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Abstract
International news‐flow research has repeatedly identified significant imbalances in the global exchange of news among regions of the world. With the emergence of thousands of news sites on the World Wide Web, and the corresponding ability of news audiences to access these sites, the Internet offers the technological capacity to globalize media content. This paper seeks to test that possibility by exploring the way one Canadian daily newspaper, the Montreal Gazette, occupies the geography of the Internet with its on‐line news operation. The paper reports on an exploratory comparative news‐flow study of the Gazette's hard‐copy and on‐line editions to determine whether on‐line publishing has prompted the Gazette to alter the boundaries of its news coverage. While the paper concludes that, indeed, the Gazette's website consistently carried far more international news items than its hard‐copy edition, it also notes that this distinction is largely explained by the website's very heavy reliance on wire‐service copy and its emphasis on sports news.
Notes
A similar study is currently under way by Dr. Mike Gasher. It has broadened the variables of the current study and compares three national and three international papers. This research thus provides a further point of comparison from which to study the varying conditions under which local and national/international papers produce their on‐line counterparts.
For a fuller discussion of the centrifugal and centripetal forces at play in on‐line news, see Gasher (Citation2003).
This subtitle is taken from the Gazette's 2001 marketing slogan, which reflects the Gazette's role as the principal news organ of Montreal's English‐language community and the defender of minority‐language rights in Quebec.
Its research further discovered another 80,000 Montrealers who spoke neither English nor French as a first language (though read English as a second language) and who read the Gazette infrequently or not at all. In response to these interesting conditions and its stagnant readership market, it launched a revamped print edition in September 2002. The marketing campaign associated with this re‐launch has adopted a new mandate of including the multi‐ethnic groups that comprise Montreal, claiming “The Gazette is Montreal.”
The Gazette no longer has a stand‐alone website. It became part of the canada.com portal, which combines the newspaper and television properties of CanWest Global, in September 2001 (see Lasica, Citation2002).
The only other geographical entities included were Vatican City and the United Nations, to which newspapers conventionally assign their own placelines.
One‐tailed test.
The formula for Scott's Pi, explained in Riffe et al. (Citation1998), is a modified Chi‐Square which takes into account both chance agreement and the strength of the operationalization of each variable. Pi = %OA − %EA/(1 − %EA), where OA is the observed agreement between the coders and EA is the expected agreement.
An editor who has worked on the website since 1996 supported these observations. In 2001, the website had only two staff members responsible for designing, building and coding the site (at a time when comparable‐size newspapers in the United States had 35–40 staff members). Because Gazette managers did not want the website to “cannibalize” the hard‐copy newspaper, and the on‐line operation did not have the staff to produce its own news copy, the web editors were compelled to rely primarily on direct, wire‐service feeds, over which they had no editorial control. The Gazette contracted to purchase syndicated material (e.g. Ann Landers) and “single buys” from other newspapers for the hard‐copy newspaper only.