ABSTRACT
The word ‘media’ has come to mean both the technologies of communication and the public and private corporations that use them.These two senses are melded in Leitner’s definition of ‘media’ as ‘communication domains with specific communicative structures which are the cause of . . . content becoming public’ (1997: 189, original emphasis). Owing to the low cost of electronic communication, the way content becomes public is changing.Where previously news was dependent on publishing/broadcasting companies for making its way from source to audience, it can now take a direct route.The rationale disappears for the bundling in the product of a single vendor of different information types – hard news, service information, social comment, advertisements, sport, etc. These diverse information types can spin free. News sources are changing, and so are news audiences. Moreover, what counts as news may be changing.
