can refer to:
* The exonym of the Ho-Chunk tribe of Native North Americans with reservations in Nebraska, Iowa, and Wisconsin
** Winnebago Tribe of Nebraska, a federally recognized tribe group in the state
** The Winnebago language of the ...
cultures of the American midwest. The
Zulu Kingdom
The Zulu Kingdom (, ), sometimes referred to as the Zulu Empire or the Kingdom of Zululand, was a monarchy in Southern Africa. During the 1810s, Shaka established a modern standing army that consolidated rival clans and built a large following ...
used runners to quickly disseminate news. In West Africa, news can be spread by
griot
A griot (; ; Manding: jali or jeli (in N'Ko: , ''djeli'' or ''djéli'' in French spelling); Serer: kevel or kewel / okawul; Wolof: gewel) is a West African historian, storyteller, praise singer, poet, and/or musician.
The griot is a repos ...
s. In most cases, the official spreaders of news have been closely aligned with holders of political power.
Town criers
A town is a human settlement. Towns are generally larger than villages and smaller than cities, though the criteria to distinguish between them vary considerably in different parts of the world.
Origin and use
The word "town" shares an ori ...
were a common means of conveying information to citydwellers. In thirteenth-century Florence, criers known as arrived in the market regularly, to announce political news, to convoke public meetings, and to call the populace to arms. In 1307 and 1322–1325, laws were established governing their appointment, conduct, and salary. These laws stipulated how many times a was to repeat a proclamation (forty) and where in the city they were to read them. Different declarations sometimes came with additional protocols; announcements regarding the plague were also to be read at the city gates. These proclamations all used a standard format, beginning with an ''
exordium''—"The worshipful and most esteemed gentlemen of the Eight of Ward and Security of the city of Florence make it known, notify, and expressly command, to whosoever, of whatever status, rank, quality and condition"—and continuing with a statement (''narratio''), a request made upon the listeners (''petitio''), and the penalty to be exacted from those who would not comply (''peroratio''). In addition to major declarations, ''bandi'' (announcements) might concern petty crimes, requests for information, and notices about missing slaves.
Niccolò Machiavelli
Niccolò di Bernardo dei Machiavelli ( , , ; 3 May 1469 – 21 June 1527), occasionally rendered in English as Nicholas Machiavel ( , ; see below), was an Italian diplomat, author, philosopher and historian who lived during the Renaissance. ...
was captured by the Medicis in 1513, following a bando calling for his immediate surrender. Some town criers could be paid to include advertising along with news.
Under the
Ottoman Empire
The Ottoman Empire, * ; is an archaic version. The definite article forms and were synonymous * and el, Оθωμανική Αυτοκρατορία, Othōmanikē Avtokratoria, label=none * info page on book at Martin Luther University) ...
, official messages were regularly distributed at mosques, by traveling holy men, and by secular criers. These criers were sent to read official announcements in marketplaces, highways, and other well-traveled places, sometimes issuing commands and penalties for disobedience.
Early news networks
The spread of news has always been linked to the communications networks in place to disseminate it. Thus, political, religious, and commercial interests have historically controlled, expanded, and monitored communications channels by which news could spread. Postal services have long been closely entwined with the maintenance of political power in a large area.
[Fang, ''History of Mass Communication'' (1997), pp. 14–15.][Stephens, ''History of News'' (1988), p. 27. "Whoever controlled the messengers could select which anecdotes and information would be favored by this treatment. Therefore, whoever controlled the messengers gained not only a conduit to the members of a society—the ability to inform them of new regulations—but gained a measure of power over the selection of news the members of a society received—the power, for example to ensure that they received news of triumphs but not necessarily of debacles. Messengers were controlled, for the most part, by kings, chiefs, headmen. They were rarely channels of dissent."]
One of the imperial communication channels, called the "
Royal Road
The Royal Road was an ancient highway reorganized and rebuilt by the Persian king Darius the Great (Darius I) of the first (Achaemenid) Persian Empire in the 5th century BC. Darius built the road to facilitate rapid communication on the western ...
" traversed the
Assyrian Empire
Assyrian may refer to:
* Assyrian people, the indigenous ethnic group of Mesopotamia.
* Assyria, a major Mesopotamian kingdom and empire.
** Early Assyrian Period
** Old Assyrian Period
** Middle Assyrian Empire
** Neo-Assyrian Empire
* Assyrian ...
and served as a key source of its power. The Roman Empire maintained a vast network of roads, known as ''
cursus publicus
The ''cursus publicus'' (Latin: "the public way"; grc, δημόσιος δρόμος, ''dēmósios drómos'') was the state mandated and supervised courier and transportation service of the Roman Empire, later inherited by the Eastern Roma ...
'', for similar purposes.
Visible chains of long-distance signaling, known as
optical telegraph
An optical telegraph is a line of stations, typically towers, for the purpose of conveying textual information by means of visual signals. There are two main types of such systems; the semaphore telegraph which uses pivoted indicator arms and ...
y, have also been used throughout history to convey limited types of information. These can have ranged from smoke and fire signals to advanced systems using semaphore codes and telescopes.
The latter form of optical telegraph came into use in Japan, Britain, France, and Germany from the 1790s through the 1850s.
Asia
![KaiYuanZaBaoRemake](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a3/KaiYuanZaBaoRemake.jpg)
The world's first written news may have originated in
eighth century BCE China, where reports gathered by officials were eventually compiled as the ''
Spring and Autumn Annals
The ''Spring and Autumn Annals'' () is an ancient Chinese chronicle that has been one of the core Chinese classics since ancient times. The ''Annals'' is the official chronicle of the State of Lu, and covers a 241-year period from 722 to 481 ...
''. The annals, whose compilation is attributed to
Confucius
Confucius ( ; zh, s=, p=Kǒng Fūzǐ, "Master Kǒng"; or commonly zh, s=, p=Kǒngzǐ, labels=no; – ) was a Chinese philosopher and politician of the Spring and Autumn period who is traditionally considered the paragon of Chinese sages. C ...
, were available to a sizeable reading public and dealt with common news themes—though they straddle the line between news and history. The
Han dynasty
The Han dynasty (, ; ) was an imperial dynasty of China (202 BC – 9 AD, 25–220 AD), established by Liu Bang (Emperor Gao) and ruled by the House of Liu. The dynasty was preceded by the short-lived Qin dynasty (221–207 BC) and a warr ...
is credited with developing one of the most effective imperial surveillance and communications networks in the ancient world. Government-produced news sheets, called
tipao
''Dibao'' (), literally "reports from the fficialresidences", were a type of publications issued by central and local governments in imperial China, which was the only official government newspaper published by the ancient Chinese central governme ...
, circulated among court officials during the late Han dynasty (second and third centuries AD). Between 713 and 734, the ''
Kaiyuan Za Bao
''Kaiyuan Za Bao'', or ''Kaiyuan Chao Bao'', ''Bulletin of the Court'', was an official publication which first appeared in the 8th century, during the Kaiyuan era. It has been described as the first Chinese newspaper or official gazette, and als ...
'' ("Bulletin of the Court") of the Chinese
Tang Dynasty
The Tang dynasty (, ; zh, t= ), or Tang Empire, was an Dynasties in Chinese history, imperial dynasty of China that ruled from 618 to 907 AD, with an Zhou dynasty (690–705), interregnum between 690 and 705. It was preceded by the Sui dyn ...
published government news; it was handwritten on silk and read by government officials.
The court created a Bureau of Official Reports (''Jin Zhouyuan'') to centralize news distribution for the court. Newsletters called ''ch'ao pao'' continued to be produced and gained wider public circulation in the following centuries.
[Smith,''The Newspaper: An International History'' (1979), p. 14. "At a later stage of its development, during the Sung period (960–1278), the ''ti pao'' was made to circulate among the purely intellectual groups, and during the Ming (1367–1644) was seen by a wider circle of society."] In 1582 there was the first reference to privately published newssheets in Beijing, during the late
Ming Dynasty
The Ming dynasty (), officially the Great Ming, was an Dynasties in Chinese history, imperial dynasty of China, ruling from 1368 to 1644 following the collapse of the Mongol Empire, Mongol-led Yuan dynasty. The Ming dynasty was the last ort ...
.
[ Brook, Timothy. (1998). '' The Confusions of Pleasure: Commerce and Culture in Ming China''. Berkeley: ]University of California Press
The University of California Press, otherwise known as UC Press, is a publishing house associated with the University of California that engages in academic publishing. It was founded in 1893 to publish scholarly and scientific works by faculty ...
. p. xxi.
Japan had effective communications and postal delivery networks at several points in its history, first in 646 with the
Taika Reform
The were a set of doctrines established by Emperor Kōtoku (孝徳天皇 ''Kōtoku tennō'') in the year 645. They were written shortly after the death of Prince Shōtoku and the defeat of the Soga clan (蘇我氏 ''Soga no uji''), uniting Japan ...
and again during the
Kamakura period
The is a period of Japanese history that marks the governance by the Kamakura shogunate, officially established in 1192 in Kamakura by the first ''shōgun'' Minamoto no Yoritomo after the conclusion of the Genpei War, which saw the struggle bet ...
from 1183 to 1333. The system depended on ''
hikyaku
were couriers in Japan who carried letters, documents, bills of exchange, and packages, using a system of relay stations under the bakufu military governments, beginning in the Kamakura period (1185–1333), gradually yielding to more modern syst ...
'', runners, and regularly spaced relay stations. By this method, news could travel between Kyoto and Kamakura in 5–7 days. Special horse-mounted messengers could move information at the speed of 170 kilometers per day.
[Distelrath, "Development of the Information and Communication Systems in Germany and Japan" (2000), pp. 45–46 .] The Japanese shogunates were less tolerant than the Chinese government of news circulation.
[Smith,''The Newspaper: An International History'' (1979), p. 14–15.] The postal system established during the
Edo period
The or is the period between 1603 and 1867 in the history of Japan, when Japan was under the rule of the Tokugawa shogunate and the country's 300 regional '' daimyo''. Emerging from the chaos of the Sengoku period, the Edo period was characteriz ...
was even more effective, with average speeds of 125–150 km/day and express speed of 200 km/day. This system was initially used only by the government, taking private communications only at exorbitant prices. Private services emerged and in 1668 established their own ''
nakama'' (guild). They became even faster, and created an effective optical telegraphy system using flags by day and lanterns and mirrors by night.
Europe
In Europe, during the Middle Ages, elites relied on runners to transmit news over long distances. At 33 kilometres per day, a runner would take two months to bring a message across the
Hanseatic League
The Hanseatic League (; gml, Hanse, , ; german: label=Modern German, Deutsche Hanse) was a medieval commercial and defensive confederation of merchant guilds and market towns in Central and Northern Europe. Growing from a few North German to ...
from Bruges to Riga. In the
early modern period, increased cross-border interaction created a rising need for information which was met by concise handwritten newssheets. The driving force of this new development was the commercial advantage provided by up-to-date news.
In 1556, the government of
Venice
Venice ( ; it, Venezia ; vec, Venesia or ) is a city in northeastern Italy and the capital of the Veneto Regions of Italy, region. It is built on a group of 118 small islands that are separated by canals and linked by over 400 ...
first published the monthly ''Notizie scritte'', which cost one
gazetta.
[Wan-Press.org](_blank)
, A Newspaper Timeline, World Association of Newspapers
The World Association of Newspapers and News Publishers (WAN-IFRA) is a non-profit, non-governmental organization made up of 76 national newspaper associations, 12 news agencies, 10 regional press organisations, and many individual newspaper ex ...
These
avvisi
Journalism of Early Modern Europe was composed originally by handwritten newsletters used to convey political, military, and economic news quickly and efficiently throughout Europe during the early modern era (1500-1700). They were often written ...
were handwritten newsletters and used to convey political, military, and economic news quickly and efficiently to Italian cities (1500–1700)—sharing some characteristics of newspapers though usually not considered true newspapers. ''Avvisi'' were sold by subscription under the auspices of military, religious, and banking authorities. Sponsorship flavored the contents of each series, which were circulated under many different names. Subscribers included clerics, diplomatic staff, and noble families. By the last quarter of the seventeenth century, long passages from ''avvisi'' were finding their way into published monthlies such as the
Mercure de France
The was originally a French gazette and literary magazine first published in the 17th century, but after several incarnations has evolved as a publisher, and is now part of the Éditions Gallimard publishing group.
The gazette was published f ...
and, in northern Italy, ''Pallade veneta''.
![Postkurse 1563](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/f4/Postkurse_1563.jpg)
Postal services enabled merchants and monarchs to stay abreast of important information. For the
Holy Roman Empire
The Holy Roman Empire was a Polity, political entity in Western Europe, Western, Central Europe, Central, and Southern Europe that developed during the Early Middle Ages and continued until its Dissolution of the Holy Roman Empire, dissolution i ...
, Emperor
Maximillian I in 1490 authorized two brothers from the Italian Tasso family, Francesco and Janetto, to create a network of courier stations linked by riders. They began with a communications line between Innsbruck and Mechelen and grew from there.
[Lampe & Ploeckl, "Spanning the Globe" (2014), 248.] In 1505 this network expanded to Spain, new governed by Maximilian's son
Philip
Philip, also Phillip, is a male given name, derived from the Greek (''Philippos'', lit. "horse-loving" or "fond of horses"), from a compound of (''philos'', "dear", "loved", "loving") and (''hippos'', "horse"). Prominent Philips who popularize ...
. These riders could travel 180 kilometers in a day. This system became the
Imperial Reichspost
''Reichspost'' (; "Imperial Mail") was the name of the postal service of Germany from 1866 to 1945.
''Deutsche Reichspost''
Upon the out break of the Austro-Prussian War of 1866 and the break-up of the German Confederation in the Peace of ...
, administered by Tasso descendants (subsequently known as
Thurn-und-Taxis), who in 1587 received exclusive operating rights from the Emperor.
The
French postal service and
English postal service also began at this time, but did not become comprehensive until the early 1600s.
In 1620, the English system linked with Thurn-und-Taxis.
[Bakker, "Trading Facts" (2011), p. 13.]
These connections underpinned an extensive system of news circulation, with handwritten items bearing dates and places of origin. Centred in Germany, the network took in news from Russia, the Balkans, Italy, Britain, France, and the Netherlands. The German lawyer
Christoph von Scheurl and the
Fugger
The House of Fugger () is a German upper bourgeois family that was historically a prominent group of European bankers, members of the fifteenth- and sixteenth-century mercantile patriciate of Augsburg, international mercantile bankers, and vent ...
house of Augsburg were prominent hubs in this network.
Letters describing historically significant events could gain wide circulation as news reports. Indeed, personal correspondence sometimes acted only as a convenient channel through which news could flow across a larger network. A common type of business communication was a simple listing of current prices, the circulation of which quickened the flow of international trade.
[Bakker, "Trading Facts" (2011), pp. 10–11.] Businesspeople also wanted to know about events related to shipping, the affairs of other businesses, and political developments.
Even after the advent of international newspapers, business owners still valued correspondence highly as a source of reliable news that would affect their enterprise. Handwritten newsletters, which could be produced quickly for a limited clientele, also continued into the 1600s.
[Bakker, "Trading Facts" (2011), pp. 11–12.]
Rise of the newspaper
The
spread of paper and the
printing press
A printing press is a mechanical device for applying pressure to an inked surface resting upon a printing, print medium (such as paper or cloth), thereby transferring the ink. It marked a dramatic improvement on earlier printing methods in wh ...
from China to Europe preceded a major advance in the transmission of news. With the spread of printing presses and the creation of new markets in the 1500s, news underwent a shift from factual and precise economic reporting, to a more emotive and freewheeling format. (Private newsletters containing important intelligence therefore remained in use by people who needed to know.) The
first newspapers emerged in Germany in the early 1600s.
Relation aller Fürnemmen und gedenckwürdigen Historien
Johann Carolus (26 March 1575 − 15 August 1634) was a German publisher of the first newspaper, called ''Relation aller Fürnemmen und gedenckwürdigen Historien'' (Account of all distinguished and commemorable stories). The ''Relation'' is re ...
, from 1605, is recognized as the world's first formalized 'newspaper';
[; World Association of Newspapers]
"Newspapers: 400 Years Young!"
while not a 'newspaper' in the modern sense, the Ancient Roman ''
Acta Diurna
''Acta Diurna'' (Latin: ''Daily Acts'', sometimes translated as ''Daily Public Records'' or poetically as ''Daily Gazette'') were daily Ancient Rome, Roman official notices, a sort of daily gazette. They were carved on stone or metal and presented ...
'' served a similar purpose circa 131 BC.
The new format, which mashed together numerous unrelated and perhaps dubious reports from far-flung locations, created a radically new and jarring experience for its readers. A variety of styles emerged, from single-story tales, to compilations, overviews, and personal and impersonal types of news analysis.
News for public consumption was at first tightly controlled by governments. By 1530, England had created a licensing system for the press and banned "seditious opinions". Under the
Licensing Act
Licensing Act (with its variations) is a stock short title used in the United Kingdom for legislation relating to licensing.
List
* Licensing Order of 1643, an Act imposing pre-publication censorship and prompting Milton to write ''Areopagitica''. ...
, publication was restricted to approved presses—as exemplified by The London Gazette, which prominently bore the words: "Published By Authority". Parliament allowed the Licensing Act to lapse in 1695, beginning a new era marked by
Whig and
Tory
A Tory () is a person who holds a political philosophy known as Toryism, based on a British version of traditionalism and conservatism, which upholds the supremacy of social order as it has evolved in the English culture throughout history. Th ...
newspapers. (During this era, the
Stamp Act limited newspaper distribution simply by making them expensive to sell and buy.) In France, censorship was even more constant. Consequently, many Europeans read newspapers originating from beyond their national borders—especially from the
Dutch Republic
The United Provinces of the Netherlands, also known as the (Seven) United Provinces, officially as the Republic of the Seven United Netherlands (Dutch: ''Republiek der Zeven Verenigde Nederlanden''), and commonly referred to in historiography ...
, where publishers could evade state censorship.
The new United States saw a newspaper boom beginning with the Revolutionary era, accelerated by spirited debates over the establishment of a new government, spurred on by subsidies contained in the 1792
Postal Service Act
The Postal Service Act was a piece of United States federal legislation that established the United States Post Office Department. It was signed into law by President George Washington on February 20, 1792.
History
William Goddard, a Patrio ...
, and continuing into the 1800s. American newspapers got many of their stories by copying reports from each other. Thus by offering free postage to newspapers wishing to exchange copies, the Postal Service Act subsidized a rapidly growing news network through which different stories could percolate. Newspapers thrived during the colonization of the
West
West or Occident is one of the four cardinal directions or points of the compass. It is the opposite direction from east and is the direction in which the Sunset, Sun sets on the Earth.
Etymology
The word "west" is a Germanic languages, German ...
, fueled by high literacy and a newspaper-loving culture. By 1880, San Francisco rivaled New York in number of different newspapers and in printed newspaper copies per capita.
Boosters of new towns felt that newspapers covering local events brought legitimacy, recognition, and community. The 1830s American, wrote
Alexis de Tocqueville
Alexis Charles Henri Clérel, comte de Tocqueville (; 29 July 180516 April 1859), colloquially known as Tocqueville (), was a French aristocrat, diplomat, political scientist, political philosopher and historian. He is best known for his works ...
, was "a very civilized man prepared for a time to face life in the forest, plunging into the wilderness of the New World with his Bible, ax, and newspapers." In France, the Revolution brought forth an abundance of newspapers and a new climate of press freedom, followed by a return to repression under Napoleon. In 1792 the Revolutionaries set up a news ministry called the ''Bureau d'Esprit''.
Some newspapers published in the 1800s and after retained the commercial orientation characteristic of the private newsletters of the Renaissance. Economically oriented newspapers published new types of data enabled the advent of
statistics
Statistics (from German language, German: ''wikt:Statistik#German, Statistik'', "description of a State (polity), state, a country") is the discipline that concerns the collection, organization, analysis, interpretation, and presentation of ...
, especially
economic statistics
Economic statistics is a topic in applied statistics and applied economics that concerns the collection, processing, compilation, dissemination, and analysis of economic data. It is closely related to business statistics and econometrics. It is ...
which could inform sophisticated investment decisions. These newspapers, too, became available for larger sections of society, not just elites, keen on investing some of their savings in the
stock market
A stock market, equity market, or share market is the aggregation of buyers and sellers of stocks (also called shares), which represent ownership claims on businesses; these may include ''securities'' listed on a public stock exchange, as ...
s. Yet, as in the case other newspapers, the incorporation of advertising into the newspaper led to justified reservations about accepting newspaper information at face value. Economic newspapers also became promoters of economic ideologies, such as
Keynesianism
Keynesian economics ( ; sometimes Keynesianism, named after British economist John Maynard Keynes) are the various macroeconomic theories and models of how aggregate demand (total spending in the economy) strongly influences economic output and ...
in the mid-1900s.
Newspapers came to sub-Saharan Africa via colonization. The first English-language newspaper in the area was ''The Royal Gazette and Sierra Leone Advertiser'', established in 1801, and followed by ''The Royal Gold Coast Gazette and Commercial Intelligencer'' in 1822 and the ''Liberia Herald'' in 1826. A number of nineteenth-century African newspapers were established by missionaries.
[Fosu, "The Press and Political Participation" (2014), pp. 60–61.] These newspapers by and large promoted the colonial governments and served the interests of European settlers by relaying news from Europe.
The first newspaper published in a native African language was the ''Muigwithania'', published in Kikuyu by the Kenyan Central Association.
''Muigwithania'' and other newspapers published by indigenous Africans took strong opposition stances, agitating strongly for African independence. Newspapers were censored heavily during the colonial period—as well as after formal independence. Some liberalization and diversification took place in the 1990s.
Newspapers were slow to
spread to the Arab world, which had a stronger tradition of
oral communication
Conversation is interactive communication between two or more people. The development of conversational skills and etiquette is an important part of socialization. The development of conversational skills in a new language is a frequent focus ...
, and mistrust of the European approach to news reporting. By the end of the eighteenth century, the Ottoman Empire's leaders in Istanbul monitored the European press, but its contents were not disseminated for mass consumption. Some of the first written news in modern North Africa arose in Egypt under
Muhammad Ali
Muhammad Ali (; born Cassius Marcellus Clay Jr.; January 17, 1942 – June 3, 2016) was an American professional boxer and activist. Nicknamed "The Greatest", he is regarded as one of the most significant sports figures of the 20th century, a ...
, who developed the local paper industry and initiated the limited circulation of news bulletins called . Beginning in the 1850s and 1860s, the private press began to develop in the multi-religious country of Lebanon.
Newswire
The development of the
electrical telegraph
Electrical telegraphs were point-to-point text messaging systems, primarily used from the 1840s until the late 20th century. It was the first electrical telecommunications system and the most widely used of a number of early messaging systems ...
, which often travelled along railroad lines, enabled news to travel faster, over longer distances. (Days before Morse's Baltimore–Washington line transmitted the famous question, "What hath God wrought?", it transmitted the news that Henry Clay and Theodore Frelinghuysen had been chosen by the Whig nominating party.)
Telegraph networks enabled a new centralization of the news, in the hands of
wire services
A news agency is an organization that gathers news reports and sells them to subscribing news organizations, such as newspapers, magazines and radio and television broadcasters. A news agency may also be referred to as a wire service, newswire, ...
concentrated in major cities. The modern form of these originated with
Charles-Louis Havas
Charles-Louis Havas (5 July 1783 – 21 May 1858) was a French writer, translator, and founder of the first news agency Agence Havas (whose descendants are the Agence France-Presse (AFP) and the advertising firm Havas).
Biography
Havas was bor ...
, who founded Bureau Havas (later
Agence France-Presse
Agence France-Presse (AFP) is a French international news agency headquartered in Paris, France. Founded in 1835 as Havas, it is the world's oldest news agency.
AFP has regional headquarters in Nicosia, Montevideo, Hong Kong and Washington, D.C ...
) in Paris. Havas began in 1832, using the French government's optical telegraph network. In 1840 he began using pigeons for communications to Paris, London, and Brussels. Havas began to use the electric telegraph when it became available.
One of Havas's proteges,
Bernhard Wolff
Bernhard Wolff (3 March 1811 – 11 May 1879) was a German media mogul. He was editor of the ''Vossische Zeitung'', founder of the ''National Zeitung'' (1848–1938), and founder of Wolffs Telegraphisches Bureau (1849–1934), one of the first p ...
, founded
Wolffs Telegraphisches Bureau
Wolffs Telegraphisches Bureau (1849–1934) was founded by the German Bernhard Wolff (1811–1879), the editor of the ''Vossische Zeitung'' and founder of the ''National Zeitung'' (1848–1938).
It was one of the first press agencies in Europe an ...
in Berlin in 1849. Another Havas disciple,
Paul Reuter
Paul Julius Reuter (born Israel Beer Josaphat; 21 July 1816 – 25 February 1899), later ennobled as Freiherr von Reuter (Baron von Reuter), was a German-born British entrepreneur who was a pioneer of telegraphy and news reporting.[Reuters
Reuters ( ) is a news agency owned by Thomson Reuters Corporation. It employs around 2,500 journalists and 600 photojournalists in about 200 locations worldwide. Reuters is one of the largest news agencies in the world.
The agency was estab ...]
news agency—specializing in news from the continent. In 1863, William Saunders and Edward Spender formed the
Central Press agency, later called the
Press Association
PA Media (formerly the Press Association) is a multimedia news agency, and the national news agency of the United Kingdom and Ireland. It is part of PA Media Group Limited, a private company with 26 shareholders, most of whom are national and re ...
, to handle domestic news. Just before insulated telegraph line crossed the English Channel in 1851, Reuter won the right to transmit stock exchange prices between Paris and London.
[Wenzlhuemer, ''Connecting the Nineteenth-Century World'' (2013), pp. 90–92.] He maneuvered Reuters into a dominant global position with the motto "Follow the Cable", setting up news outposts across the
British Empire
The British Empire was composed of the dominions, colonies, protectorates, mandates, and other territories ruled or administered by the United Kingdom and its predecessor states. It began with the overseas possessions and trading posts esta ...
in Alexandria (1865), Bombay (1866), Melbourne (1874), Sydney (1874), and Cape Town (1876).
In the United States, the
Associated Press
The Associated Press (AP) is an American non-profit news agency headquartered in New York City. Founded in 1846, it operates as a cooperative, unincorporated association. It produces news reports that are distributed to its members, U.S. newspa ...
became a news powerhouse, gaining a lead position through an exclusive arrangement with the
Western Union
The Western Union Company is an American multinational financial services company, headquartered in Denver, Colorado.
Founded in 1851 as the New York and Mississippi Valley Printing Telegraph Company in Rochester, New York, the company chang ...
company.
The telegraph ushered in a new global communications regime, accompanied by a restructuring of the national postal systems, and closely followed by the advent of telephone lines. With the value of international news at a premium, governments, businesses, and news agencies moved aggressively to reduce transmission times. In 1865, Reuters had the scoop on the
Lincoln assassination
On April 14, 1865, Abraham Lincoln, the 16th president of the United States, was assassinated by well-known stage actor John Wilkes Booth, while attending the play ''Our American Cousin'' at Ford's Theatre in Washington, D.C.
Shot in the head ...
, reporting the news in England twelve days after the event took place. In 1866,
an undersea telegraph cable successfully connected Ireland to Newfoundland (and thus the Western Union network) cutting trans-Atlantic transmission time from days to hours.
[Allan, ''News Culture'' (2004), p. 17.] The transatlantic cable allowed fast exchange of information about the London and New York stock exchanges, as well as the New York, Chicago, and Liverpool commodity exchanges—for the price of $5–10, in gold, per word. Transmitting On 11 May 1857, a young British telegraph operator in Delhi signaled home to alert the authorities of the
Indian Rebellion of 1857
The Indian Rebellion of 1857 was a major uprising in India in 1857–58 against the rule of the British East India Company, which functioned as a sovereign power on behalf of the British Crown. The rebellion began on 10 May 1857 in the fo ...
. The rebels proceeded to disrupt the British telegraph network, which was rebuilt with more redundancies. In 1902–1903, Britain and the U.S. completed the circumtelegraphy of the planet with transpacific cables from Canada to Fiji and New Zealand (British Empire), and from the US to Hawaii and the occupied Philippines. U.S. reassertions of the
Monroe Doctrine
The Monroe Doctrine was a United States foreign policy position that opposed European colonialism in the Western Hemisphere. It held that any intervention in the political affairs of the Americas by foreign powers was a potentially hostile ac ...
notwithstanding, Latin America was a battleground of competing telegraphic interests until World War I, after which U.S. interests finally did consolidate their power in the hemisphere.
![Eisenbahnen- und Telegraphendichte der Erde um 1900](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/58/Eisenbahnen-_und_Telegraphendichte_der_Erde_um_1900.jpg)
By the turn of the century (i.e., circa 1900), Wolff, Havas, and Reuters formed a news cartel, dividing up the global market into three sections, in which each had more-or-less exclusive distribution rights and relationships with national agencies. Each agency's area corresponded roughly to the colonial sphere of its mother country. Reuters and the Australian national news service had an agreement to exchange news only with each other. Due to the high cost of maintaining infrastructure, political goodwill, and global reach, newcomers found it virtually impossible to challenge the big three European agencies or the American Associated Press. In 1890 Reuters (in partnership with the Press Association, England's major news agency for domestic stories) expanded into "soft" news stories for public consumption, about topics such as sports and "human interest". In 1904, the big three wire services opened relations with ''Vestnik'', the news agency of Czarist Russia, to their group, though they maintained their own reporters in Moscow. During and after the
Russian Revolution
The Russian Revolution was a period of Political revolution (Trotskyism), political and social revolution that took place in the former Russian Empire which began during the First World War. This period saw Russia abolish its monarchy and ad ...
, the outside agencies maintained a working relationship with the Petrograd Telegraph Agency, renamed the Russian Telegraph Agency (ROSTA) and eventually the
Telegraph Agency of the Soviet Union (TASS).
[Michael Palmer, "What Makes News", in Boyd-Barrett & Rantanen, ''The Globalization of News'' (1998), p. 184.]
The
Chinese Communist Party
The Chinese Communist Party (CCP), officially the Communist Party of China (CPC), is the founding and One-party state, sole ruling party of the China, People's Republic of China (PRC). Under the leadership of Mao Zedong, the CCP emerged victoriou ...
created its news agency, the Red China News Agency, in 1931; its primary responsibilities were the ''Red China'' newspaper and the internal ''Reference News''. In 1937, the Party renamed the agency ''
Xinhua
Xinhua News Agency (English pronunciation: )J. C. Wells: Longman Pronunciation Dictionary, 3rd ed., for both British and American English, or New China News Agency, is the official state news agency of the People's Republic of China. Xinhua ...
'', New China. Xinhua became the official news agency of the
People's Republic of China
China, officially the People's Republic of China (PRC), is a country in East Asia. It is the world's most populous country, with a population exceeding 1.4 billion, slightly ahead of India. China spans the equivalent of five time zones and ...
in 1949.
[Xin Xin, "A developing market in news: Xinhua News Agency and Chinese newspapers"; ''Media, Culture & Society'' 28.1 (2006).]
These agencies touted their ability to distill events into "minute globules of news", 20–30 word summaries which conveyed the essence of new developments.
Unlike newspapers, and contrary to the sentiments of some of their reporters, the agencies sought to keep their reports simple and factual. The wire services brought forth the "inverted pyramid" model of news copy, in which key facts appear at the start of the text, and more and more details are included as it goes along.
The sparse telegraphic writing style spilled over into newspapers, which often reprinted stories from the wire with little embellishment.
In a 20 September 1918 ''Pravda'' editorial, Lenin instructed the Soviet press to cut back on their political rambling and produce many short anticapitalist news items in "telegraph style".
As in previous eras, the news agencies provided special services to political and business clients, and these services constituted a significant portion of their operations and income. The wire services maintained close relationships with their respective national governments, which provided both press releases and payments.
[Boyd-Barrett, "'Global' News Agencies", in Boyd-Barrett & Rantanen, ''The Globalization of News'' (1998), pp. 23–24. "Earnings were generally derived from the sale of news services to media, financial or economic institutions, and governments, which were important as sources of revenue and as sources of intelligence, and it is generally considered that their news services reflected their respective national interests."] The acceleration and centralization of economic news facilitated regional economic integration and
economic globalization
Economic globalization is one of the three main dimensions of globalization commonly found in academic literature, with the two others being political globalization and cultural globalization, as well as the general term of globalization.
Econom ...
. "It was the decrease in information costs and the increasing communication speed that stood at the roots of increased market integration, rather than falling transport costs by itself. In order to send goods to another area, merchants needed to know first whether in fact to send off the goods and to what place. Information costs and speed were essential for these decisions."
Radio and television
The
British Broadcasting Company
The British Broadcasting Company Ltd. (BBC) was a short-lived British commercial broadcasting company formed on 18 October 1922 by British and American electrical companies doing business in the United Kingdom. Licensed by the British Genera ...
began transmitting radio news from London in 1922, dependent entirely, by law, on the British news agencies.
[Allan, ''News Culture'' (2004), pp. 26–27.] BBC radio marketed itself as a news by and for social elites, and hired only broadcasters who spoke with upper-class accents. The BBC gained importance in the May 1926 general strike, during which newspapers were closed and the radio served as the only source of news for an uncertain public. (To the displeasure of many listeners, the BBC took an unambiguously pro-government stance against the strikers).
In the US, RCA's Radio Group established its radio network, NBC, in 1926. The Paley family founded CBS soon after. These two networks, which supplied news broadcasts to subsidiaries and affiliates, dominated the airwaves throughout the period of radio's hegemony as a news source. Radio broadcasters in the United States negotiated a similar arrangement with the press in 1933, when they agreed to use only news from the Press–Radio Bureau and eschew advertising; this agreement soon collapsed and radio stations began reporting their own news (with advertising). As in Britain, American news radio avoided "controversial" topics as per norms established by the
National Association of Broadcasters
The National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) is a trade association and lobby group representing the interests of commercial and non-commercial over-the-air radio and television broadcasters in the United States. The NAB represents more than ...
.
[Allan, ''News Culture'' (2004), p. 34.] By 1939, 58% of Americans surveyed by ''Fortune'' considered radio news more accurate than newspapers, and 70% chose radio as their main news source.
Radio expanded rapidly across the continent, from 30 stations in 1920 to a thousand in the 1930s. This operation was financed mostly with advertising and public relations money.
The Soviet Union began a major international broadcasting operation in 1929, with stations in German, English and French. The
Nazi Party
The Nazi Party, officially the National Socialist German Workers' Party (german: Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei or NSDAP), was a far-right politics, far-right political party in Germany active between 1920 and 1945 that crea ...
made use of the radio in its rise to power in Germany, with much of its propaganda focused on attacking the Soviet Bolsheviks. The British and Italian foreign radio services competed for influence in North Africa. All four of these broadcast services grew increasingly vitriolic as the European nations prepared for war.
The war provided an opportunity to expand radio and take advantage of its new potential. The BBC reported on
Allied invasion of Normandy
Operation Overlord was the codename for the Battle of Normandy, the Allied operation that launched the successful invasion of German-occupied Western Europe during World War II. The operation was launched on 6 June 1944 (D-Day) with the Norma ...
on 8:00 a.m. of the morning it took place, and including a clip from German radio coverage of the same event. Listeners followed along with developments throughout the day. The U.S. set up its
Office of War Information
The United States Office of War Information (OWI) was a United States government agency created during World War II. The OWI operated from June 1942 until September 1945. Through radio broadcasts, newspapers, posters, photographs, films and other ...
which by 1942 sent programming across South America, the Middle East, and East Asia.
Radio Luxembourg
Radio Luxembourg was a multilingual commercial broadcaster in Luxembourg. It is known in most non-English languages as RTL (for Radio Television Luxembourg).
The English-language service of Radio Luxembourg began in 1933 as one of the earlies ...
, a centrally located high-power station on the continent, was
seized by Germany, and then
by the United States—which created fake news programs appearing as though they were created by Germany. Targeting American troops in the Pacific, the Japanese government broadcast the "
Zero Hour" program, which included news from the U.S. to make the soldiers homesick. But by the end of the war, Britain had the largest radio network in the world, broadcasting internationally in 43 different languages. Its scope would eventually be surpassed (by 1955) by the worldwide
Voice of America
Voice of America (VOA or VoA) is the state-owned news network and international radio broadcaster of the United States of America. It is the largest and oldest U.S.-funded international broadcaster. VOA produces digital, TV, and radio content ...
programs, produced by the
United States Information Agency
The United States Information Agency (USIA), which operated from 1953 to 1999, was a United States agency devoted to "public diplomacy". In 1999, prior to the reorganization of intelligence agencies by President George W. Bush, President Bill C ...
.
In Britain and the United States, television news watching rose dramatically in the 1950s and by the 1960s supplanted radio as the public's primary source of news. In the U.S., television was run by the same networks which owned radio: CBS, NBC, and an NBC spin-off called ABC.
Edward R. Murrow
Edward Roscoe Murrow (born Egbert Roscoe Murrow; April 25, 1908 – April 27, 1965) was an American broadcast journalist and war correspondent. He first gained prominence during World War II with a series of live radio broadcasts from Europe fo ...
, who first entered the public ear as a war reporter in London, made the big leap to television to become an iconic newsman on CBS (and later the director of the United States Information Agency).
Ted Turner
Robert Edward "Ted" Turner III (born November 19, 1938) is an American entrepreneur, television producer, media proprietor, and philanthropist. He founded the Cable News Network (CNN), the first 24-hour United States cable news, cable news ch ...
's creation of the
Cable News Network
CNN (Cable News Network) is a multinational cable news channel headquartered in Atlanta, Georgia, U.S. Founded in 1980 by American media proprietor Ted Turner and Reese Schonfeld as a 24-hour cable news channel, and presently owned by the M ...
(CNN) in 1980 inaugurated a new era of
24-hour
The modern 24-hour clock, popularly referred to in the United States as military time, is the convention of timekeeping in which the day runs from midnight to midnight and is divided into 24 hours. This is indicated by the hours (and minutes) pas ...
satellite news broadcasting. In 1991, the BBC introduced a competitor,
BBC World Service Television
BBC World Service Television, often abbreviated to WSTV (World Service Television), was the name of two BBC international satellite television channels between 1991 and 1995. It was the BBC's first foray into worldwide television broadcasting. In ...
. Rupert Murdoch's Australian
News Corporation
News Corporation (abbreviated News Corp.), also variously known as News Corporation Limited, was an American multinational mass media corporation controlled by media mogul Rupert Murdoch and headquartered at 1211 Avenue of the Americas in Ne ...
entered the picture with
Fox News Channel
The Fox News Channel, abbreviated FNC, commonly known as Fox News, and stylized in all caps, is an American multinational conservative cable news television channel based in New York City. It is owned by Fox News Media, which itself is owne ...
in the US,
Sky News
Sky News is a British free-to-air television news channel and organisation. Sky News is distributed via an English-language radio news service, and through online channels. It is owned by Sky Group, a division of Comcast. John Ryley is the hea ...
in Britain, and
STAR TV Star TV may refer to:
* E! (Canadian TV channel) (formerly Star!), a Canadian entertainment news channel
* Las Estrellas (Spanish for The Stars), the Mexican television network
* Estrella TV (Spanish for Star TV), the American Spanish-language net ...
in Asia.
Combining this new apparatus with the use of
embedded reporters, the United States waged the 1991–1992
Gulf War
The Gulf War was a 1990–1991 armed campaign waged by a 35-country military coalition in response to the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait. Spearheaded by the United States, the coalition's efforts against Iraq were carried out in two key phases: ...
with the assistance of nonstop
media coverage
Media may refer to:
Communication
* Media (communication), tools used to deliver information or data
** Advertising media, various media, content, buying and placement for advertising
** Broadcast media, communications delivered over mass e ...
. CNN's specialty is the
crisis
A crisis ( : crises; : critical) is either any event or period that will (or might) lead to an unstable and dangerous situation affecting an individual, group, or all of society. Crises are negative changes in the human or environmental affair ...
, to which the network is prepared to shift its total attention if so chosen.
[Hachten, ''World News Prism'' (1996), pp. 45–48. "When a major crisis breaks out overseas, ABC, CBS, and NBC will issue news bulletins and then go back to scheduled programming and perhaps do a late-evening wrap-up, but CNN stays on the air for long stretches of time continually updating the story. The networks' version of the story will be seen in the United States; CNN's version will be seen all over the world."] CNN news was transmitted via
INTELSAT
Intelsat S.A. (formerly INTEL-SAT, INTELSAT, Intelsat) is a multinational satellite services provider with corporate headquarters in Luxembourg and administrative headquarters in Tysons Corner, Virginia, United States. Originally formed as In ...
communications satellites. CNN, said an executive, would bring a "town crier to the global village".
In 1996, the Qatar-owned broadcaster
Al Jazeera
Al Jazeera ( ar, الجزيرة, translit-std=DIN, translit=al-jazīrah, , "The Island") is a state-owned Arabic-language international radio and TV broadcaster of Qatar. It is based in Doha and operated by the media conglomerate Al Jazeera ...
emerged as a powerful alternative to the Western media, capitalizing in part on anger in the Arab & Muslim world regarding biased coverage of the Gulf War. Al Jazeera hired many news workers conveniently laid off by
BBC Arabic Television
BBC News Arabic ( ar, بي بي سي نيوز عربي), formerly BBC Arabic Television, is a television news channel broadcast to the Arab World by the BBC. It was launched on 11 March 2008. It is run by the BBC World Service and funded from the ...
, which closed in April 1996. It used
Arabsat
The Arab Satellite Communications Organization (often abbreviated as Arabsat) is a communications satellite operator in the Arab World, headquartered in the city of Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. Arabsat was created to deliver satellite-based, public and ...
to broadcast.
[McNair, ''Cultural Chaos'' (2006), pp. 108–114.]
Internet
The early internet, known as
ARPANET
The Advanced Research Projects Agency Network (ARPANET) was the first wide-area packet-switched network with distributed control and one of the first networks to implement the TCP/IP protocol suite. Both technologies became the technical fou ...
, was controlled by the U.S. Department of Defense and used mostly by academics. It became available to a wider public with the release of the
Netscape browser
Netscape Browser (or ''Netscape 8'') is the eighth major release of the Netscape series of web browsers, now all discontinued. It was published by AOL, but developed by Mercurial Communications, and originally released for Windows on May 19, 2005 ...
in 1994. At first, news websites were mostly archives of print publications. An early
online newspaper
An online newspaper (or electronic news or electronic news publication) is the online version of a newspaper, either as a stand-alone publication or as the online version of a printed periodical.
Going online created more opportunities for newspa ...
was the ''Electronic Telegraph'', published by ''
The Daily Telegraph
''The Daily Telegraph'', known online and elsewhere as ''The Telegraph'', is a national British daily broadsheet newspaper published in London by Telegraph Media Group and distributed across the United Kingdom and internationally.
It was fo ...
''.
A 1994 earthquake in California was one of the first big stories to be reported online in real time.
[Allan, ''News Culture'' (2004), pp. 175–176.] The new availability of web browsing made news sites accessible to more people.
On the day of the
Oklahoma City bombing
The Oklahoma City bombing was a domestic terrorist truck bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, United States, on April 19, 1995. Perpetrated by two anti-government extremists, Timothy McVeigh and Terry N ...
in April 1995, people flocked to newsgroups and chatrooms to discuss the situation and share information. The ''Oklahoma City Daily'' posted news to its site within hours. Two of the only news sites capable of hosting images, the ''San Jose Mercury News'' and ''Time'' magazine, posted photographs of the scene.
Quantitatively, the internet has massively expanded the sheer volume of news items available to one person. The speed of news flow to individuals has also reached a new plateau. This insurmountable flow of news can daunt people and cause
information overload
Information overload (also known as infobesity, infoxication, information anxiety, and information explosion) is the difficulty in understanding an issue and effectively making decisions when one has too much information (TMI) about that issue, ...
.
Zbigniew Brzezinski
Zbigniew Kazimierz Brzeziński ( , ; March 28, 1928 – May 26, 2017), or Zbig, was a Polish-American diplomat and political scientist. He served as a counselor to President Lyndon B. Johnson from 1966 to 1968 and was President Jimmy Carter's ...
called this period the "technetronic era", in which "global reality increasingly absorbs the individual, involves him, and even occasionally overwhelms him."
In cases of government crackdowns or revolutions, the Internet has often become a major communication channel for news propagation; while it's a (relatively) simple act to shut down a newspaper, radio or television station, mobile devices such as smartphones and netbooks are much harder to detect and confiscate. The propagation of internet-capable mobile devices has also given rise to the
citizen journalist
Citizen journalism, also known as collaborative media, participatory journalism, democratic journalism, guerrilla journalism or street journalism, is based upon public citizens "playing an active role in the process of collecting, reporting, a ...
, who provide an additional perspective on unfolding events.
News media today
News can travel through different
communication media.
In modern times, printed news had to be phoned into a newsroom or brought there by a
reporter
A journalist is an individual that collects/gathers information in form of text, audio, or pictures, processes them into a news-worthy form, and disseminates it to the public. The act or process mainly done by the journalist is called journalism ...
, where it was typed and either transmitted over wire services or
edited
Editing is the process of selecting and preparing written, photographic, visual, audible, or cinematic material used by a person or an entity to convey a message or information. The editing process can involve correction, condensation, orga ...
and manually
set in type along with other news stories for a specific edition. Today, the term "
breaking news
Breaking news, interchangeably termed late-breaking news and also known as a special report or special coverage or news flash, is a current issue that broadcasters feel warrants the interruption of scheduled programming or current news in orde ...
" has become trite as
commercial broadcasting
Commercial broadcasting (also called private broadcasting) is the broadcasting of television programs and radio programming by privately owned corporate media, as opposed to state sponsorship. It was the United States′ first model of radio (an ...
United States cable news
Cable news channels are television networks devoted to television news broadcasts, with the name deriving from the proliferation of such networks during the 1980s with the advent of cable television.
In the United States, the first nationwide ca ...
services that are available 24 hours a day use live
communications satellite
A communications satellite is an artificial satellite that relays and amplifies radio telecommunication signals via a transponder; it creates a communication channel between a source transmitter and a receiver at different locations on Earth. C ...
technology to bring current events into
consumer
A consumer is a person or a group who intends to order, or uses purchased goods, products, or services primarily for personal, social, family, household and similar needs, who is not directly related to entrepreneurial or business activities. T ...
s' homes as the event occurs. Events that used to take hours or days to become common knowledge in towns or in nations are fed instantaneously to consumers via
radio
Radio is the technology of signaling and communicating using radio waves. Radio waves are electromagnetic waves of frequency between 30 hertz (Hz) and 300 gigahertz (GHz). They are generated by an electronic device called a transmit ...
,
television
Television, sometimes shortened to TV, is a telecommunication medium for transmitting moving images and sound. The term can refer to a television set, or the medium of television transmission. Television is a mass medium for advertisin ...
,
mobile phone
A mobile phone, cellular phone, cell phone, cellphone, handphone, hand phone or pocket phone, sometimes shortened to simply mobile, cell, or just phone, is a portable telephone that can make and receive calls over a radio frequency link whil ...
, and the
internet
The Internet (or internet) is the global system of interconnected computer networks that uses the Internet protocol suite (TCP/IP) to communicate between networks and devices. It is a '' network of networks'' that consists of private, pub ...
.
Speed of news transmission, of course, still varies wildly on the basis of where and how one lives.
[Silverblatt & Zlobin, ''International Communications'' (2004), pp. 42–43. "In contrast, the Masai, a nomadic community of cattle raisers in Kenya, Africa, spend their lives on the move; consequently, their contact with the media is sporadic. As a result, members of the Masai community did not learn about the September 11 attack in New York until the following June."]
Newspaper
![NYTimes-Page1-11-11-1918](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/75/NYTimes-Page1-11-11-1918.jpg)
Most large cities in the United States historically had morning and afternoon newspapers. With the addition of new communications media, afternoon newspapers have shut down and morning newspapers have lost circulation. Weekly newspapers have somewhat increased. In more and more cities, newspapers have established local market monopolies—i.e., a single newspaper is the only one in town. This process has accelerated since the 1980s, commensurate with a general trend of
consolidation in media ownership. In China, too, newspapers have gained exclusive status, city-by-city, and pooled into large associations such as Chengdu Business News. These associations function like news agencies, challenging the hegemony of Xinhua as a news provider.
The world's top three
most circulated newspapers all publish from Japan.
About one-third of newspaper revenue comes from sales; the majority comes from advertising. Newspapers have struggled to maintain revenue given declining circulation and the free flow of information over the internet; some have implemented
paywall
A paywall is a method of restricting access to content, with a purchase or a paid subscription, especially news. Beginning in the mid-2010s, newspapers started implementing paywalls on their websites as a way to increase revenue after years of ...
s for their websites.
In the U.S., many newspapers have shifted their operations online, publishing around the clock rather than daily in order to keep pace with the internet society. Prognosticators have suggested that print newspapers will vanish from the U.S. in 5–20 years.
[Shelley Thompson, "The Future of Newspapers in a Digital Age", in Fowler-Watt & Allan (eds.), ''Journalism'' (2013).] Many newspapers have started to track social media engagement for trending news stories to cover.
Television
Internationally distributed news channels include
BBC News
BBC News is an operational business division of the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) responsible for the gathering and broadcasting of news and current affairs in the UK and around the world. The department is the world's largest broadca ...
,
CNN
CNN (Cable News Network) is a multinational cable news channel headquartered in Atlanta, Georgia, U.S. Founded in 1980 by American media proprietor Ted Turner and Reese Schonfeld as a 24-hour cable news channel, and presently owned by the M ...
,
Fox News
The Fox News Channel, abbreviated FNC, commonly known as Fox News, and stylized in all caps, is an American multinational conservative cable news television channel based in New York City. It is owned by Fox News Media, which itself is owne ...
,
MSNBC
MSNBC (originally the Microsoft National Broadcasting Company) is an American news-based pay television cable channel. It is owned by NBCUniversala subsidiary of Comcast. Headquartered in New York City, it provides news coverage and political ...
,
CBC News Network
CBC News Network (formerly CBC Newsworld) is a Canadian English-language specialty news channel owned by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC). It broadcasts into over 10 million homes in Canada. As Canada's first all-news channel, it is th ...
, and
Sky News
Sky News is a British free-to-air television news channel and organisation. Sky News is distributed via an English-language radio news service, and through online channels. It is owned by Sky Group, a division of Comcast. John Ryley is the hea ...
. Televisions are densely concentrated in the United States (98% of households), and the average American watches 4 hours of television programming each day. In other parts of the world, such as Kenya—especially rural areas without much electricity—televisions are rare.
The largest supplier of international video news is Reuters TV, with 409 subscribers in 83 countries, 38 bureaus, and a reported audience of 1.5 billion people each day. The other major video news service is
Associated Press Television News
{{About, the global video news agency, TVRI television programme, Dunia Dalam Berita, the airlines of Ethiopia, Ethiopian Airlines, the Indonesian public television, TVRI
Associated Press Television News, also referred to as AP Video and often abbr ...
. These two major agencies have agreements to exchange video news with ABC, NBC, CBS, CNN, and
Eurovision
The Eurovision Song Contest (), sometimes abbreviated to ESC and often known simply as Eurovision, is an international songwriting competition organised annually by the European Broadcasting Union (EBU), featuring participants representing pr ...
—itself a sizeable video news exchange.
[Hachten, ''World News Prism'' (1996), pp. 39–41.] CNN International
CNN International (CNNI, simply branded on-air as CNN) is an international television channel that is owned by CNN Global. CNN International carries news-related programming worldwide; it cooperates with sister network CNN's national and inter ...
is a notable broadcaster in times of crisis.
Internet
Online journalism
Digital journalism, also known as netizen journalism or online journalism, is a contemporary form of journalism where editorial content is distributed via the Internet, as opposed to publishing via print or broadcast. What constitutes digital j ...
is news that is reported on the
internet
The Internet (or internet) is the global system of interconnected computer networks that uses the Internet protocol suite (TCP/IP) to communicate between networks and devices. It is a '' network of networks'' that consists of private, pub ...
. News can be delivered more quickly through this method of news as well as accessed more easily. The internet era has transformed the understanding of news. Because the internet allows communication which is not only instantaneous, but also bi- or multi-directional, it has blurred the boundaries of who is a legitimate news producer. A common type of internet journalism is called
blogging
A blog (a truncation of "weblog") is a discussion or informational website published on the World Wide Web consisting of discrete, often informal diary-style text entries (posts). Posts are typically displayed in reverse chronological order ...
, which is a service of persistently written articles uploaded and written by one or more individuals. Millions of people in countries such as the United States and South Korea have taken up blogging. Many blogs have rather small audiences; some blogs are read by millions each month. Social media sites, especially Twitter and Facebook, have become an important source of breaking news information and for disseminating links to news websites. Twitter declared in 2012: "It's like being delivered a newspaper whose headlines you'll always find interesting—you can discover news as it's happening, learn more about topics that are important to you, and get the inside scoop in real time." Cell phone cameras have normalized citizen
photojournalism
Photojournalism is journalism that uses images to tell a news story. It usually only refers to still images, but can also refer to video used in broadcast journalism. Photojournalism is distinguished from other close branches of photography (such ...
.
Michael Schudson
Michael S. Schudson
Michael S. Schudson (born November 3, 1946) is professor of journalism in the graduate school of journalism of Columbia University and adjunct professor in the department of sociology. He is professor emeritus at the Universi ...
, professor at the
Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism
The Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism is located in Pulitzer Hall on the university's Morningside Heights campus in New York City.
Founded in 1912 by Joseph Pulitzer, Columbia Journalism School is one of the oldest journalism s ...
, has said that "
erything we thought we once knew about journalism needs to be rethought in the Digital Age."
Today the work of journalism can be done from anywhere and done well. It requires no more than a reporter and a laptop. In that way, journalistic authority seems to have become more individual- and less institution-based. But does the individual reporter always have to be an actual journalist? Or can journalistic work be done from anywhere and by anyone? These are questions that refer to the core of journalistic practice and the definition of "news" itself. As Schudson has given emphasis to, the answer is not easily found; "the ground journalists walk upon is shaking, and the experience for both those who work in the field and those on the outside studying it is dizzying".
Schudson has identified the following six specific areas where the ecology of news in his opinion has changed:
* The line between the reader and writer has blurred.
* The distinction among tweet, blog post, Facebook, newspaper story, magazine article, and book has blurred.
* The line between professionals and amateurs has blurred, and a variety of "pro-am" relationships has emerged.
* The boundaries delineating for-profit, public, and non-profit media have blurred, and the cooperation across these models of financing has developed.
* Within commercial news organizations, the line between the news room and the business office has blurred.
* The line between old media and new media has blurred, practically beyond recognition.
These alterations inevitably have fundamental ramifications for the contemporary ecology of news. "The boundaries of journalism, which just a few years ago seemed relatively clear, and permanent, have become less distinct, and this blurring, while potentially the foundation of progress even as it is the source of risk, has given rise to a new set of journalistic principles and practices", Schudson puts it. It is indeed complex, but it seems to be the future.
Online news has also changed the geographic reach of individual news stories, diffusing readership from city-by-city markets to a potentially global audience.
The growth of social media networks have also created new opportunities for automated and efficient news gathering for journalists and newsrooms. Many newsrooms (broadcasters, newspapers, magazines, radio and TV) have started to perfor
news gathering on social media platforms Social media is creating changes in the consumer behaviour and news consumption. According to
study by Pew Research a large portion of Americans read news on digital and on mobile devices.
Because internet does not have the "column inches" limitation of print media, online news stories can, but don't always, come bundled with supplementary material. The medium of the
World Wide Web
The World Wide Web (WWW), commonly known as the Web, is an information system enabling documents and other web resources to be accessed over the Internet.
Documents and downloadable media are made available to the network through web se ...
also enables
hyperlinking
In computing, a hyperlink, or simply a link, is a digital reference to data that the user can follow or be guided by clicking or tapping. A hyperlink points to a whole document or to a specific element within a document. Hypertext is text wit ...
, which allows readers to navigate to other pages related to the one they're reading.
Despite these changes, some studies have concluded that internet news coverage remains fairly homogenous and dominated by news agencies.
[Chris Paterson, "News Agency Dominance in International news on the Internet", ''Papers in International and Global Communication'' 01/06 (Center for International Communications Research), May 2006.] And journalists working with online media do not identify significantly different criteria for newsworthiness than print journalists.
News agencies
![Bundesarchiv B 145 Bild-F079071-0007, Bonn, Nachrichtenagentur Reuters](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/72/Bundesarchiv_B_145_Bild-F079071-0007%2C_Bonn%2C_Nachrichtenagentur_Reuters.jpg)
News agencies are services which compile news and disseminate it in bulk. Because they disseminate information to a wide variety of clients, who repackage the material as news for public consumption, news agencies tend to use less controversial language in their reports. Despite their importance, news agencies are not well known by the general public. They keep low profiles and their reporters usually do not get bylines.
The oldest news agency still operating is the
Agence France-Presse
Agence France-Presse (AFP) is a French international news agency headquartered in Paris, France. Founded in 1835 as Havas, it is the world's oldest news agency.
AFP has regional headquarters in Nicosia, Montevideo, Hong Kong and Washington, D.C ...
(AFP). It was founded in 1835 by a Parisian translator and
advertising agent,
Charles-Louis Havas
Charles-Louis Havas (5 July 1783 – 21 May 1858) was a French writer, translator, and founder of the first news agency Agence Havas (whose descendants are the Agence France-Presse (AFP) and the advertising firm Havas).
Biography
Havas was bor ...
as
Agence Havas
Havas SA is a French multinational advertising and public relations company, headquartered in Paris, France. It operates in more than 100 countries and is one of the largest advertising and communications groups in the world. Havas consists of ...
. By the end of the twentieth century,
Reuters
Reuters ( ) is a news agency owned by Thomson Reuters Corporation. It employs around 2,500 journalists and 600 photojournalists in about 200 locations worldwide. Reuters is one of the largest news agencies in the world.
The agency was estab ...
far outpaced the other news agencies in profits, and became one of the largest companies in Europe. In 2011, Thomson Reuters employed more than 55,000 people in 100 countries, and posted an annual revenue of $12.9 billion.
United Press International
United Press International (UPI) is an American international news agency whose newswires, photo, news film, and audio services provided news material to thousands of newspapers, magazines, radio and television stations for most of the 20th ...
gained prominence as a world news agency in the middle of the twentieth century, but shrank in the 1980s and was sold off at low prices. It is owned by the
Unification Church
The Family Federation for World Peace and Unification, widely known as the Unification Church, is a new religious movement, whose members are called Unificationists, or "Moonies". It was officially founded on 1 May 1954 under the name Holy Spi ...
company
News World Communications
News World Communications Inc. is an American international news media corporation.
Background
It was founded in New York City, in 1976, by Unification movement founder and leader Sun Myung Moon. Its first two newspapers, ''The News World'' (l ...
.
News agencies, especially Reuters and the newly important
Bloomberg News
Bloomberg News (originally Bloomberg Business News) is an international news agency headquartered in New York City and a division of Bloomberg L.P. Content produced by Bloomberg News is disseminated through Bloomberg Terminals, Bloomberg Televi ...
, convey both news stories for mass audiences and financial information of interest to businesses and investors.
[John Bartram Ewha, "News Agency Wars: the battle between Reuters and Bloomberg"; ''Journalism Studies'' 4.3 (2003).] Bloomberg LP, a private company founded by
Michael Bloomberg
Michael Rubens Bloomberg (born February 14, 1942) is an American businessman, politician, philanthropist, and author. He is the majority owner, co-founder and CEO of Bloomberg L.P. He was Mayor of New York City from 2002 to 2013, and was a ca ...
in 1981, made rapid advances with computerized stock market reporting updated in real time. Its news service continued to exploit this electronic advantage by combining computer-generated analytics with text reporting. Bloomberg linked with Agence France Presse in the 1990s.
Following the marketization of the Chinese economy and the media boom of the 1990s,
Xinhua
Xinhua News Agency (English pronunciation: )J. C. Wells: Longman Pronunciation Dictionary, 3rd ed., for both British and American English, or New China News Agency, is the official state news agency of the People's Republic of China. Xinhua ...
has adopted some commercial practices including subscription fees, but it remains government-subsidized. It provides newswire, news photos, economic information, and audio and video news. Xinhua has a growing number of subscribers, totaling 16,969 in 2002, including 93% of Chinese newspapers.
It operates 123 foreign bureaus and produces 300 news stories each day.
Other agencies with considerable reach include
Deutsche Presse-Agentur
Deutsche Presse-Agentur GmbH (dpa) is a German news agency founded in 1949. Based in Hamburg, it has grown to be a major worldwide operation serving print media, radio, television, online, mobile phones, and national news agencies. News is avai ...
(Germany),
Kyodo News
is a nonprofit cooperative news agency based in Minato, Tokyo. It was established in November 1945 and it distributes news to almost all newspapers, and radio and television networks in Japan. The newspapers using its news have about 50 millio ...
(Japan), the ''
Agenzia Nazionale Stampa Associata
The Agenzia Nazionale Stampa Associata (ANSA; literally "National Associated Press Agency") is the leading news agency in Italy. ANSA is a not-for-profit cooperative, whose members and owners are 36 leading news organizations in Italy. Its missi ...
'' (Italy), the
Middle East News Agency
The Middle East News Agency (MENA) is a news agency based in Egypt. It is run by the Egyptian government.
History and profile
The MENA was founded on 15 December 1955 as a joint stock company owned by Egyptian press establishments. The agency, ...
(Egypt),
Tanjug
Tanjug (/'tʌnjʊg/) ( sr-cyr, Танјуг; sometimes stylized as TANJUG) was a Serbian state news agency based in Belgrade, which officially ceased to exist in March 2021. Since then, Belgrade based private company Tanjug Tačno, acquired the r ...
(Serbia),
EFE
Agencia EFE, S.A. () is a Spanish international news agency, the major multimedia news agency in Spanish language and the world's fourth largest wire service after the Associated Press, Reuters, and Agence France-Presse. EFE was created in 1939 ...
(Spain), and
Anadolu Agency
Anadolu Agency ( tr, Anadolu Ajansı, ; abbreviated AA) is a state-run news agency headquartered in Ankara, Turkey.
History
The Anadolu Agency was founded in 1920 during the Turkish War of Independence by the order of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk. As ...
(Turkey).
On the internet,
news aggregators
In computing, a news aggregator, also termed a feed aggregator, feed reader, news reader, RSS reader or simply an aggregator, is client software or a web application that aggregates syndicated web content such as online newspapers, blogs, podc ...
play a role similar to that of the news agency—and, because of the sources they select, tend to transmit news stories which originate from the main agencies. Of articles displayed by
Yahoo! News
Yahoo! News is a news website that originated as an internet-based news aggregator by Yahoo!. The site was created by a Yahoo! software engineer named Brad Clawsie in August 1996. Articles originally came from news services such as the Associate ...
in the U.S., 91.7% come from news agencies: 39.4% from AP, 30.9% AFP, and 21.3% Reuters. In India, 60.1% of Yahoo! News stories come from Reuters.
Google News
Google News is a news aggregator service developed by Google. It presents a continuous flow of links to articles organized from thousands of publishers and magazines. Google News is available as an app on Android, iOS, and the Web.
Google rel ...
relies somewhat less on news agencies, and has shown high volatility, in the sense of focusing heavily on the most recent handful of salient world events.
In 2010, Google News redesigned its front page with automatic geotargeting, which generated a selection of local news items for every viewer.
Global news system
In the 20th century, global news coverage was dominated by a combination of the "Big Four" news agencies—Reuters, Associated Press, Agence France Press, and United Press International—representing the
Western bloc
The Western Bloc, also known as the Free Bloc, the Capitalist Bloc, the American Bloc, and the NATO Bloc, was a coalition of countries that were officially allied with the United States during the Cold War of 1947–1991. It was spearheaded by ...
, and the Communist agencies:
TASS
The Russian News Agency TASS (russian: Информацио́нное аге́нтство Росси́и ТАСС, translit=Informatsionnoye agentstvo Rossii, or Information agency of Russia), abbreviated TASS (russian: ТАСС, label=none) ...
from the Soviet Union, and
Xinhua
Xinhua News Agency (English pronunciation: )J. C. Wells: Longman Pronunciation Dictionary, 3rd ed., for both British and American English, or New China News Agency, is the official state news agency of the People's Republic of China. Xinhua ...
from China. Studies of major world events, and analyses of all international news coverage in various newspapers, consistently found that a large majority of news items originated from the four biggest wire services.
Television news agencies include
Associated Press Television News
{{About, the global video news agency, TVRI television programme, Dunia Dalam Berita, the airlines of Ethiopia, Ethiopian Airlines, the Indonesian public television, TVRI
Associated Press Television News, also referred to as AP Video and often abbr ...
, which bought and incorporated World Television News; and Reuters Television.
Bloomberg News created in the 1990s, expanded rapidly to become a player in the realm of international news.
[Oliver Boyd-Barrett, "'Global' News Agencies", in Boyd-Barrett & Rantanen, ''The Globalization of News'' (1998), p. 21. "Bloomberg's influence is greater than the number of its terminals may suggest, as it feeds financial data and economic news through the AP network to AP members and clients in the United States, and to many national networks through national news agencies. Indeed, it boasts having the second largest 'wholesale' news distribution in the United States, after AP. It has print, radio and television distribution in many countries: Bloomberg television is distributed via Astra satellite service in Europe."] The Associated Press also maintains a radio network with thousands of subscribers worldwide; it is the sole provider of international news to many small stations.
By some accounts, dating back to the 1940s, the increasing interconnectedness of the news system has accelerated the pace of
human history
Human history, also called world history, is the narrative of humanity's past. It is understood and studied through anthropology, archaeology, genetics, and linguistics. Since the invention of writing, human history has been studied throug ...
itself.
New World Information and Communication Order
The global news system is dominated by agencies from Europe and the United States, and reflects their interests and priorities in its coverage. Euro-American control of the global news system has led to criticism; that events around the world are constantly compared to events like the
Holocaust
The Holocaust, also known as the Shoah, was the genocide of European Jews during World War II. Between 1941 and 1945, Nazi Germany and its collaborators systematically murdered some six million Jews across German-occupied Europe; a ...
and World War II, which are considered foundational in the West.
[Barbie Zeiler, "Cannibalizing Memory in the Global Flow of News"; in ''On Media Memory'' (2011), ed. Neiger, Myers, & Zandberg; pp. 31–34.] Since the 1960s, a significant amount of news reporting from the Third World has been characterized by some form "development journalism", a paradigm which focuses on long-term development projects, social change, and nation-building. When in 1987 the U.S. media reported on a riot in the Dominican Republic—the first major news item regarding that country in years—the resulting decline in tourism lasted for years and had a noticeable effect on the economy. The English language predominates in global news exchanges. Critics have accused the global news system of perpetuating
cultural imperialism
Cultural imperialism (sometimes referred to as cultural colonialism) comprises the cultural dimensions of imperialism. The word "imperialism" often describes practices in which a social entity engages culture (including language, traditions, ...
.
[John Tomlinson, "Cultural Globalization and Cultural Imperialism", in Mohammadi (ed.), ''International Communication and Globalization'' (1997).] Critics further charge that the Western media conglomerates maintain a bias towards the status quo economic order, especially a pro-corporate bias.
The
(UNESCO) has promoted a
New World Information and Communication Order
The New World Information and Communication Order (NWICO, also shortened to New World Information Order, NWIO or just, more generally, information order) is a term coined in a debate over media representations of the developing world in UNESCO in ...
, which envisions an international news exchange system involving national news agencies in every country. UNESCO encouraged the new states formed from colonial territories in the 1960s to establish news agencies, to generate domestic news stories, exchange news items with international partners, and disseminate both types of news internally. Along these lines, the 1980
MacBride report
''Many Voices One World'', also known as the MacBride report, was written in 1980 by the United Nations Educational Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), which reports to its International Commission for the Study of Communication Problems ...
, "Many Voices, One World", called for an interdependent global news system with more participation from different governments. To this end, also, UNESCO formed the
Non-Aligned News Agencies Pool
The Non-Aligned News Agencies Pool (NANAP) was a cooperation system among news agencies of Non-Aligned countries, which lasted from 1975 to mid-1990s. The NANAP was initially led, funded, and supported by Yugoslavia's Tanjug, and gathered many st ...
.
The
Inter Press Service
Inter Press Service (IPS) is a global news agency headquartered in Rome, Italy. Its main focus is news and analysis about social, political, civil, and economic subjects as it relates to the Global South, civil society and globalization.
Hist ...
, founded in 1964, has served as an intermediary for Third World press agencies. Inter Press Service's editorial policy favors coverage of events, institutions, and issues which relate to inequality,
economic development
In the economics study of the public sector, economic and social development is the process by which the economic well-being and quality of life of a nation, region, local community, or an individual are improved according to targeted goals and o ...
,
economic integration
Economic integration is the unification of economic policies between different states, through the partial or full abolition of tariff and Non-tariff barriers to trade, non-tariff restrictions on trade.
The trade-stimulation effects intended b ...
, natural resources, population, health, education, and
sustainable development
Sustainable development is an organizing principle for meeting human development goals while also sustaining the ability of natural systems to provide the natural resources and ecosystem services on which the economy and society depend. The des ...
.
[C. Anthony Giffard, "Alternative News Agencies", in Boyd-Barrett & Rantanen, ''The Globalization of News'' (1998), pp. 192–194.] It gives less coverage than other agencies to crime, disasters, and violence. Geographically, 70% of its news reporting concerns Africa, Asia, Latin America, and the Caribbean. IPS has the most subscribers in Latin America and southern Africa.
IPS receives grants from organizations such as the
United Nations Development Program
The United Nations Development Programme (UNDP)french: Programme des Nations unies pour le développement, PNUD is a United Nations agency tasked with helping countries eliminate poverty and achieve sustainable economic growth and human dev ...
and other United Nations agencies and private foundations to report news on chosen topics, including the environment, sustainable development, and women's issues.
Beginning in the 1960s, the
United States Agency for International Development
The United States Agency for International Development (USAID) is an independent agency of the U.S. federal government that is primarily responsible for administering civilian foreign aid and development assistance. With a budget of over $27 bi ...
, the
National Aeronautics and Space Administration
The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA ) is an independent agency of the US federal government responsible for the civil space program, aeronautics research, and space research.
NASA was established in 1958, succeeding th ...
, and UNESCO developed the use of satellite television for international broadcasting. In India, 1975–1976, these agencies implemented an experimental satellite television system, called the
Satellite Instructional Television Experiment
Satellite Instructional Television Experiment or SITE was an experimental satellite communications project launched in India in 1975, designed jointly by NASA and the Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO). The project made available informatio ...
, with assistance from the
Indian Space Research Organisation
The Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO; ) is the national space agency of India, headquartered in Bengaluru. It operates under the Department of Space (DOS) which is directly overseen by the Prime Minister of India, while the Chairman ...
, and
All India Radio
All or ALL may refer to:
Language
* All, an indefinite pronoun in English
* All, one of the English determiners
* Allar language (ISO 639-3 code)
* Allative case (abbreviated ALL)
Music
* All (band), an American punk rock band
* ''All'' (All a ...
.
Further transformation in global news flow
By the 1980s, much of the Third World had succumbed to a
debt crisis
Debt crisis is a situation in which a government (nation, state/province, county, or city etc.) loses the ability of paying back its governmental debt. When the expenditures of a government are more than its tax revenues for a prolonged period, th ...
resulting from unpayable large loans accumulated since the 1960s. At this point, the
World Bank
The World Bank is an international financial institution that provides loans and grants to the governments of low- and middle-income countries for the purpose of pursuing capital projects. The World Bank is the collective name for the Interna ...
took an active role in the governance of many countries, and its authority extended to communications policy. The policy of developing Third World media gave way to a global regime of
free trade
Free trade is a trade policy that does not restrict imports or exports. It can also be understood as the free market idea applied to international trade. In government, free trade is predominantly advocated by political parties that hold econo ...
institutions like the
World Trade Organization
The World Trade Organization (WTO) is an intergovernmental organization that regulates and facilitates international trade. With effective cooperation
in the United Nations System, governments use the organization to establish, revise, and e ...
, which also protected the free flow of information across borders. The World Bank also promoted privatization of national telecommunications, which afforded large multinational corporations the opportunity to purchase networks and expand operations in the Third World.
In countries with less telecommunications infrastructure, people, especially youth, tend today to get their news predominantly from mobile phones and, less so, from the internet. Older folks listen more to the radio. The government of China is a major investor in Third World telecommunications, especially in Africa. Some issues relating to global information flow were revisited in light of the internet at the 2003/2005
World Summit on the Information Society
The World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) was a two-phase United Nations-sponsored summit on information, communication and, in broad terms, the information society that took place in 2003 in Geneva and in 2005 in Tunis. WSIS Forums have ...
, a conference which emphasized the role of civil society and the private sector in
information society
An information society is a society where the usage, creation, distribution, manipulation and integration of information is a significant activity. Its main drivers are information and communication technologies, which have resulted in rapid inf ...
governance.
News values
News values are the professional norms of
journalism
Journalism is the production and distribution of reports on the interaction of events, facts, ideas, and people that are the "news of the day" and that informs society to at least some degree. The word, a noun, applies to the occupation (profes ...
. Commonly, news content should contain all the "
Five Ws
The Five Ws (sometimes referred to as Five Ws and How, 5W1H, or Six Ws) are questions whose answers are considered basic in information gathering or problem solving. They are often mentioned in journalism (''cf.'' news style), research, and poli ...
" (who, what, when, where, why, and also how) of an event. Newspapers normally place hard news stories on the first pages, so the most important information is at the beginning, enabling busy readers to read as little or as much as they desire. Local stations and networks with a set format must take news stories and break them down into the most important aspects due to time constraints.
Journalists are often expected to aim for
objectivity; reporters claim to try to cover all sides of an issue without bias, as compared to commentators or analysts, who provide
opinion
An opinion is a judgment, viewpoint, or statement that is not conclusive, rather than facts, which are true statements.
Definition
A given opinion may deal with subjective matters in which there is no conclusive finding, or it may deal with f ...
or personal points of view. The resulting articles lay out facts in a sterile, noncommittal manner, standing back to "let the reader decide" the truth of the matter. Several governments impose certain constraints against bias. In the
United Kingdom
The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, commonly known as the United Kingdom (UK) or Britain, is a country in Europe, off the north-western coast of the continental mainland. It comprises England, Scotland, Wales and North ...
, the government agency of
Ofcom
The Office of Communications, commonly known as Ofcom, is the government-approved regulatory and competition authority for the broadcasting, telecommunications and postal industries of the United Kingdom.
Ofcom has wide-ranging powers acros ...
(Office of Communications) enforces a legal requirement of "impartiality" on news broadcasters.
[Sue Wallace, "Impartiality in the News", in Fowler-Watt & Allan (eds.), ''Journalism'' (2013).] Both newspapers and broadcast news programs in the United States are generally expected to remain neutral and avoid bias except for clearly indicated editorial articles or segments. Many single-party governments have operated state-run news organizations, which may present the government's views.
Although newswriters have always laid claim to truth and objectivity, the modern values of professional journalism were established beginning in the late 1800s and especially after World War I, when groups like the
American Society of Newspaper Editors
The American Society of News Editors (ASNE) was a membership organization for editors, producers or directors in charge of journalistic organizations or departments, deans or faculty at university journalism schools, and leaders and faculty of ...
codified rules for unbiased news reporting. These norms held the most sway in American and British journalism, and were scorned by some other countries. These ideas have become part of the practice of journalism across the world. Soviet commentators said stories in the Western press were trivial distractions from reality, and emphasized a
socialist realism
Socialist realism is a style of idealized realistic art that was developed in the Soviet Union and was the official style in that country between 1932 and 1988, as well as in other socialist countries after World War II. Socialist realism is ch ...
model focusing on developments in everyday life.
Even in those situations where objectivity is expected, it is difficult to achieve, and individual journalists may fall foul of their own personal bias, or succumb to
commercial or political pressure. Similarly, the objectivity of news organizations owned by conglomerated corporations fairly may be questioned, in light of the natural incentive for such groups to report news in a manner intended to advance the conglomerate's financial interests. Individuals and organizations who are the subject of news reports may use
news management
Managing the news is the deliberate influencing of the presentation of information within the news media. The expression ''managing the news'' is often used in a negative sense. For example, people or organizations that wish to lessen the publi ...
techniques to try to make a favourable impression. Because each individual has a particular point of view, it is recognized that there can be no absolute objectivity in news reporting. Journalists can collectively shift their opinion over what is a controversy up for debate and what is an established fact, as evidenced by homogenization during the 2000s of news coverage of climate change.
Some commentators on news values have argued that journalists' training in news values ''itself'' represents a systemic bias of the news. The norm of objectivity leads journalists to gravitate towards certain types of acts and exclude others. A journalist can be sure of objectivity in reporting that an official or public figure has made a certain statement. This is one reason why so much news reporting is devoted to official statements. This lemma dates back to the early history of public news reporting, as exemplified by an English printer who on 12 March 1624 published news from Brussels in the form of letters, with the prefacing comment: "Now because you shall not say, that either out of my owne conceit I misliked a phrase, or presumptuously tooke upon me to reforme any thing amisse, I will truly set you downe their owne words."
Feminist critiques argue that discourse defined as objective by news organizations reflects a male-centered perspective. In their selection of sources, journalists rely heavily on men as sources of authoritative- and objective-seeming statements. News reporting has also tended to discuss women differently, usually in terms of appearance and relationship to men.
The critique of traditional norms of objectivity comes from within news organizations as well. Said Peter Horrocks, head of television news at BBC: "The days of middle-of-the-road, balancing Left and Right, impartiality are dead.
we need to consider adopting what I like to think of as a much wider 'radical impartiality'—the need to hear the widest range of views—all sides of the story."
Social organization of news production
News organizations
Viewed from a
sociological perspective, news for mass consumption is produced in hierarchical organizations. Reporters, working near the bottom of the structure, are given significant autonomy in researching and preparing reports, subject to assignments and occasional intervention from higher decision-makers. Owners at the top of the news hierarchy influence the content of news indirectly but substantially. The professional norms of journalism discourage overt censorship; however, news organizations have covert but firm norms about how to cover certain topics. These policies are conveyed to journalists through socialization on the job; without any written policy, they simply learn how things are done. Journalists comply with these rules for various reasons, including job security. Journalists are also systematically influenced by their education, including
journalism school
A journalism school is a school or department, usually part of an established university, where journalists are trained. 'J-School' is an increasingly used term for a journalism department at a school or college.
Journalists in most parts of the ...
.
News production is routinized in several ways. News stories use familiar formats and subgenres which vary by topic. "Rituals of objectivity", such as pairing a quotation from one group with a quotation from a competing group, dictate the construction of most news narratives. Many news items revolve around periodic press conferences or other scheduled events. Further routine is established by assigning each journalist to a
beat
Beat, beats or beating may refer to:
Common uses
* Patrol, or beat, a group of personnel assigned to monitor a specific area
** Beat (police), the territory that a police officer patrols
** Gay beat, an area frequented by gay men
* Battery ( ...
: a domain of human affairs, usually involving government or commerce, in which certain types of events routinely occur.
A common scholarly frame for understanding news production is to examine the role of information
gatekeepers
A gatekeeper is a person who controls access to something, for example via a city gate or bouncer, or more abstractly, controls who is granted access to a category or status. Gatekeepers assess who is "in or out", in the classic words of managem ...
: to ask why and how certain narratives make their way from news producers to news consumers. Obvious gatekeepers include journalists, news agency staff, and wire editors of newspapers. Ideology, personal preferences, source of news, and length of a story are among the many considerations which influence gatekeepers. Although social media have changed the structure of news dissemination, gatekeeper effects may continue due to the role of a few central nodes in the social network.
New factors have emerged in internet-era newsrooms. One issue is "click-thinking", the editorial selection of news stories—and of journalists—who can generate the most website hits and thus advertising revenue. Unlike a newspaper, a news website has detailed data collection about which stories are popular and who is reading them.
The drive for speedy online postings, some journalists have acknowledged, has altered norms of fact-checking so that verification takes place after publication.
Journalists' sometimes unattributed echoing of other news sources can also increase the homogeneity of news feeds.
The digital age can accelerate the problem of
circular reporting
Circular reporting, or false confirmation, is a situation in source criticism where a piece of information appears to come from multiple independent sources, but in reality comes from only one source. In many cases, the problem happens mistakenl ...
: propagation of the same error through increasingly reliable sources. In 2009, a number of journalists were embarrassed after all reproducing a fictional quotation, originating from Wikipedia.
News organizations have historically been male-dominated, though women have acted as journalists since at least the 1880s. The number of female journalists has increased over time, but organizational hierarchies remain controlled mostly by men. Studies of British news organizations estimate that more than 80% of decision-makers are men. Similar studies have found '
old boys' networks' in control of news organizations in the United States and the Netherlands. Further, newsrooms tend to divide journalists by gender, assigning men to "hard" topics like military, crime, and economics, and women to "soft", "humanised" topics.
Relationship with institutions
For various reasons, news media usually have a close relationship with the state, and often church as well, even when they cast themselves in critical roles.
[Salmon, ''The Newspaper and the Historian'' (1923), pp. 90–91.] This relationship seems to emerge because the press can develop symbiotic relationships with other powerful social institutions.
In the United States, the
Associated Press
The Associated Press (AP) is an American non-profit news agency headquartered in New York City. Founded in 1846, it operates as a cooperative, unincorporated association. It produces news reports that are distributed to its members, U.S. newspa ...
wire service developed a "bilateral monopoly" with the
Western Union
The Western Union Company is an American multinational financial services company, headquartered in Denver, Colorado.
Founded in 1851 as the New York and Mississippi Valley Printing Telegraph Company in Rochester, New York, the company chang ...
telegraph company.
[Starr, ''Creation of the Media'' (2004), pp. 175–177.]
The news agencies which rose to power in the mid-1800s all had support from their respective governments, and in turn served their political interests to some degree.
News for consumption has operated under
statist
In political science, statism is the doctrine that the political authority of the state is legitimate to some degree. This may include economic and social policy, especially in regard to taxation and the means of production.
While in use since ...
assumptions, even when it takes a stance adversarial to some aspect of a government. In practice, a large proportion of routine news production involves interactions between reporters and government officials. Relatedly, journalists tend to adopt a hierarchical view of society, according to which a few people at the top of organizational pyramids are best situated to comment on the reality which serves as the basisi of news. Broadly speaking, therefore, news tends to normalize and reflect the interests of the power structure dominant in its social context.
Today, international non-governmental organizations (NGOs) rival and may surpass governments in their influence on the content of news.
State control
Governments use international news transmissions to promote the national interest and conduct
political warfare
Political warfare is the use of political means to compel an opponent to do one's will, based on hostile intent. The term political describes the calculated interaction between a government and a target audience, including another state's govern ...
, alternatively known as
public diplomacy
In international relations, public diplomacy or people's diplomacy, broadly speaking, is any of the various government-sponsored efforts aimed at communicating directly with foreign publics to establish a dialogue designed to inform and influen ...
and, in the modern era,
international broadcasting
International broadcasting, in a limited extent, began during World War I, when German and British stations broadcast press communiqués using Morse code. With the severing of Germany's undersea cables, the wireless telegraph station in Nauen was t ...
. International radio broadcasting came into wide-ranging use by world powers seeking cultural integration of their empires. The British government used BBC radio as a diplomatic tool, setting up Arabic, Spanish and Portuguese services in 1937. American propaganda broadcasters include
Voice of America
Voice of America (VOA or VoA) is the state-owned news network and international radio broadcaster of the United States of America. It is the largest and oldest U.S.-funded international broadcaster. VOA produces digital, TV, and radio content ...
and
Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty
Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (RFE/RL) is a United States government funded organization that broadcasts and reports news, information, and analysis to countries in Eastern Europe, Central Asia, Caucasus, and the Middle East where it says tha ...
,
set up during the Cold War and still operating today. The United States remains the world's top broadcaster, although by some accounts it was surpassed for a time circa 1980
by the Soviet Union. Other major international broadcasters include the People's Republic of China, Taiwan, Germany, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, North Korea, India, Cuba, and Australia. Around the world (and especially, formerly, in the Soviet bloc), international news sources such as the
BBC World Service
The BBC World Service is an international broadcasting, international broadcaster owned and operated by the BBC, with funding from the Government of the United Kingdom, British Government through the Foreign Secretary, Foreign Secretary's o ...
are often welcomed as alternatives to domestic state-run media.
Governments have also funneled programming through private news organizations, as when the British government arranged to insert news into the Reuters feed during and after World War Two. Past revelations have suggested that the U.S. military and intelligence agencies create news stories which they disseminate secretly into the foreign and domestic media. Investigation into the
Central Intelligence Agency
The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA ), known informally as the Agency and historically as the Company, is a civilian foreign intelligence service of the federal government of the United States, officially tasked with gathering, processing, ...
pursued in the 1970s found that it owned hundreds of news organizations (wire services, newspapers, magazines) outright. Soviet news warfare also involved the creation of front groups, like the
International Organization of Journalists
Logotype of the IOJ
The International Organization of Journalists (IOJ, french: Organisation internationale des journalistes) was an international press workers' organization based in Prague, Czechoslovakia, during the Cold War. It was one of doz ...
. The Russian
KGB
The KGB (russian: links=no, lit=Committee for State Security, Комитет государственной безопасности (КГБ), a=ru-KGB.ogg, p=kəmʲɪˈtʲet ɡəsʊˈdarstvʲɪn(ː)əj bʲɪzɐˈpasnəsʲtʲɪ, Komitet gosud ...
heavily pursued a strategy of
disinformation
Disinformation is false information deliberately spread to deceive people. It is sometimes confused with misinformation, which is false information but is not deliberate.
The English word ''disinformation'' comes from the application of the L ...
, planting false stories which made their way to news outlets worldwide.
Broadcasts into Iraq before the
Second Gulf War mimicked the style of local programming. The US also launched Middle East Broadcasting Networks, featuring the satellite TV station
Alhurra
Alhurra ( ar, الحرة ' ,The pronunciation differs depending on the variety of Arabic, for example, . "the Free One") is a United States-based public Arabic-language satellite TV channel that broadcasts news and current affairs programming ...
and radio station
Radio Sawa
Radio Sawa ( ar, راديو سوا) is a Middle Eastern radio station broadcasting in the Arab world. The station is a service of the Middle East Broadcasting Networks, Inc., which also operates Alhurra Television and is publicly funded by the U ...
to beam 24-hour programming to Iraq and environs.
Today,
Al Jazeera
Al Jazeera ( ar, الجزيرة, translit-std=DIN, translit=al-jazīrah, , "The Island") is a state-owned Arabic-language international radio and TV broadcaster of Qatar. It is based in Doha and operated by the media conglomerate Al Jazeera ...
, a TV and internet news network owned by the government of
Qatar
Qatar (, ; ar, قطر, Qaṭar ; local vernacular pronunciation: ), officially the State of Qatar,) is a country in Western Asia. It occupies the Qatar Peninsula on the northeastern coast of the Arabian Peninsula in the Middle East; it sh ...
, has become one of the foremost news sources in the world, appreciated by millions as an alternative to the Western media. State-owned
China Central Television
China Central Television (CCTV) is a Chinese state- and political party-owned broadcaster controlled by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). Its 50 different channels broadcast a variety of programing to more than one billion viewers in six lan ...
operates 18 channels and reaches more than a billion viewers worldwide. Iran's
Press TV
Press TV (stylised as PRESSTV) is an Iranian state-owned news network that broadcasts in the English and French languages owned by Islamic Republic of Iran Broadcasting (IRIB), the only organization legally able to transmit radio and TV broadc ...
and Russia's
Russia Today
RT (formerly Russia Today or Rossiya Segodnya (russian: Россия Сегодня) is a Russian state-controlled international news television network funded by the Russian government. It operates pay television and free-to-air channels ...
, branded as RT, also have multiplatform presences and large audiences.
Public relations
As distinct from
advertising
Advertising is the practice and techniques employed to bring attention to a product or service. Advertising aims to put a product or service in the spotlight in hopes of drawing it attention from consumers. It is typically used to promote a ...
, which deals with marketing distinct from news,
public relations
Public relations (PR) is the practice of managing and disseminating information from an individual or an organization (such as a business, government agency, or a nonprofit organization) to the public in order to influence their perception. P ...
involves the techniques of influencing news in order to give a certain impression to the public. A standard public relations tactic, the "third-party technique", is the creation of seemingly independent organizations, which can deliver objective-sounding statements to news organizations without revealing their corporate connections. Public relations agencies can create complete content packages, such as
Video News Release
A video news release (VNR) is a video segment made to look like a news report, but is instead created by a PR firm, advertising agency, marketing firm, corporation, government agency, or non-profit organization. They are provided to television ne ...
s, which are rebroadcast as news without commentary or detail about their origin. Video news releases seem like normal news programming, but use subtle
product placement
Product placement, also known as embedded marketing, is a marketing technique where references to specific brands or products are incorporated into another work, such as a film or television program, with specific promotional intent. Much of th ...
and other techniques to influence viewers.
Public relations releases offer valuable newsworthy information to increasingly overworked journalists on deadline.
[Jamie Matthews, "Journalists and their sources: The twin challenges of diversity and verification", in Fowler-Watt & Allan (eds.), ''Journalism'' (2013).] (This pre-organized news content has been called an
information subsidy An information subsidy is the provision of ready-to-use newsworthy information to the news media by various sources interested in gaining access to media time and space. Typical forms of information subsidies include press releases, as well as press ...
.) The journalist relies on appearances of autonomy and even opposition to established interests—but the public relations agent seek to conceal their client's influence on the news,. Thus, public relations works its magic in secret.
Public relations can dovetail with state objectives, as in the case of the
1990 news story about Iraqi soldiers taking "babies out of incubators" in Kuwaiti hospitals. During the
Nigerian Civil War
The Nigerian Civil War (6 July 1967 – 15 January 1970), also known as the Nigerian–Biafran War or the Biafran War, was a civil war fought between Nigeria and the Republic of Biafra, a secessionist state which had declared its independence f ...
, both the federal government and the secessionist Republic of Biafra hired public relations firms, which competed to influence public opinion in the West, and between them established some of the key narratives employed in news reports about the war.
Overall, the position of the public relations industry has grown stronger, while the position of news producers has grown weaker. Public relations agents mediate the production of news about all sectors of society.
[Kevin Moloney, Daniel Jackson, & David McQueen, "News journalism and public relations: a dangerous relationship", in Fowler-Watt & Allan (eds.), ''Journalism'' (2013).]
News consumption
Over the centuries, commentators on newspapers and society have repeatedly observed widespread human interest in news.
Elite members of a society's political and economic institutions might rely on news as one limited source of information, for the masses, news represents a relatively exclusive window onto the operations by which a society is managed.
Regular people in societies with news media often spend a lot of time reading or watching news reports. Newspapers became significant aspects of national and literary culture—as exemplified by James Joyce's ''Ulysses (novel), Ulysses'', which derives from the newspapers of 16 June (and thereabouts), 1904, and represents the newspaper office itself as a vital part of life in Dublin.
A 1945 study by sociologist Bernard Berelson found that during the 1945 New York newspaper strike, New Yorkers exhibited a virtual addiction to news, describing themselves as "lost", "nervous", "isolated", and "suffering" due to the withdrawal. Television news has become still further embedded in everyday life, with specific programming anticipated at different times of day.
[Allan, ''News Culture'' (2004), pp. 47–48.] Children tend to find the news boring, too serious, or emotionally disturbing. They come to perceive news as characteristic of adulthood, and begin watching television news in their teenage years because of the adult status it confers.
People exhibit various forms of skepticism towards the news. Studies of tabloid (newspaper format), tabloid readers found that many of them gain pleasure from seeing through the obviously fake or poorly constructed stories—and get their "real news" from television.
Social and cultural cohesion
An important feature distinguishing news from private information transfers is the impression that when one reads (or hears, or watches) it, one joins a larger public.
[Starr, ''Creation of the Media'' (2004), p. 24. "Publications weave invisible threads of connection among their readers. Once a newspaper circulates, for example, no one ever truly reads it alone. Readers know that others are also seeing it at roughly the same time, and they read it differently as a result, conscious that the information is now out in the open, spread before a public that may talk about the news and act on it."] In this regard news serves to unify its receivers under the banner of a culture, or a society, as well as into the sub-demographics of a society targeted by their favorite kind of news. News thus plays a role in nation-building, the construction of a national identity.
Photojournalism, Images connected with news can also become iconic and gain a fixed role in the culture. Examples such as Alfred Eisenstaedt's photograph ''V-J Day in Times Square'', Nick Ut's photograph of Phan Thi Kim Phuc and other children running from a napalm blast in Vietnam; Kevin Carter's photograph of a starving child being stalked by a vulture;
etc.
With the new interconnectedness of global media, the experience of receiving news along with a world audience reinforces the social cohesion effect on a larger scale. As a corollary, global media culture may erode the uniqueness and cohesion of national cultures.
[Silverblatt & Zlobin, ''International Communications'' (2004), pp. 28–31. "A major liability of transnational media conglomerates is the loss of distinctive local culture. Transnational media conglomerates have a distinctly American influence—regardless of their country of origin. For instance, although Bertlesmann is a German-based corporation, in 2001, its largest proportion of its revenue (35 per cent) came from its U.S. media subsidiaries, including Bantam, Doubleday Dell, and Random House publishing companies, ''Family Circle'' and ''McCall's magazines, and Arista and RCA record labels."]
Public sphere
This collective form experience can be understood to constitute a political realm or public sphere.
In this view, the news media constitute a fourth estate which serves to check and balance the operations of government.
This idea, at least as a goal to be sought, has re-emerged in the era of global communications. Today, unprecedented opportunities exist for public analysis and discussion of world events. According to one interpretation of the CNN effect, instantaneous global news coverage can rally public opinion as never before to motivate political action. In 1989, local and global communications media-enabled instant exposure to and discussion of the Chinese government's actions in Tiananmen Square protests of 1989, Tiananmen Square. The news about Tiananmen Square travelled over a fax machine, telephone, newspaper, radio, and television, and continued to travel even after the government imposed new restrictions on local telecommunications.
News events
As the technological means for disseminating news grew more powerful, news became an experience which millions of people could undergo simultaneously. Outstanding news experiences can exert a profound influence on millions of people. Through its power to effect a shared experience, news events can mold the collective memory of a society.
One type of news event, the media event, is a scripted pageant organized for a mass live broadcast. Media events include athletic contests such as the Super Bowl and the Olympics, cultural events like awards ceremonies and celebrity funerals, and also political events such as coronations, debates between electoral candidates, and diplomatic ceremonies. These events typically unfold according to a common format which simplifies the transmission of news items about them. Usually, they have the effect of increasing the perceived unity of all parties involved, which include the broadcasters and audience. Today, international events such as a national declaration of independence can be scripted in advance with the major news agencies, with staff specially deployed to key locations worldwide in advance of the life news broadcast. Public relations companies can participate in these events as well.
The perception that an ongoing crisis is taking place further increases the significance of live news. People rely on the news and constantly seek more of it, to learn new information and to seek reassurance amidst feelings of fear and uncertainty. Crises can also increase the effect of the news on social cohesion, and lead the population of a country to "rally" behind its current leadership. The rise of a global news system goes hand in hand with the advent of terrorism and other sensational acts, which have power in proportion to the audience they capture. In 1979, the Iran hostage crisis, capture of American hostages in Iran dominated months of news coverage in the western media, gained the status of a "crisis", and influenced a presidential election.
South Africans overwhelmingly describe the end of Apartheid as a source of the country's most important news. In the United States, news events such as the assassinations of the 1960s (of the assassination of John F. Kennedy, John F. Kennedy, Assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., Martin Luther King, Jr., and Assassination of Robert F. Kennedy, Robert F. Kennedy), the 1969 moon landing, the 1986 Challenger explosion, the 1997 death of Princess Diana, the Bush v. Gore, intervention of the Supreme Court in the 2000 United States presidential election, 2000 presidential election and the 2001 September 11 attacks. In Jordan, people cited numerous memorable news events involving death and war, including the death of King Hussein, Princess Diana, and Assassination of Yitzhak Rabin, Yitzhak Rabin. Positive news stories found memorable by Jordanians featured political events affecting their lives and families—such as the South Lebanon security belt, Israeli withdrawal from South Lebanon, and the Israel–Jordan peace treaty.
News coverage can also shape collective memory in retrospect. A study of Israeli news coverage leading up to the media event of the nation's 60th birthday found that news coverage of events like the Holocaust, World War Two, and subsequent Israeli wars increased the perceived importance of these events in the minds of citizens.
News making
News making is the act of making the news or doing something that is considered to be newsworthy. When discussing the act of news making, scholars refer to specific models. Five of these models are the Professional Model, Mirror Model, Organizational Model, Political Model, and Civic Journalism Model.
The Professional Model is when skilled peoples put certain events together for a specific audience. The reaction of the audience is influential because it can determine the impact that the particular article or newspaper has on the readers.
The Mirror Model states that news should reflect reality. This model aims to focus on particular events and provide accuracy in reporting. The Organizational Model is also known as the Bargaining Model.
It focuses on influencing various news organizations by applying pressures to governmental processes. The Political Model outlines that news represents the ideological biases of the people as well as the various pressures of the political environment. This model mainly influences journalists and attempts to promote public opinion.
The Civic Journalism Model is when the press discovers the concerns of the people and uses that to write stories. This allows the audience to play an active role in society.
Models of news making help define what the news is and how it influences readers. But it does not necessarily account for the content of print news and online media. Stories are selected if they have a strong impact, incorporate violence and scandal, are familiar and local, and if they are timely.
News Stories with a strong impact can be easily understood by a reader. Violence and scandal create an entertaining and attention-grabbing story.
Familiarity makes a story more relatable because the reader knows who is being talked about. Proximity can influence a reader more. A story that is timely will receive more coverage because it is a current event. The process of selecting stories coupled with the models of news making are how the media is effective and impactful in society.
Psychological effects
Exposure to constant news coverage of war can lead to stress and anxiety. Television coverage of the Collapse of the World Trade Center, destruction of the World Trade Center in 2001, which repeated the same footage over and over, led to symptoms of trauma (medicine), trauma experienced across the United States. Studies have indicated that children have been traumatized by exposure to television of other frightening events, including the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster, Challenger disaster. Journalists themselves also experience trauma and guilt.
Research also suggest that constant representations of violence in the news lead people to overestimate the frequency of its occurrence in the real world, thus increasing their level of fear in everyday situations.
Influence
The content and style of news delivery certainly have effects on the general public, with the magnitude and precise nature of these effects being tough to determine experimentally. In Western societies, television viewing has been so ubiquitous that its total effect on psychology and culture leave few alternatives for comparison.
News is the leading source of knowledge about global affairs for people around the world. According to agenda-setting theory, the general public will identify as its priorities those issues which are highlighted on the news. The agenda-setting model has been well-supported by research, which indicate that the public's self-reported concerns respond to changes in news coverage rather than changes in the underlying issue itself. The less an issue obviously affects people's lives, the bigger an influence media agenda-setting can have on their opinion of it. The agenda-setting power becomes even stronger in practice because of the correspondence in news topics promulgated by different media channels.
Influence of sponsorship
It has been acknowledged that sponsorship has historically influenced various news stories.
This history gained widespread attention following the release of the film ''Anchorman 2''.
One example in recent time is the fact that Meta, Inc, Facebook has invested heavily in news sources and purchasing time on local news media outlets.
''TechCrunch'' journalist Josh Continue even stated in February 2018 that the company "stole the news business" and used sponsorship to make many news publishers its "ghostwriters."
In January 2019, founder Mark Zuckerberg announced that he will spend $300 million in local news buys over a three-year period.
See also
* Toronto School of communication theory
References
Sources and further reading
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* Boyd-Barrett, Oliver, and Tehri Rantanen (eds.). ''The Globalization of News''. (SAGE, 1998. ).
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* Dayan, Daniel, and Elihu Katz. ''Media Events: The Live Broadcasting of History''. Harvard University Press, 1992.
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* Michael Schudson, Schudson, Michael. ''Discovering the News: A Social History of American Newspapers''. New York: Basic Books, Inc., 1978.
* Shoemaker, Pamela J. and Akiba A. Cohen (eds.). ''News Around the World: Content, Practitioners, and the Public.'' New York, Routledge, 2006.
* Silberstein-Loeb, Jonathan. ''The International Distribution of News: The Associated Press, Press Association, and Reuters, 1848–1947'' (2014)
* Silverblatt, Art, and Nikolai Zlobin. ''International Communications: A Media Literacy Approach''. Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, Inc., 2004.
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* Starr, Paul. ''The Creation of the Media: Political Origins of Modern Communication''. New York: Basic Books, 2004.
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* Zhong, Bu.
Searching for Meaning: Multi-Level Cognitive Processing of News Decision Making Among U.S. and Chinese Journalists. Dissertation accepted at University of Maryland, College Park, 2006.
External links
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