Page 139 - Critical Political Economy of the Media

118 Critical investigations in political economy

(Fortunati 2005) of mass media has been uneven and complex. Nevertheless,
there is overwhelming evidence that far from fragmenting into cottage industries
the major media conglomerates rapidly dominated the most used parts of the
Internet for media content services. Although there are variations across each
industry/medium, the common pattern remains one in which traditional media
content companies retain significant market share and presence.
Within a few years of the Internet’s massification, in 1998, more than three-
quarters of the thirty-one most visited news and entertainment websites in the
US were affiliated with large media firms. Most of the rest were connected to outfits
like AOL and Microsoft. Traditional news suppliers still heavily dominate news
consumption online. A global listing of the ten most visited news websites included
four search engines (Yahoo and Google sites) the BBC, CNN, MSNBC, The
Guardian and The New York Times (Alexa 2013). The top ten newspaper
websites in 2010–11 were all leading news organisations with the exception of
the Huffington Post, a formerly independent news organisation acquired in 2011
by AOL, which had spun off from Time Warner in 2009. Leading the field was
The New York Times brand followed by the MailOnline, the Huffington Post,
Tribune Newspapers, The Guardian, USA Today, The Wall Street Journal,
Xinhua News Agency, The Washington Post, Advance Internet, the Internet
division for Advance Publications’ affiliated newspapers and magazines (Guardian
2011). In 2010, 80 per cent of Internet traffic to news and information sites was
concentrated on the top 7 per cent of sites, the majority of which (67 per cent)
were controlled by news organisations that predated the Internet era (Pew 2011).
Of the remaining share, 13 per cent were content aggregators and only 14 per cent
were new online operations generating original reportage. According to Pew
(2010a) ‘the websites of legacy news organizations – especially cable stations and
newspapers – dominate the online space in traffic in loyalty’. Ofcom (2010)
found that news consumption occupied a mere 2 per cent of UK users’ total
time online, but that the overwhelming share was from news sites run by traditional
news providers.

Explanations: stagism and change
Some explanations adopt a stagist model of transition. In strong versions ‘old
media’ are regarded as walking zombies, staggering on but already dead. The
case for regarding them as such is stronger for print news media (considered below)
than audiovisual content industries. However, ‘transition’ arguments, favoured in
some business and policy forums, tend to posit unidirectional change with relatively
distinct and uncontested outcomes. By contrast, academic accounts have described
a more varied and uncertain process of adaption. For instance, Boczkowski
(2004: 4) in Digitizing the News writes ‘what we often find is a merging of existing
socio-material infrastructures with novel technical capabilities’. Online news-
papers merge print’s existing institutionalised patterns with the web’s potentials
and technical novelty – an ongoing process and one shaped by different local