Online news: end of the monologue / Problem field / Home

News is a culturally determined category . This has been proven by research carried out in two traditional directions. The first of these, the social history of the press, identified the institutional and technological factors that have defined the concept of “news” over the past 200 years.

Michael Schudson (Discovering the News , 1978) examined the institutional transformations associated with the emergence of news in the United States in the modern sense of the word and pointed out that the concept was born in penny newspapers of the 1830s. in response to the growth of democratic freedoms and market economies, and in response to the aspirations of the middle class. According to Schudson, these newspapers "came to reflect not the life of the elite of a tiny trading society, but the activities of an urban, increasingly diverse middle class engaged in trade, transport and industry." Menachem Blondheim (News over the Wires , 1994) emphasized the role of technological change and pointed out that the invention of the telegraph had a decisive influence on the evolution of news in the second half of the 19th century. “The telegraph, having speeded up the delivery of news and ensured the possibility of their continuous transmission, broke messages about the development of news stories into small and fractional segments. It also expanded the horizons and scope of news. From now on, news that attracts the attention of the public and generates interest in the development and completion of the story has become not only local events, but also news for the entire country."

A second line of research, the ethnography of news production, has identified local features that influence coverage of current events. The main premise of this line of research was the idea that news does not have any inherent characteristics. As Walter Gieber (1964) put it, news is “what the newsboys say it is.”

James W. Carey (Reading the News, 1986) summed up the major contributions of the research by stating that news is not “a straightforward, cursory sketch of the world. News reflects, on the one hand, organizational constraints journalistic work [and], on the other hand, the literary forms and narrative mechanisms that journalists tend to use to cope with the overwhelming flow of events."
In this section, I will maintain the assumption that what is news online is whatever the people involved in producing the news think it is.

I do not include in the traditional definition of newsmakers and news products some contributors (such as visitors to the New York Times' technology forum) and related content (such as nonprofit postings on Community Connection 's New Jersey Online ). But, considering possible reconstructions of the act of creation of online news, I want to emphasize the importance of the mechanism of “following the actors” ( Bruno Latour , 1987).

There are at least two points that distinguish new media news production from the typical process in traditional print and electronic media. Online news production involves larger and more diverse groups of contributors, a factor that places a premium on coordinating the useful activities of these groups.
The number of authors, in turn, influences the content and form of online news. News, previously focused mainly on the journalist, presented in the form of a monologue and primarily of a local nature, is gradually losing these features. From now on, they are increasingly audience-oriented, becoming part of multilateral discussions, and this gives them a micro-local character.

The groups and actors involved in the production of news and directly influencing this process are much more diverse than is usually taken into account in studies of newspaper, television and radio journalism. Such studies tend to focus on the work of editors and reporters. Building on the analysis in previous chapters, it is reasonable to assume that at least four additional groups of players are involved in new media news production.

First. In online versions of traditional media, the content of the news, the identity of its author and the timing of its release depend not on one, but on two editions - online and traditional, as well as on their interaction.

Second. The composition of news, the selection of stories and the distribution of budget funds are influenced to a greater extent than in paper newspapers by the advertising and marketing departments. This is leading to the deepening of so-called “market-oriented journalism” (McManus, 1984), a trend that has been growing in the American media since the 1980s.

Third. Technicians and designers are beginning to influence the way news is presented, from the use of multimedia and interactive tools to the rise of the visual interface as part of the narrative.

And fourth. By voicing their opinions in forums, chat rooms and new media publications, and hyperlinking these web pages to other sites - from personal weblogs to the home pages of activist groups - users begin to determine for themselves what stories are worthy of inclusion in the news, who should comment on them, and how they must be submitted.

This expansion of actors determining the composition of news in the online environment leads to changes in ideas about the nature of news production.

In a study of the interpretation of art, Howard Becker (Art Worlds , 1982) introduces the concept of an “art nation”, meaning “all the people whose activity is necessary to create the types of works that in our own, and perhaps in others, worlds are defined as art." Just as art is not the creation of artists alone, news in the online environment may not be what, to paraphrase Guibert, “the newsboys declare it to be.” They, these news, can most likely be defined as products of “news worlds”. The composition of a particular news world and the types of connections connecting relevant groups of actors will change depending on what events are currently considered newsworthy, who reports them and through what means of communication. The concepts of "world" and "news", as in the case of art worlds, "are multivalent, since the work taken as the starting point of research may be the product of the interaction of different networks and fall under different definitions" (Becker, 1982).

But if we view online news as the product of complex and dynamic worlds, it is quite reasonable to question the fundamental, a priori concepts of what counts as news and who the newsmakers are, concepts largely introduced to understand the essence of print and electronic media.

This first transformation leads us further to the next: in news production, the importance of coordinating many of these groups increases. News is no longer generated solely by the interactions between reporters and their sources and the relationships between reporters and editors. Online news is greatly influenced by the relationships of other groups that populate the news world. As a result, the work of coordinating the tasks, goals and values ​​of the groups involved in news production comes to the fore. This coordination complicates traditional understandings of the news production process. After all, tradition implies that only the editorial office is involved in “making news,” and the same tradition takes into account only the working relationships of representatives of the journalistic profession.

These changes have at least three impacts as news migrates online. First of all, news is now focused not on the journalist, but on the user. Let us remember that back in 1973, Leon Segal (“Reporters and Officials: The Organization and Politics of Newsmaking” , 1973) wrote: “News is a product of consensus: newspaper audiences, reacting to news, actively influences their content. But the average reader's influence on consensus development is still negligible." In contrast, in the online environment, the direct influence of users on news content is quite noticeable - from a qualitative leap in the intensity of communication with journalists (via e-mail) to the expression of their own views on news stories on publication forums and, finally, to the publication of their own notes in online periodicals .

What's going on is that the user-centric nature of online news is deepening the "civic" or "public interest" journalism movement, which advocates for the right of citizens to participate in the editorial process and in publishing "whatever citizens want to know about" (Arthur Charity, "Creating Public Service Journalism" " - "Doing Public Journalism" , 1995). Moreover, the growing influence of marketing and advertising personnel sensitive to consumer preferences and desires may, in turn, directly or indirectly increase user attraction to online news. And the overall result may be an expansion of the subject matter of the news offered by the site - both the actual coverage of events and the assessment of the prospects for their development.

Second, online news is no longer a one-way monologue, allowing only quiet reader feedback in the form of letters to the editor. Apparently, these one-pointed statements are becoming part of a wider dialogue. This means that online coverage of an event (usually, but not necessarily, one of general interest) now involves multiple voices interacting explicitly and implicitly with each other. And this, in turn, turns the news story into a subject of discussion, conducted either directly - as a conflict of opinions - or indirectly - as a multiplicity of points of view.

Conversational presentation of news is possible when the journalist knows the point of view of his audience well. To some extent, news in the form of dialogue is the result of the fact that audience members are increasingly becoming authors of new media content, published both in traditional news sources, such as online periodicals, and in non-traditional ones, such as personal weblogs. Regardless of whether today's journalists classify this kind of content as “news,” our research suggests that it is becoming increasingly attractive to new media audiences. The importance placed on reader emails in The New-York Times technology forums , the bickering between staff and free riders aboard the Virtual Navigator at HoustonChronicle.com, and the nonprofit sites in New Jersey Online's Community Connection section are windows allowing us to see the dynamism and value of news presented as an ongoing dialogue.

Third, online news has a micro-local focus and focuses on content that interests small communities of users who share a common interest either geographically or both, just as print and electronic media emphasize local and national news. .
A clear example of such a micro-local focus like Community Connection shows that online news can include specialized, utilitarian content that differs from the average content of most media. In addition, the micro-localization of online news at the geographic level is deepening the trend toward so-called “zoning,” that is, the publication of specialized editions for the area in which they are distributed, which has been in place since the 1970s. Many national daily newspapers switched over in response to their audiences spreading to the suburbs.

News that matters to micro-local audiences—from high school sports to niche nonprofit organizations—is rarely covered by traditional media or even local print newspapers. In light of the economics of Internet communications and the growing role of users in the dynamics of news worlds, micro-local content may take an important place in online news as broader segments of the population gain access to the Internet and become familiar with the media culture of collaborative content production.

In closing, I would like to return to the first day of my research in 1997. After almost two hours of conversation about newspapers, the web and the Virtual Navigator, David Galloway - then the content producer for the Virtual Navigator - said words that I still remember today Since then: “In paper journalism┘ we wanted to go out, have adventures, and then come back and put them on a piece of paper. We did not notice the movements and did not hear any sounds except those that could be turned into a printed product. I think that "Virtual Navigator" forced us to turn our eyes and ears to a form of journalism that the slaves of the press simply did not need."

Galloway's words contain two ideas that get to the heart of the stories I've told in this book. First, the print periodicals' pursuit of paperless distribution techniques is not just a technical change, but a fundamental cultural transformation. This transformation is not only related to the material culture and information infrastructure that ensures the collection, processing and dissemination of news - it has affected editorial and journalistic work. Galloway's book continually raises issues of identity for periodicals encroaching on non-paper territories, as when New York Times publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr., speaking at Harvard University's 1995 Nieman Foundation conference, discussed the problems of identity of this newspaper during its transition from paper to online publications.

The second theme raised by Galloway reveals the meaning of this cultural transformation in relation to print.

Throughout my book I argue with the popular narrative about the death of print in new media spaces. My analysis shows that American daily newspapers often attempted to replicate paper publishing standards in their non-paper projects. At the same time, the created newspaper retained connections with its paper predecessor, but was qualitatively different from it in material infrastructure, editorial practice and news production technology.

Print has survived in the online environment. Paradoxically, this is precisely what led to the creation of new media, strikingly different from the old ones. At the time of writing this book, there is still no answer to the question - what will be the outcome of the process during which the attempt to preserve the old gave rise to spontaneous innovations? This is why understanding its dynamics is so important - to capture the sense of randomness and uncertainty that will become even more vague when the dust settles, and to try to steer the evolution of the press in the desired direction.