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Abstract
Viewed from the newsrooms of Paris- and London-based international news agencies, and via the Internet and Internet sites of these and similar organisations, conceptions of French and British traditions of “what makes news” seem, on the one hand, to stress “fact-centric” or “hard” or “spot” journalism and, on the other, to highlight the “added value” when established newspersons provide interpretative pieces or comment columns. Technical discussions of the formatting of news for hypertext markup languages and the taxonomies of the classification of news go hand-in-hand with debates about customised “daily me” type news schedules. Some journalists move from being foreign or war correspondents covering “hotspots” and “flash-points” to a more reflexive self-questioning… and “mainstream-media”-questioning… stance. “Whither the news?” ask some; “so what?” reply others.
Acknowledgements
My thanks to Reuters and AFP for granting access to in-house material.
Notes
1. Assistant secretary of state for public affairs during the Clinton administration; a “world affairs” commentator for Sky News in Britain—the companion of CNN's Christiane Amanpour (of Iranian and English parentage) (book review of Alistair Campbell's Diaries, The Blair Years, I.H.T., 1–2 September 2007).
2. House-histories of news agencies provide the data to support the remark of E. Herman and R. McChesney's, The Global Media: ‘the wire-based international news agencies were the first significant form of global media’ (1987, p. 12); and less directly, the assertion of D. L. Winseck and R. M. Pike: ‘the advent of the global media system … was driven mainly by the logic of imperialism and rivalry among the imperial superpowers’ (Citation2007, p. xv).
3. A Reuters memo, “Review of French Operations, 10.2.1976”, asked rhetorically: for how much of the 20 per cent of Reuters revenue coming from the media does the AFP compete? (Reuters’ Archive, London).
4. At a world editors forum in Cape Town, in May 2007, a Reuters editor noted how the director, news and information, of France's leading circulation daily (the Rennes-based Ouest-France, 800,000 copies), claimed that local bloggers provided about half of its material; R. Mackinnon, a co-founder of Global Voices, an aggregator of blogs worldwide, co-sponsored by RTR, stressed that blogs show journalists what people care about. The CEO of Pluck, in which RTR has a stake, showed how US newspaper sites began to cover subject areas without using journalists by syndicating material from bloggers.
5. Between 1985 and 1988, Reuters launched services in Japanese, Dutch, Italian, Swedish and Norwegian.
6. This is the argument that underlies promotional rhetoric about some blogs. Riverbend's news has nothing to do with troop movements, casuality figures, or the latest from the Green Zone—the subjects of mainstream news reports (Riverbend, Citation2005, p. v).
7. “Words Without Borders”, an interview with Ryszard Kapuscinksi, Granta magazine, 1989, reprinted in Adbusters, 1 May 2007.
8. Reuters eBriefs, 30 May 2007.
