ABSTRACT
When the first edition of News and Journalism in the UK was published in early 1994, the internet as we know it today was in its infancy. Netscape’s Mosaic browser had not yet been launched, and use of the internet was still largely the preserve of scientists, academics and other specialists with a clear use for the possibilities it offered of shared information, distributed on networked computers. Although the various technological advances necessary to construct the basic infrastructure of the network had been emerging since the 1950s,1 it was in those not-so-distant days far from being a mass medium, or a medium used routinely by journalists. Neither was it foreseen how important the internet would, within a few short years, become to cultural life in general, and to journalists and their audiences in particular. Consequently, that first edition of this publication, which went to the publisher in 1993, contained no reference to the internet, for the simple reason that at that point it played no discernible part in either the production or consumption of news. Journalism in the early 1990s was about print and broadcasting. Subsequent editions of N&JUK gradually began to reflect the spread of the
worldwide web and the growth of the internet as a journalistic medium (2003 marked the point at which over 50 per cent of UK households had access to the internet, an increase of 500 per cent since 1999, when only 10 per cent had access) – a reference here, a brief section there. That process of incremental revision was increasingly unsatisfactory, as it became clear that the impact of the internet could not be discussed adequately merely by updating a book conceived and written in the pre-internet era. In the past 15 years – and
especially since the publication of the fourth edition in 2003 – the internet has not only emerged as another means of distributing news and journalism – it has fundamentally transformed the structure of the news media, in the UK as elsewhere. It has also transformed the nature of journalistic work and, as citizen journalists and bloggers have proliferated, problematised the very meaning of the term ‘journalism’. The pace of change has been unprecedented and difficult to keep up with, not least for academics who, by the time a book or scholarly article has been researched, written and published, may find that the subject of their inquiries – the media – have moved on to another set of issues entirely. In this edition, therefore, this chapter devoted to the subject has been added, as well as net-led revisions to and rewritings of existing chapters on print and broadcast news.
