Online news: end of a monologue

News - a culturally determined category . This is proved by research works that were conducted in two traditional areas. The first of them - the social history of the press - revealed institutional and technological factors that determined the concept of "news" in the last 200 years.

Michael Shadson ("Discovery of News" - "Discover the News" , 1978) considered institutional transformations related to the emergence of news in the USA in the modern sense of the word and indicated that this concept was born in the pennies of the 1830s. In response to the growth of democratic freedoms and a market economy, as well as in response to aspirations of the middle class. According to Shadson, these newspapers "did not reflect the life of the elite of a tiny trade society, but the activities of the city, more and more diverse middle class, employed in trade, transport and industry." Menaham Blondheim ("News on Wires" - "News Over The Wires" , 1994) emphasized the role of technological changes and indicated that the invention of the telegraph decisively influenced the evolution of news in the second half of the 19th century. "The telegraph, having accelerated the delivery of news and ensured the possibility of their continuous transmission, defeated reports of the development of news stories into small and fractional segments. He also expanded the horizons and the scale of the news. From now on news that attracts the attention of the public and give birth to interest in the development and completion of the plot, not only local events began to be considered, but also to lead the whole country."

The second area of ​​research - the ethnography of the creation of news - revealed local features that affect the coverage of current events. The main prerequisite for this area of ​​research was the idea that the news did not have any immanent signs. As Walter Gibert (1964) put it, the news - "This is what newspaper men declare such."

James W. Carey (“Reading News” - “Reading the News”, 1986) summed up the main contribution of research, stating that the news is not at all “a certain direct and cursory outline of the picture of the world. On the one hand, the news is reflected, on the one hand, the organizational restrictions of journalistic work [and], on the other hand, are literary forms and narrative mechanisms, which, as a rule, are usually Journalists use to cope with a stunning stream of events. "
In this section, I will adhere to the assumption that the news in the online environment is everything that people involved in the production of news considered this.

I do not include in the traditional definition of newsmakers and news products of some process participants (such as visitors to the technology forum in the New York Times) and the corresponding content (say, the publication of non-profit organizations in the Community Connection newspapers New Jersey Online ). But, considering the possible reconstruction of the act of the creation of online news, I want to emphasize the meaning of the mechanism of "following the actors" ( Bruno Latur , 1987).

There are at least two points that distinguish the production of news with new media from a typical process in traditional printed and electronic media. More numerous and various groups of authors participate in the formation of online news, and this factor puts in the first place the coordination of the useful activity of these groups.
The large number of authors, in turn, affects the content and the form of online novations. News, previously oriented mainly to journalists, served in the form of a monologue and are primarily local in nature, gradually losing these signs. From now on, they are increasingly focusing on the audience, become part of multilateral discussions, and this gives them a micro-local character.

Groups and actors, included in the production of news and directly affecting this process, are much more diverse than this is usually taken into account by newspaper, television and radio journalism studies. Such studies, as a rule, are focused on the work of editors and reporters. Based on the analysis carried out in previous chapters, it will be reasonable to assume that at least four additional groups of players participate in the production of new media news.

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

Second. On the composition of the news, the selection of plots and the distribution of budget funds to a greater extent than in paper newspapers are influenced by the advertising and marketing departments. This leads to the deepening of the so-called "market-oriented journalism" (McManus, 1984)-trends growing in the American media since the 1980s.

Third. Technical personnel and designers begin to influence the methods of feeding news - starting with the use of multimedia and interactive tools and ending with the spread of the visual interface as an integral part of the narrative.

And the fourth. By voicing their opinions in the forums, chats and publications of new media and connecting these web pages with other sites with hyperlinks - from personal webogues to home pages of activists groups - users begin to determine themselves what plots are worthy of inclusion in the news, who should comment on and how they should be presented.

Such an expansion of actors determining the composition of news in the online environment leads to a change in ideas about the essence of news production.

In the study on the interpretation of art, Howard Becker ("Artistic Worlds" - "Art Worlds" , 1982) introduces the concept of "artistic nation", implying "all people whose activities are necessary to create types of works, which, and possibly in other worlds, are defined as art." As art is not the creation of artists alone, so the news in the online environment may not be at all that, paraphrasing Gibera, "newspapers declare such." They, this news, can soon be defined as the creatures of the "news worlds". The composition of a particular news world and types of connections connecting the relevant groups of actors will change depending on which events are currently considered worthy of lighting, who reports about them and with the help of which means of communication. The concepts of "peace" and "news", as in the case of art worlds, are "meaningful, since work taken as a starting point of research can be a product of interaction between various networks and fall under various definitions" (Becker, 1982).

But if we consider the online news as creatures of complex and dynamic worlds, it will be quite reasonable to doubt the indigenous and priori concepts: what to consider news and who are New Smakers - in concepts, mostly introduced to comprehend the essence of printed and electronic media.

This first transformation leads us further, as follows: when creating news, the value of the coordination of many of these groups is enhanced. News from now on are generated not only by the interaction between reporters with their sources and relations of reporters and editors. Online news is under the enormous influence of the relationship between other groups with which the population of the news world is growing. As a result, work comes first to coordinate the tasks, goals and values ​​of groups participating in the production of news. Such coordination complicates the traditional understanding of the news production process. After all, the tradition implies that only the editorial office is involved in the “news”, and the same tradition takes into account only the working relations of representatives of the journalistic profession.

These changes, as the news migrated into the online environment, affect at least a threefold way. First of all, the news is now focused not on a journalist, but to the user. Recall that back in 1973, Leon Sigal ("Reporters and officials: organization and Newsmakers' Politics" - "Reporters and Officials: The Organization of Newsmaking" , 1973) wrote: "News is a product of newspapers: newspaper audience, reacting to news, reacting to news. Actively affects their content. In contrast, in the online environment, the direct influence of users on news content is very noticeable - from a high -quality jump in the intensity of communication with journalists (by e -mail) to expressing their own views on news on the forums of publications and, finally, to publish own notes in online periodicals.

Everything goes to the fact that the orientation of online news on the user deepens the movement of “civilian” or “public” journalism, which defends the right of citizens to participate in editorial processes and in the publication “everything that citizens want” (Arthur Charity, “creating public journalism” - “Ding Public Journalism” , 1995). Moreover, the growing influence of marketing and advertising personnel, sensitive to the preferences and desires of consumers, in turn, can directly or indirectly strengthen the user's gravity to online news. And the general result may be the expansion of the theme of the news offered by the site - and the actual coverage of events and the assessment of the prospects for their development.

Secondly, online news ceases to be a unidirectional monologue that allows only a quiet response of readers in the form of letters to the editor. Apparently, these unidirectional statements become part of a wide dialogue. This means that the online lighting of the event (as a rule, but not necessarily causing universal interest) now includes many votes that clearly and implicitly interacting with each other. And this, in turn, turns the news plot into the subject of a discussion leading or directly - as a conflict of opinions - or indirectly - as a multiplicity of points of view.

The news presentation 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 representatives of the audience are increasingly becoming authors of the content of new media, published both in traditional news sources, such as online periodicals and in non -traditional ones - in personal webbes. Regardlessly, whether today's journalists reckon to “news” of this kind of content, our research gives enough reason to believe that it is becoming more and more attractive to the audience of new media. The value attached to the forums of the technology section in The New-York Times "to the electronic letters of readers, the skirmishes between the personnel and the freezers aboard the" virtual navigator " on Houstonchronicle.com and the sites of non-profit organizations under the section of Community Connection of the newspaper New Jersey Online is windows that allow you to see the dynamism and value of news presented as an ongoing dialogue.

Thirdly, the online news has a micro -local orientation and focused on content that is interested in small communities of users united by common interests or geographically or these factors - just like printed and electronic media focus on local and national news.
A good example of such a micro-local orientation like Community Connection shows that online news may include specialized, utilitarian content that is different from the average content of the majority of the media. In addition, the micro-localization of online news at the geographical level deepens the tendency to the so-called "zoning", that is, the publication of specialized issues for the area in which they are spreading, to which since the 1970s. Many central daily newspapers crossed in response to the creep of their audience in the suburbs.

The news important for a micro -local audience - from school sports to the activities of highly specialized non -profit organizations - are rarely covered in traditional media and even on the pages of local issues of paper newspapers. In the light of the economy of Internet communications and the growing role of users in the dynamics of news worlds, micro-local content can take an important place in online news, when wider segments of the population will gain access to the Internet and get acquainted with the media culture of joint production of content.

In conclusion, I would like to return to the first day of my study in 1997. After an almost two -hour conversation about newspapers, Web and the Virtual Navigator David Galloway - at that time the content producer of the Virtual Navigator - said the words that I recall so far: “In paper journalism, we sought to go out on the street, to express adventures, to be adventure And then we did not notice their movements and did not hear any sounds, except those that could be turned into a printed product.

Galloway's words contain two thoughts that open the very essence of the stories I cited in this book. Firstly, the pursuit of print periodicals behind uninvited distribution techniques is not just a technical change, but a fundamental cultural transformation. This transformation is associated not only with material culture and information infrastructure that ensures the collection, processing and distribution of news - it affected editorial and journalistic work. In the book of Galloway, the problems of periodicals invading the unsuccessful territories come to the same and then, for example, on the page where the publisher of The New-York Times, Arthur Sulzberger Jr., speaking at Harvard University at the Niman Foundation in 1995, discussed the problem of the identity of this newspaper under its newspaper transition from paper to online publications.

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

Throughout my book, I argue with the popular bike about the death of the press in new media spaces. My analysis shows that American daily newspapers often tried to reproduce the standards of a paper publication in their non -bummer projects. At the same time, the newspaper created maintained ties with its paper predecessor, but it was qualitatively different from it by material infrastructure, editorial practice and news production technology.

The seal survived in the online environment. Paradoxically, this is what led to the creation of new media, which are 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 result of the process during which the attempt to preserve the old gave rise to spontaneous innovations? That is why it is so important to understand his dynamics - in order to catch the feeling of chance and uncertainty, which will become even more vague when the dust settles, and in order to try to direct the evolution of the press into the desired direction.