ABSTRACT
In the twenty-first century the production of news, and journalism of all kinds, is big business, and getting bigger all the time. The supply of information (whether as journalism or as rawer forms of data) occupies an industry of major economic importance, employing vast human and financial resources, and enjoying high status. According to a 2007 report by the World Association of Newspapers (WAN), there are more than 10,000 newspaper titles in existence, employing some two million people and generating US$180 billion of revenue. Notwithstanding concerns about the impact of the internet on print journalism (see below, Chapters 5 and 7), for WAN these figures indicate that the global print industry is ‘healthy and vigorous’.1 Across the world, top newsreaders, anchormen and women, bloggers and newspaper columnists acquire the glamour of movie stars and exert the influence of politicians. Media companies such as the BBC, CNN, Sky and Reuters judge themselves, and are judged, by the perceived quality of their news brands in an increasingly competitive and globalised marketplace. Journalism is also an expanding business. At the beginning of the 1980s
there were just two organisations supplying televised news and current affairs to the UK: the British Broadcasting Corporation and Independent Television News. Each provided around two hours of news per day. Now there are three UK-based providers of television journalism accessible to the British audience (BBC, ITN, Sky), transmitting on five free-to-air terrestrial channels, and several satellite and cable channels operated by these and other providers. The number of hours of television news available to the dedicated viewer has increased exponentially as 24-hour services have come on air, and the established free-to-air channels have steadily over the years augmented their services with breakfast news, round-the-clock bulletins and coverage of Parliament. A
2002 Broadcasting Standards Commission/Independent Television Commission (BSC/ITC)-commissioned study found that the provision of TV news had expanded by 800 per cent between 1986 and 2001, from an average of 30 hours per week to 243 hours, including 24-hour channels (Hargreaves and Thomas, 2002). Radio journalism is also expanding as more national and local channels
have been set up, benefiting from the expansion of spectrum provided by digitisation. Radio journalism remains principally the preserve of the BBC, and its Radio 4 and Five Live channels in particular. These compete with talkSport and other commercial channels, which provide varying amounts of news, mostly supplied in bulletin form by Independent Radio News and Sky News Radio. In print, there are, if one counts such upstarts as the Daily Sport, Sunday
Sport and Sunday Star (launched in September 2002), more national newspapers available in the UK than there were 20 years ago. At local and regional level, a large ‘free sheet’ sector exists alongside the ‘paid-fors’. Last, but certainly not least, Britain has seen an explosion of online news
and journalism-based websites. Some of these are produced in the UK, many others overseas. The point about the internet – to which we will return below – is that regardless of where they are produced, online media are global by nature insofar as they are accessible to anyone, anywhere on the planet, who has access to a networked computer (state censorship exists in some countries but becomes ever more difficult to sustain as populations become more skilled at evading it). Thus the Guardian, which had a print circulation in the UK of around 310,000 as this edition of N&JUK went to press, had more than 25 million regular users of its guardian.co.uk online site globally. Many established news organisations, in the UK and elsewhere, have ‘gone global’ in this sense, a fact with significant implications for how they produce and market their content. Since the late 1990s, when the number of journalism-based websites was numbered in the hundreds worldwide, online journalism has emerged as a major news platform in the UK, accessed on personal computers and mobile phones. We will examine both trends – what we might call the globalisation and mobilisation of news, respectively – and their implications for the future of print and broadcast journalism in detail below.
