ABSTRACT
Media convergence and the shift online have radically changed the way we read our news and where we get it from. In the time it once took to browse our favourite daily paper and watch the nine o’clock news we can now skim an encyclopaedic range of complementary news sources. A rapid survey of the day’s news online, any day of the week, produces a dizzying diversity of style, form, content and perspective. As I write in 2007, the front pages both of the Guardian Unlimited and CNN.com offer a report (augmented by CNN with an extended video report) on huge increases in Chinese military spending. English.Al-Jazeera.net makes no mention of that but leads with a report on the opening of the ‘National People’s Conference’ in Beijing and an article on the new generation of American nuclear warheads. Reports from Iraq and Afghanistan absorb the front pages of the national press in the west and the English-language pages of Al-Jazeera, yet, for today, those wars have left the front pages of Tehran’s newspapers’ websites and those of other Islamic countries. They seem more interested in relations with Eastern Europe and the Arab world. On the other hand, the present global slide in stock-market prices is interesting editors everywhere, even in Cornwall, where the Western Morning News, the most established newspaper in Britain’s south-west (1860), leads with a highly competent video round-up of the local news and a live-to-screen report on the region’s sporting prospects for the week.
