More on declining diversity of international news
sources
Newsdesk.org adviser Chris Paterson, who hopefully will make the
next Media Giraffe conference if we can get him over from Leeds, was
recently interviewed by the Guardian about his research on declining
diversity of international news reporting.
Research into global
news flows suggests the internet is hindering, not helping access to
original reporting.
Mic Dover
Friday January 5, 2007
MediaGuardian.co.uk
News wire agencies - the "wire" tag comes from their early
use of telegraph technology - are organisations set up by the print
media to collect news from its newspaper members for redistribution to
other papers at home and abroad.
In the early 20th century, agencies such as Reuters in the UK,
Associated Press in the US, Russia's Tass, France's AFP and many
others, proliferated to exploit the potential of the telegraph for
capitalising on breaking news.
By the 1960s, only five news wire agencies remained, and by 2000, it
was effectively down to just two global players - Reuters and AP. Take
a glance at the international pages of most daily newspapers around
the world and the Reuters or AP brands are all over the foreign news
stories.
Dr Chris Paterson, a media academic based at the University of Leeds,
has been analysing global news flows for over seven years, and he has
major concerns about this duopoly. His latest paper looks at online
news - with some worrying findings. A decade ago, many hoped the web
would evolve as a democratising force that could alleviate
"information poverty", but Dr Paterson's research suggests
the opposite is happening.
Highly popular portals such as MSN or Yahoo! are websites designed to
serve as a web user's home page. Offering news as a "sticky"
feature to attract users is a well-established strategy. The net has
seen a proliferation of sites offering links to up-to-the-minute news
items.
But Dr Paterson's research suggests this expansion is "a
conjurer's trick - we are being duped by more brand labels on the
same, very limited, news content".
Today, online news is characterised by three types of content
provider.
The first group are traditional media outlets such as the BBC or the
Guardian which combine original reporting with some news agency
content.
The second group are "disintermediated" producers of
original news content which bypass intermediaries. This group would
include the new high-profile websites of AP and Reuters that deliver
agency stories directly to online news consumers.
The third group are intermediaries such as CNN Interactive and MSNBC
which, for international news at least, convey stories written by wire
services with little or no editing. This group also includes
"news aggregator" sites, such as Yahoo! and Google, where AP
and Reuters provide the lion's share of the news, despite what
Paterson calls an "audacious pretence at source
diversity".
Google has developed searching algorithms for retrieving, selecting,
ranking, and linking to "4,500 news sources updated
continuously". This process can have bizarre results.
"For a breaking story in China," says Dr Paterson,
"Google News consumers may be offered links to news outlets like
Arizona Republic or KRQE Television (New Mexico) or the Calgary Sun.
But they will all be providing identical, unaltered wire agency
copy."
In 2001, Dr Paterson analysed a sample of international stories with
some plagiarism detection software, and repeated the process in 2006.
The original study found 68% of international news copy on the
aggregator sites could be traced back to wire reports, but by 2006
this figure had risen to 85%. A similar comparison of the major
original news content providers showed a rise from 34% to 50%
dependence on wire copy.
Dr Paterson's study concentrates more on measurement than the causes
of these trends but he points out that, "it makes economic sense
that the two leading news agencies should dominate international news
delivery in cyberspace, for as in any open and unregulated market, the
strongest producers with the lowest unit costs
thrive".
AP and Reuters have 150 years' experience in this area, of course, and
digital technologies have made news agency production more efficient,
allowing easy access into new markets through the creation of products
tailored to new media.
Whatever the media, AP and Reuters can sell and resell the same agency
words and pictures with little or no costly human intervention.
Another noticeable change was the shift away from minor rewriting,
towards the publishing of wire stories in their entirety with clear
wire service branding - a practice encouraged by the previously
low-profile agencies.
This shows news sites are becoming more concerned with breadth of
coverage and less concerned about projecting an image of providing
original news coverage.
In 2006, only four media organisations - Reuters, AP, the BBC and AFP
- still do extensive international reporting. A few such as CNN, MSN,
the New York Times and the Guardian do some, but most none at all.
Dr Paterson thinks this is a cause for concern - a growing number of
people get their news from the internet, but they are being subjected
to a very narrow worldview of global events.
News wire agencies have to try to please (or not upset) editors all
over the world, so they have developed bland writing styles that
create the appearance of objectivity and neutrality.
But ideologically distinctive views of the world inevitably seep into
the news coverage. Even the act of choosing which stories to cover
will tend to reinforce the status quo - stories challenging the
dominant political players on the world scene (in agency eyes, the US
and UK) receive little attention.
Dr Paterson's latest paper builds on earlier work looking at
international television news which found that 63% of stories were
based on events in the developed world and that "news as defined
by international news agencies is almost exclusively the news of men
... where a 'main actor' could be identified in news agency stories,
only 13% of these were female".
Research in the US and the UK also shows that online news consumers
are spending more time on fewer sites.
A 2003 Nielson/Netratings survey found 46% of US net users get their
news from TV news sites such as CNN or MSNBC, while 39% go to portals
such as Google.
In the UK, Hitwise found, in 2006, that the BBC was the most popular
news site (40%) followed by GuardianUnlimited, Google UK News, CNN,
Yahoo!, Times Online and the Telegraph.
But do these findings really matter? Some media commentators would
contend that, with blogs, citizen journalism and personalised
newsbots, the new media model is "cultural chaos", a phrase
coined by Brian McNair, professor of journalism and communication at
Strathclyde University, to describe "a democratising force,
demystifying established power [exposing] the rise of spin and
promotional culture".
The internet may have facilitated widespread personalisation of
information delivery, but Dr Paterson argues that "these
phenomena make it no less a form of mass media than would the
insertion of targeted advertising into a magazine delivered to
someone's home".
And because resources are being devoted to endless distribution and
redistribution, internet journalism will continue to grow thinner.
A recent state of the media report in the US found: "For now ...
it appears that the resources devoted to skilled journalism will
continue to shrink as the web grows." (State of the News Media,
2006).
In the long term, media watchers such as Dr Paterson believe the
industry must invest in more original reporting as an alternative to
the few genuinely international news organisations now on offer, and
give more prominence to buying, and properly translating, original
non-English language reporting from around the world.
"The research shows that despite the deluge of information
available online, the old media sources remain the privileged tellers
of most of the stories circulating about the world," say Dr
Paterson. "And for most end-users, the internet is a mass medium
providing mostly illusory interactivity and mostly illusory
diversity."
· This article is based on research carried between 2001 and 2006 by
Dr Chris Paterson, University of Leeds Centre for International
Communications Research. Click hereto see the original papers
· To contact the MediaGuardian newsdesk email
or phone 020 7239 9857. For all other
inquiries please call the main Guardian switchboard on 020 7278
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