Page 152 - Critical Political Economy of the Media

Political economy of the Internet 131

page of search results (Redden and Witschge 2010). News aggregators, like
Yahoo and Google, provide little by way of original news material and instead rely
heavily on the newsfeeds of the major news agencies. In a study of international
news online, Chris Paterson (2006) found that Yahoo and AOL reproduced
Reuters and Associated Press material 85 per cent of the time. Yahoo developed
a strategic relationship with the Reuters news agency in the mid 1990s and their
model was widely copied. The majority of international news is provided by the
existing major players, resulting in news being repurposed from a very restricted
number of sources. According to UK communications regulator Ofcom (2007: 3),
‘news outlets of all kinds often tell the same stories, from the same perspective,
using much the same material’. The Pew Centre’s study tracking stories over a
week of media coverage in Baltimore found that eight out of ten stories ‘simply
repeated or repackaged previously published information’, with most original
news stories produced by old media, notably the Baltimore Sun, whose origination
of news stories had fallen by more than 30 per cent over the previous decade
(Pew 2010b). Yet the professional journalism itself was still heavily dependent on
official sources and press releases for 86 per cent of the news stories.
In Euro-American media systems, news provision remains largely in the hands
of dominant providers. Commercial providers are seeking to manage their
migration from the declining medium of printed newspapers to online provision.
This process involves the evisceration of some newspapers, including profitable
and viable ones. There is a lack of viable new sources of news to counter the
collapsing commercial model. Newspapers are dying (losing readers and adver-
tising revenue) but the Internet is not substituting for the loss. Yet to fix our gaze
on the decaying old media may well miss vital new growth. The Internet, it is
argued, has nurtured a far more radical shift in communications production and
exchange.

Participation

The Internet and digital technologies are alleged to have distributed tools
for creativity, communication and collaboration into the hands of users, a pro-
cess commonly referred to as ‘democratisation’. This is associated with various
claims. User-generated content (UGC) and a more collaborative approach
to content production are celebrated as a resurgence of ‘an older, folk culture,
which was extinguished by the mass-produced, industrial culture of the record
and film industry of the 20th century’ (Leadbeater 2009: 56). The production of
commercials for Doritos crisps by ‘amateurs’ is celebrated as exemplifying such
‘crowdsourced’ production (Leadbeater 2009: 105). The language of political
democracy and equality is thus applied to the (co-)creation of content and economic
value. ‘You can participate in the economy as an equal, co-creating value with
your peers and favourite companies to meet your very personal needs, to engage
in fulfilling communities, to change the world, or just to have fun!’ proclaim
Tapscott and Williams (2006: 150). For these commentators the benefits of