On Being Your Own Editor: New Media and the American News Industry

In the era of industrial production of media, information flowed in one direction: from the

media producer to the media consumer. Due to the costs of manufacturing media content, institutions

arose that could bear this burden and produce media products to inform, entertain and enrich consumers

according to market demands. Information traveled in only one direction because that was what the

medium allowed – the transmission of data in a written format that was printed on paper and physically

distributed throughout the market to retail sale points and end consumers. The capital investments

required in producing and distributing media content were such that the one-to-many reach that would

be necessary to become a meaningful mass media product were limited to those who could afford the

means of production and distribution.

The archetypal form of industrial media production in the United States is the broadsheet

newspaper, a product with multiple stages of manufacturing, from the more cerebral and intellectual

(researching, writing and editing a news item), to the business-minded (ad sales and promotions) and

the gritty mechanized printing and physical distribution of the finished product to the customers' front

door and the newsstand. This top-down process is carefully orchestrated, subject to a highly stratified

hierarchical management structure and carried out in accordance with professional norms maintained

across the industry (Boczkowski, 2004, 164). Revenues in this field stem largely from the sale of

advertisements, which are interspersed on the page with media content generated or licensed by the

publishers, and are priced according to a refined calculus that considers the volume and type of

consumers as well as the reputation and profile of the publication itself, among other criteria. To the

extent that there is some two-way communication between the producer and consumer, it is usually

limited to letters to the editor and op-eds printed in the editorial pages, typically in the back of the main

news section of the paper.

There has been much discussion, both within the popular media and academic circles, of the
perceived rise of a network (Castells, 2000) or information (Mansell and Steinmueller, 2000) society

supported by “new media” that is distinguished by interactivity, accessibility and personalization

(Boczkowski, 64). This new media, which is often perceived as an insurgent threat to the incumbent

position of the industrially produced media (sometimes now called the “old media”), has come of age

over the past quarter-century. It has had its trials and tribulations, as well as its triumphs, but does new

media truly change the nature of the game when it comes to the economic characteristics of media

markets? The digital nature of new media products often raise the notion of a post-scarcity media

economy, but even under such a regime there are non-trivial costs and barriers to entry, and as new

media producers continue to gain investor confidence, the market realities of delivering revenues and

profitability to share holders hold considerable sway (Mansell, 2004, 97). So what is the nature of the

new media, and what is its relation to the old? Is new media subject to market conditions in the same

way as the traditional print media? Will new media deliver on the promise of an open-ended, post-

scarcity media sphere where the lines of communication are open to all, or will it suffer from a

cacophony of voices and opinions that drown out any hope for gleaning useful information?

In this essay I will consider the challenges that new media pose for incumbent media producers

in terms of providing alternative and competing products for consumers, as well as the substantial

technical, interactive and collaborative advantages that new media has in comparison to traditional

print media in American newspaper markets. I will also challenge the popular notion that digital media

represents a revolutionary change from the traditional print media, both in terms of its ability to report

to and inform its consumers, as well as its ability to change the essential economic characteristics of

media markets in the United States. I will show how in media markets, both “old” and “new”,

publications are usually businesses and readers are always consumers – the principal difference may in

fact be that with new media, consumers are increasingly producers as well (Bockowski, 164-165).

What is 'new media'?

 There is considerable confusion and disagreement as to what precisely constitutes new media.

Many alternative definitions have been proposed (see, for example, Manovich, 2001), but broadly

speaking the principal component of new media is the departure from the unidirectional nature of

traditional print or broadcast media (Castells, 2001, 2). The idea that consumers can interact with

media, whether through setting personalized preferences and sharing favorite news items or through

commenting features which have largely served to supplant the traditional (and spatially limited) letters

to the editor, plays a central role in web-based news outlets. Indeed, according to Tim O'Reilly (who is

credited with having coined the term 'Web 2.0', broadly referring to the implementation of new media

practices on the World Wide Web), interaction by users is an essential component of, and a source of

comparative strength for new media. Referring to the relative strength of online retailer Amazon.com, a

survivor of the dot.com crash of the turn of the century, O'Reilly (2005, 2) writes: “the central principle

behind the success of the giants born in the Web 1.0 era who have survived to lead the Web 2.0 era

appears to be this, that they have embraced the power of the web to harness collective intelligence.”

For a retailer like Amazon, the contributions of users and customers to their site in terms of posting

book reviews, creating lists of products following a theme or simply the raw data logs of their surfing

and consumption patterns provide a competitive value-addition to a site that is selling what is otherwise

an identical product (the book itself) (Chevalier and Mayzlin, 2003, 23).

These same elements have been applied to the distribution of news via new media outlets,

principally the World Wide Web. Because the structure and low cost of the web does not limit the

amount or length of articles that a newspaper can publish, content creators are able to provide extensive

background and supplementary stories to contextualize the main news that otherwise would fail to fit in

the limited space available in the print edition. Additionally, users are often given the opportunity to

rate and share individual stories as well as view dynamically created lists of related or popular stories

from the digital archive. In the era of print publishing, editors determined which stories were of the

most significance to readers and chose what to put on the front page, but the customization possible on
the web allows users to determine their own front page, based on their own needs and interests. This

major shift in the location of decision making from the producer to the consumer marks the most

important strength and competitive advantage of the new media over the old, allowing the community

of users to play a central role in the construction and interpretation of the news (Levy, 1997, 121).

These interactive elements have proven popular, and while generally speaking the circulation of print

editions have been declining, adoption of digital editions of mainstream newspapers have been rising to

the point that they begin to rival the print versions in terms of the number of readers. (Boczkowski, 53)

But the new media does not restrict its innovations to the users alone. Consumers have tended to

be resistant to paying for access to electronic news content (Boczkowski, 31) and as a result revenues

are generally derived from advertising. Fortunately, the same elements that provide benefits to news

readers on the web also benefit the targeting and serving of online ads (Castells, 2001, 77). Because of

the digital nature of website traffic, publishers are able to sort and codify that traffic and improve the

efficiency of their advertising and thus increase their profit margins. Contextual ads, which can be

served based on the existence of keywords on a web page, provide relevant products and promotions to

users who have signaled a relationship with those key terms based on their presence on the web page.

The idea of contextual advertising is not new, however on the internet it is able to develop dynamically

and requires fewer resources in the form of ad sales employees to pitch products to clients. It also

opens up the possibility of advertising in a reputable and popular publication to smaller firms as a result

of less competition for marginal search terms. This refers to the theory of the 'Long Tail', which holds

that, given the freedom from physical limitations made possible by the internet, the market for marginal

or obscure advertising terms (among other products) can be as large or even larger than the market for

mainstream terms (Anderson, 2006). In this way, newspapers can sell advertising space to previously

unmarketable keywords that result in a lower number of hits, but a higher aggregate volume.

One final competitive advantage that new media holds over traditional print media is its

detachment from the limits of physical distribution. This benefits both the producers and consumers of
news media. Readers are able to access the reports of multiple sources in various regions and

languages, allowing them to compare coverage and gain additional insight into events. Publishers,

meanwhile, are able to court that traffic which would otherwise have been unavailable to them owing

to the expense of maintaining distant printing facilities or of shipping copies abroad, and which would

anyways tend to contain old news that was less valuable for the recipients on the other end. As Castells

(2001, 197) writes, “if you want to know what happened in your city from the other side of the world,

only the internet is able to provide you with the information.” It can do this because of the distributed,

customized and specified capabilities possessed by networked actors, enabling users to transcend time

and place to locate information that is specifically related to their needs and interests. Indeed, the

dynamic nature of web-based news outlets enables them to provide constantly updated information to

their users, keeping them apprised of the latest breaking reports and turning them into trusted

destinations for receiving the newest information. In the period immediately preceding the

popularization of the World Wide Web in the 1990s, newspapers were usually beat to breaking news

by the broadcast medium of television which was able to offer more frequent updates on news stories

and to come to its consumers with new developments sooner than their print competition. Now,

however, the advantage has transferred to online news publications which are able to break a story at

the speed of Internet Time (Castells, 2001, 191), operating faster than the television broadcast medium,

and at a significantly lower cost. It should come as no surprise that television news networks have

adopted the internet as a central news outlet with as much ferocity as print newspapers.

Thus we can see that the advantages offered by the interactive, distributed and personal nature

of new media formats provide. They enable globally distributed users to access information that is

specifically relevant to them regardless of their circumstances, provided that they have network access.

The limits of time and space can be overcome through new media, and the ability to personalize and

customize their interaction with the network allows for much greater convenience and efficiency for

consumers.
Dispelling the myths of new media

For all of this discussion of the strengths of the new media in relation to the old, it is important

to remember that the news media is a business. Even if there are opportunities to lower costs through

the abolition of expensive infrastructure like printing presses and delivery trucks, the costs of building,

maintaining and stocking a web-based news outlet are not zero, and most sites operate as profit-

generating organizations. While the social production of media can be pointed to as an alternative or

competing source of information and news (Benkler, 2006, 122), there always remains the question of

who will pay for the server space to host that information. Because news organizations generally expect

a return on their investment, new media still operates within a market economy where there are winners

and losers. Thus it is important to recognize and consider some of the myths of the new media

propagated by futurologists, techno-utopians and internet evangelists.

First, while the non-rivalrous nature of digital information on the internet does indeed have

major consequences for questions of the transferability of intellectual property, it is not entirely

accurate to discuss the emergence of a 'post-scarcity' economy (Mansell, 2004, 97). In the era of digital

communications, limitless copies of media content can be made without depriving the owner of its use,

but there remain questions of the effect that free copying of intellectual property will have on the

production side of the media. In the context of digital news outlets, there must be an incentive for the

publisher to fund the creation of professional news content in order for that creation to occur. As

previously noted, consumers have been resistant to paying for access to news content, and so

advertising has been seen as a means of generating revenues to pay for the salaries of journalists and

the costs of maintaining newsrooms. However the notion that the information readers receive from

websites is “free” is disingenuous as well, beyond even the presence of advertising. Consumers must

make investments in hardware to reach new media, as well as spending periodic sums to gain access to

the internet where that information resides. These costs are non-trivial and beyond the means of many

people around the globe who often find themselves excluded from the benefits of new media.
 Second, while we can reject as elitist arguments that suggest that user-created content, such as

that found on interactive digital news websites, are qualitatively inferior to that authored by

professional journalists (see, for instance, Keen, 2007), we cannot expect content such as blogs, wikis

and comments to replace the public service provided by professional journalists and traditional media

outlets. Given the unequal distribution of new media products and services compared to those of the

“old media”, it would be dangerous to presume that all citizens could simply log on to their favorite

new media news organization and receive the valuable information that is necessary to their being

connected with larger society and making informed decisions in their own lives. This is not to suggest

that all disadvantaged individuals already have total access to old media products, indeed their lack of

access to this content is among the factors that create the conditions leading to their disadvantage.

However, as things stand in the context of new media, there are institutionalized inequalities in access

and disadvantaged groups tend to be systematically excluded from the information, entertainment and

other benefits promised by new media (Silverstone, 1995, 62). Until this unevenness of access can be

addressed, it would be dangerous to allow new media to overwhelm and replace the traditional printed

media, and indeed such circumstances might well justify state intervention to preserve access to public

service information for those disadvantaged groups that cannot afford or access new media news

outlets.

And finally, although inevitably new media technologies are hailed by their producers as well as

the popular press as representing 'revolutionary' changes in the way that society informs and

communicates with itself, history has shown that, as Silverstone (1995, 63) wrote, “revolutions are

evolutions in disguise.” While a technology like the internet and its ability to digitally deliver the news

to consumers strikes us as something wholly new, this reveals an ignorance of history and the plodding,

incremental change that has brought us to the place we find ourselves today. Throughout the last

quarter of the 20th century, news publishers experimented with many new media models, and almost

without exception they failed, from Teletext to facsimile, before a migration to the World Wide Web
began in 1995 finally found traction (Boczkowski, 40). Although the news seems to have made itself a

reasonably comfortable home on the internet, this is the result of spending many years testing the

waters and experimenting with new formats. Consumers individually may have woken up one morning

and discovered that they could read the newspaper on the internet, but they tend to be ignorant of the

gradual and deliberate process that occurred over many years before such an achievement had been

made (Boczkowski, 50).

Conclusion

Although definitions of new media continue to be somewhat fluid, one element remains plainly

clear: that the unidirectional reign of the printed medium of newspapers has been cracked by an

interactive, multi-directional conversation between the consumers of news content and the producers.

Increasingly, as well, the border between consumer and producer has become blurred, with users

contributing valuable content to new media outlets in both active ways (such as writing comments and

ranking articles) as well as passive ones (by navigating through websites and creating associations to

improve the arrangement of content as well as the efficacy of advertisements). In this essay I have

attempted to demonstrate the various ways in which new media provides opportunities for both

consumers and producers of news content to benefit from the advantages of networked technology.

While these advantages have led to the adoption of new means of producing and consuming the news,

and indeed, developing a new kind of relationship between the two, they have also preserved much of

the traditional logic of media markets. While many of the sunk costs built into the physical

infrastructure of print media have been removed in a new media regime, significant costs remain, as

well as significant responsibilities to the public. In the new media as with the old, consumers and

producers enter into an arrangement whereby readers are supplied with information in exchange for

their attention, and this attention is directed by the producers at both the news and the advertisements
which pay for their production. While consumers no longer have to subsidize the printing and delivery

of a packet of paper to their doorstep each morning with a subscription, they still have to uphold their

end of the bargain – and now they have the added responsibility, or at least the opportunity, to

contribute to the production of the news in their own words.