Page 210 - Communication and Citizenship Journalism and the Public Sphere

THE GLOBAL NEWSROOM 199

Our impression, based on observations of the operations of the
Eurovision News Exchange system conducted during 1987, and of the
relationship between Eurovision and other regional news exchange
organizations, is of a rather decentralized and mutually dependent
system. During our observations, for example, we noticed a
considerable degree of interaction between the European and the Asian
systems, characterized, we thought, more by a peer relationship than
dominance and subordination. Admittedly, our evidence is
impressionistic, yet it seems that the era in which two or three global
news agencies dominated the flow of world news from bases in
London, Paris or New York is, perhaps, gradually being superseded by
one in which Tokyo and Kuala Lumpur (the co-ordinating centers for
Asiavision) play a role more on a par with the one played by the centers
of the EBU news exchange system in the various European capitals.

CONVERGENCE, DIVERSITY, DEPENDENCE

The impact of the global newsroom can be studied in part by examining
some of the patterns of story usage by the national services which
participate in the Eurovision News Exchange. Among the appropriate
questions to ask in this regard are:

1 Considering all the national services which air stories from EVN
feeds, how much diversity and how much convergence do we find
in patterns of usage across services?
2 Focusing on individual national services as the unit of analysis, how
dependent is each service on the Eurovision News Exchange for its
‘foreign’ news footage?

The data reported here come from a content analysis of television news
stories which aired during the main evening newscast of eighteen
different television news services and from an examination of official
EBU documents reporting story use for the thirty-six national broadcast
services which are regular and associate members of the Eurovision
News Exchange. Videotapes of eighteen different main evening bulletins
were collected for a two-week period (weekdays only), 16–20 February
and 15–19 June, 1987. Newscasts examined ranged from ABC World
News Tonight with Peter Jennings to Heute on ZDF to the Arabic
language broadcasts of Jordanian television.
A total of 2,569 different news stories were coded by trained graduate
students at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and the University of