ABSTRACT
There is broad agreement today about the transformative consequences of networked computing and digital telecommunications – new media and information technologies – in virtually every sector of the economy and aspect of everyday life and culture. Nowhere has the disruption been more profound – or a corresponding sense of ‘crisis’ more acute – than in the traditional media, entertainment and news industries, whose production methods, markets, cultural practices and modes of consumption and readership1 have depended so much on the technologies and logic of mass production and mass media. From the seventeenth century onwards, news served as something of a ‘killer app’ for mass-produced print, attracting unprecedented mass audiences, spurring technological innovations in response to increasing demands for news and reflecting and fostering political and economic upheavals throughout the modern era. In the twentieth century, broadcasting further concentrated news production along mass-production lines, and extended the reach and institutional power of the news industry. “Just as the creation of the mass-market automobile was the result of industrial logic brought to transportation, the rise of the mass press was the result of industrial logic brought to information” (Peters and Broersma, 2013: 4; emphasis in original).2
