Page 212 - Communication and Citizenship Journalism and the Public Sphere

THE GLOBAL NEWSROOM 201

By contrast, later in the week (18 June), only thirteen national
services carried EVN-derived footage of student unrest in South Korea,
but that was still the day’s most commonly aired story from the
Eurovision News Exchange.
While the most frequently used EVN stories tended to be hard, often-
breaking news, occasionally soft or feature news is also widely aired.
Several Eurovision news co-ordinators told us that stories about animals
(pandas, whales and water-skiing squirrels) often received wide ‘play’.
Similarly, celebrity news too was sometimes widely used. On 18 June,
for example, an item about an auction of film star Brigitte Bardot’s
personal effects was the second most widely used story, airing on eleven
different national services.
Overall, the data in Table 1 demonstrates that for some ‘big’ stories
of the day, there is substantial, but not complete, convergence of
coverage across the thirty-six services we examined. Indeed, this less
than complete convergence is further illustrated in Table 2 which shows
that no story appeared on all thirty-six national services or even on twenty-
one out of the thirty-six full and associate members of the Eurovision
News Exchange.
Only one story during the June sample week (Reagan speech) was
used by twenty national services, while three out of seven (42.7 per
cent) of all stories transmitted on an EVN feed were used by four or fewer
national services and 87.2 per cent of the week’s EVN stories were not
used by two-thirds of member services. However, every story
transmitted was aired by at least one national broadcast service.
What is one to make of this pattern of convergence on the ‘top’
stories of the day, coupled with substantial diversity on any day’s lesser
news? First, it is clear that since television news is a picture-driven
medium, the sheer availability of news footage undoubtedly makes it
more likely that a story will be broadcast by any news service if it
contains pictures. Thus, the existence of the global newsroom increases
the likelihood that different news programs in different countries will
have the same or similar news.
Second, the convergence of coverage we observed also implies a
measure of shared professional culture, a certain commonality in news
values and news judgments, across all national services. At the same
time, the diversity of judgments on lesser items also suggests that this
sharing of news values is not complete and that national social and
political differences, as well as differences in journalistic norms
between nations, also play a part in shaping patterns of news coverage.
Finally, these data point to considerable ‘slack’ in the influence of the