Mike Gasher

Assistant Professor Department of Journalism Concordia University CANADA

Paper Routes: The Geography of News in Digital Times

NOTA BENE

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Paper Routes: The Geography of News in Digital Times

Mike Gasher Assistant Professor Department of Journalism Concordia University 7141 Sherbrooke St. West Montreal, Quebec H4B 1R6 Tel: Fax: (514) 848-2474 (514) 848-2473

E-mail: gashmj@vax2.concordia.ca

Abstract: It has been argued that the international network of computer networks known as the Internet heralds a new communications geography, displacing media systems typically organized nationally with an integrated media system organized globally. This paper considers the place of online newspapers within this system, posing the question: what might on-line data transmission portend for the circulation of news through time and space in a historical period of globalization? The paper argues that the answers to these questions must come from research which adopts a dialectical approach, examining not only the centrifugal forces of computer network technology and public goods production, but as well, the centripetal inclinations of newspaper content: editorial material and advertising. We must consider, that is, not only what is new, but what is news.

Introduction: The Internet is to newspaper publishing today what the telegraph was to communication in the 19th century: the radical separation of the message from the messenger. Electronic publishing, that is, enables the delivery of news without the delivery of newspapers, substituting the digital language of zeros and ones for Samuel Morses dots and dashes, replacing the exclusivity of the telegraph office for the accessibility of computer networks. This technological innovation entails any number of enticing implications for newspaper publishers who have only

begun to think about what it means to be able to publish around the clock and around the world. It is no wonder that so many of them have rushed to establish World Wide Web sites, even if these on-line experiments have to date been very costly. This is still, of course, a phase of technological fantasy, of re-imagining and reconceptualizing the newspaper, and difficult questions remain to be explored. I would like to take up one of those questions in this paper: what might on-line data transmission portend for the circulation of news through time and space, particularly in a historical period of globalization, characterized as it is by the rapid and extensive circulation of people, images, capital, products and services? If, in other words, globalization has reconfigured our sense of space and place (Morley & Robins, 1995), what might this mean for our sense of what is news, given that newspapers have traditionally been bound to a particular time and place? USA. Today. Any number of scholars have looked to the technology itself for answers to this basic question. But if the medium is their message, I would like instead to adopt a dialectical approach to the question, to consider not only what is new, but also what is news.

Whats New? Insofar as the Internet has transformed the delivery of news from the journalist to the newsroom, it is less revolutionary than evolutionary. For at least 150 years, reporters have been able to work far afield, travelling by trains, planes and automobiles, and filing same-day dispatches by telegraph and telephone. The lap-top computer has simply made long-distance correspondence faster, cheaper and more convenient. Carolyn Marvin (1988), in fact, draws a direct link between what it meant to be wired in the 19th century and what it means today. In a historical sense, the computer is no more than an instantaneous telegraph with a prodigious memory, and all the communications inventions in between have simply been elaborations on the telegraphs original work (p. 3). This is in no way intended to understate the capabilities of computer networks, but rather to set the Internet in the much larger context of media history. As Ursula Franklin (1990) reminds us, the speed of the transmission of messages hardly changed between antiquity and 1800. Then suddenly, with the emergence of the telegraph, the speed of transmission of messages changed from the speed of galloping horses to the speed of the transmission of electricity - the speed of light (p. 41).

But insofar as the Internet is transforming the delivery of news to readers, it promises to redefine fundamentally the relationship between the newspaper and its audience by publishing directly to the computer network. If, beginning in the 1970s, every stage of the newspaper production process was computerized with the exception of printing and delivery, newspapers completed the cycle in the 1990s by producing a digital end-product. To begin with, we may have to stop using the term electronic publishing as newspaper Web sites converge with their broadcast news cousins by introducing moving images and sound. Newspaper Web sites resemble radio and television in another way as well; rival and alternative information sources are just a click of a button away. Specific news sites are less destinations in and of themselves than brief stops within an endless network of hypertext links. Reading the paper has become reading the papers. Newspaper Web sites have been criticized for relying too heavily on shovelware, merely repurposing content from their hard-copy editions. But this complaint overlooks a fundamental difference between the hardcopy and on-line versions of the same newspaper. That is, in establishing Web sites, newspapers are changing the nature of their business from the production of private goods -- newspapers -- to the production of public goods -news sites on the World Wide Web. And it is here that on-line publishing promises to alter the temporal and spatial characteristics of news. Media economists define a private good as a material good which is produced in limited supply, a stock which is diminished each time a good is purchased. Newspapers, books, magazines, videocassettes and compact discs are private goods. You buy them, you take them home, they are yours. Public goods, on the other hand, are those that, once produced, can be enjoyed by any number of people without in any way reducing their availability to others. Radio and television programs and films are examples of public goods (Picard, 1989, pp. 17-19). There is no limit to how many people can watch the Super Bowl at the same time. There is a limit to how many people can buy the New York Times the next day to read about it. The distinction between private and public goods is critical to understanding how these media operate economically -- as well as spatially and temporally. For one thing, private and public goods are paid for in different ways. When a customer buys a newspaper, he or she pays for a material copy of the newspaper itself, even if the cost of the newspaper is highly subsidized by advertising. The actual price paid is the result of a complex formula which takes into account both the costs of producing the news and the costs of producing the newspaper (i.e.,

printing and distribution). Newspaper readers, of course, also pay with their time, the time they spend reading the newspaper. They literally pay attention, and it is this attention that advertisers seek to attract. Audiences dont buy pubic goods. What people pay for, if they make any direct payment at all, is access to programming. In the case of radio and television, the programming is either completely or largely subsidized by advertisers, who, again, are paying for audiences attention. In the case of feature films, movie-goers buy a ticket which grants them access to one showing of the film, at a particular theatre at a particular time. The production of newspapers as private goods is the production of thousands, even hundreds of thousands, of individual copies. Financial decisions have to be made about how many copies to produce, and to which geographical markets they will be distributed. If too many copies of any one days paper are printed and distributed, unsold copies will simply be returned by the retailer. Production runs are timed to get the various editions of the paper to their various geographical destinations for same-day sale. But there are always limits to the papers geographic availability, depending on whether there is perceived to be a market for it. National newspapers like the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal are widely available in North Americas urban centres, but metropolitan newspapers like the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and the Montreal Gazette primarily serve their respective metropolitan areas and are scarce elsewhere. This geography of distribution, of course, is governed by the economics of private goods production. Until recently, home delivery of the Globe and Mail, Canadas self-proclaimed national newspaper, was not available in my Montreal neighborhood because the market for it was too small. For the same reason, many rural areas in Canada and the United States are excluded from the global distribution networks of private media goods, such as certain newspaper, magazine and book titles. Manufacturing, distribution and newsprint costs account for more than 50 per cent of a newspapers expenses, so that every time a newspaper increases its press run, it is increasing its costs (Picard & Brody, 1997, p. 151). Unless those costs can be recovered, it makes no economic sense to increase the press run. Public media goods are another matter entirely. Companies which produce public goods are in the business of generating one media product -- a master copy, if you will -- and disseminating it to as many markets as possible as quickly as possible. Such companies have an economic interest in maximizing distribution, because their principal cost is in the production of the original, and their distribution costs -- whether electronically, as in broadcasting, or materially, as in prints of feature films -- are relatively low. Robert G. Picard (1989) maintains that

public goods production needs to be understood within distribution economics where the cost of production is not affected by the number of users. He writes: Once a program or production is complete, the costs of getting it to a larger audience by making it available nationally or internationally are small and incremental. Under distribution economics, income increases as audience size increases (pp. 65-66). For example, once a major Hollywood studio has paid in the neighbourhood of $80 million to produce a feature film, it needs that film to open in as many theatres around the world as possible to begin generating revenue. In the same way, once a newspaper pays the labour and technical costs of mounting a Web site, it wants to generate as many hits on that site as possible. And the electronic version of the newspaper is as available to the Web surfer in Auckland as it is in Dallas, at no extra cost to the publisher. If there is a significant difference between a feature film and a newspaper, however, it is that the newspaper is a quickly perishable good. Its news content is valuable to readers for a maximum of 24 hours, when the same newspaper completely updates its news package. This characteristic makes it even more imperative that the on-line version reach as many markets as possible as quickly as possible. Some on-line newspapers have tried to maximize audiences by publishing more often, updating stories several times within the conventional 24-hour publishing cycle to keep the news content fresh. Not only does this render the news package more up-to-date, but it may encourage the same readers to monitor the same site several times a day. For example, the Globe and Mail in Toronto, which in November, 1977 became the first newspaper in the world to produce a complete electronic version (Gibson, 1998), relaunched its on-line version on June 19, 2000 as a breaking news site. Executive editor Edward Greenspon (2000) explained: We intend to post stories to our site as quickly as possible. The modern news consumer, a hyper-connected individual with an insatiable need to know -- and right now -- expects coverage of events on a timely basis. Not only can newspapers now publish around the world, they can publish around the clock. If that has been a strategy for dealing with the perishability of news, a strategy to address the perishability of any one days edition of the on-line newspaper has been to create archives to maintain reader access to certain stories, special feature sections and favourite columnists, content which stands up over longer periods of time. But this is precisely where content -- both advertising and editorial content -- enters the temporal and spatial equation. And this is where there are still many question marks as far as Web newspapers are concerned. Because most news sites belong to commercial news organizations, they need to generate revenue as well as hits.

To date, Web surfers have been reluctant to pay for subscriptions to news sites, unless, like the Wall Street Journal, the site is highly specialized and appeals to an affluent clientele willing to pay for the information it provides. Newspapers like USA Today and the New York Times initially charged for access, but wound up abandoning subscription fees because people refused to pay for information they felt was available for free elsewhere on the World Wide Web (Friedman, 1997, pp. 166-173). Today, they are among thousands of English-language newspapers available on-line for free. The paid subscription as a conventional source of revenue, therefore, is not available to most news sites. This has put the onus for revenue generation on advertising and e-commerce. Newspapers, like many other media, serve dual product markets. That is, while a newspaper company produces one product -- a newspaper, or a news site on the World Wide Web -- it serves two markets: the advertising market and the readership market (Picard, 1989, pp. 17-19). Simply put, the idea is to use the editorial content of the paper to attract readers who will be of interest to advertisers. Traditionally, the advertising and readership markets have shared roughly the same geographical boundaries, so that the products and services advertised will be readily available to the newspapers readers (Picard, 1989, p. 19). One of the special skills of advertising buyers, of course, is deciding which media -- newspapers, magazines, radio, television -- will most effectively serve their clients. A small, neighbourhood restaurant, for example, may be best served by a nearby community weekly newspaper, while an airline would be well-advised to consider national advertising using a combination of print and broadcast media. Whether on-line newspapers seek to serve an international readership may ultimately depend on whether there are advertisers willing to go along. This, in turn, will depend on how far afield the newspaper is actually read and how its audiences are distributed geographically. It will also depend on whether newspapers have stand-alone Web sites, or whether they are linked directly to newspapers belonging to the same corporate chain, perhaps sharing a searchable classified advertising site, or sharing links to on-line retailing sites such as booksellers or travel agencies. In other words, so long as newspapers are commercial enterprises, they can only extend their geographical reach as far as they can extend their geographical market. But what will ultimately position any newspapers Web site will be its editorial package, where it perceives its audience to be located. So far, it seems, news sites seem to be targetting the same geographical readership as their hard-copy publications. Perhaps the most obvious example of this is Le Journal de Montral. Until recently,

Montreals largest-circulation newspaper offered, by subscription, a full-text, on-line version each day. However, in order to access the full-text version, readers were required to subscribe to the hard-copy version of the paper, which would then be delivered to his or her door each morning. A redundant strategy if ever there was one. Quebecor Inc. shut down the Web sites of Le Journal de Montral and Le Journal de Qubec in July, 2000, claiming that the simple on-line reproduction of the two newspapers was a fruitless exercise. Quebecor, nevertheless, continues to maintain Canoe.ca, a multilingual news and information portal, even though Quebecor reported second-quarter losses of $11 million on its new media operations in 2000 (Leger, 2000). If the global reach of digital technology and the expansionary imperative of public goods production together act as a centrifugal force, spreading the news far and wide, they need to be weighed against what has historically been the centripetal force of newspaper content, consisting of advertising and editorial material.

Whats News? Deciding what is news, deciding what a particular newspapers readers want to know, need to know and should know about the constellation of events going on in the world each day, is a subjective operation, involving reporters and editors in a complex process of selection. Jaap van Ginneken (1998) calls this process selective articulation, in which journalists impose order and literally make sense out of the unordered chaos which surrounds us (p. 16). While news judgement is most often exercised intuitively by journalists under time pressure on assignment, media scholars have identified a number of criteria which render some events news and others not news. Melvin Mencher (2000), for example, identifies seven determinants of newsworthiness: timeliness (events which are immediate or recent); impact (events which affect many people); prominence (events involving wellknown people or institutions); proximity (events which are geographically or emotionally close to readers); conflict (events pitting two sides against one another); peculiarity (events that deviate from the everyday); and currency (long-simmering events which suddenly emerge as objects of attention) (pp. 72-77). These criteria, of course, are not applied uniformly. Each newspaper has its own specialty areas -- sports, the arts, business, politics, international affairs, etc. -- designed to appeal to a specific readership. What is especially newsworthy to one newspaper and its audience may not be as newsworthy to another, or may be judged to be not newsworthy at all.

But of Menchers seven criteria for judging news value, it is proximity which is bound to compel editors of on-line news sites to rethink the geographical sweep of their news coverage. Certainly, some newspapers are more closely bound to their location than others, emphasizing local news over regional, national or international news. But research suggests that most newspapers are bound to place to some extent, and their news coverage privileges a located audience. The most obvious examples of this are sports and arts coverage. While the New York Times runs all the major-league baseball scores and a summary of the previous nights games, it foregrounds coverage of the local teams -- the Yankees and the Mets. Similarly, Times arts coverage reflects a particular interest in art exhibits, films, concerts and museum displays in New York, even if it may also cover the arts elsewhere. But such parochialism is reflected throughout the newspaper, even in a newspaper as widely diffused -nationally and internationally -- as the hard-copy New York Times. Newspapers, in other words, make certain kinds of we claims, based on very complicated understandings of proximity -- geographical, cultural and emotional proximity. John Hartley (1992) argues that the news media create domains of inclusion and exclusion which he calls, respectively, Wedom and Theydom, domains which do not simply coincide with the formal geographical boundaries of the city, the state or the nation. He writes: The boundaries of Theydom are not coterminous with national boundaries; certain foreign countries, principally the USA, Britain and former dominions like Canada and New Zealand, are in Australias Wedom, while certain nearby countries like Indonesia, Malaysia and Japan are in its Theydom. Similarly, not all Australian citizens are in its Wedom; there are people and actions which cannot be rendered in the news as we and ours, but which instead are only intelligible as they. Such persons include criminals, political extremists, drug traffickers, paedophiles, juvenile offenders and, in certain circumstances, immigrants (p. 207).

These distinctions are produced by the relationship between the news organization and its target audience. Hartley argues that news is organized around strategies of inclusion and exclusion from our community. The news media function, at the most general level, to create a sense of belonging for the population of a given city, state or country. Their readers and audiences are an imagined community; in the case of popular (or monopoly) outlets these readers or viewers are assumed to be coterminous with the nation or state, and they are encouraged by each newspaper or TV channel to see the news as part of their own identity, while the news strives to identify with them. So news includes stories on a daily basis which enable everyone to recognize a larger unity or community than their own immediate contacts, and to identify with the news outlet as our storyteller (p. 207).

To alter the geography of news, then, is to revise an intimate relationship between the newspaper as our storyteller and its audience. It also implies the radical transformation of conventional definitions of news. Research on national and international news flows tends to support the view that the stories we call news are largely defined in the communion between storyteller and audience, suggesting that geography and history still matter a great deal in our globalized world. News flow studies, that is, consistently indicate that news organizations are much more interested in certain parts of the world -- i.e., certain people -- than they are in other parts of the world. Such a tendency creates what H. Denis Wu (2000) describes as a discrepancy between the real world and the news world (p. 110). Or, as Jaap van Ginneken (1998) puts it: Some people and some tragedies are more important to the global media than others (pp. 23-24). The global circulation of news, in other words, is imbalanced. Some people and places in the world are always in the media spotlight, while others are only mentioned in particularly tragic circumstances, if they are mentioned even then. Kuldip R. Rampal (1995) summarizes the problems and patterns of news flows in four main points. First, more than 75 per cent of non-local news in the media of the worlds developing countries comes from Western news agencies, which means that most of the issues reported in these media are seen through Western eyes. Second, there is a heavy imbalance of news flows, moving predominantly from advanced Western countries to developing countries. Third, what little coverage there is of the developing world in the Western media is often tainted by stereotypical portrayals of such nations, with a focus on violence, pestilence, murders, and other catastrophes. Fourth, the Western media maintain cultural imperialism through their dominant position as the suppliers of news, information and cultural content to the developing world (pp. 47-49). Van Ginneken (1998) notes that while the G7 nations -- the U.S., Canada, Britain, France, Germany, Italy and Japan -- comprise less than 10 per cent of the worlds population, their news media account for up to 90 per cent of transcontinental news flows through such agencies as Reuters, Associated Press and Agence France Presse. This means that a minority of the worlds population tends to shape the news and views of a majority about other parts of the globe (pp. 45-49). It also means that news audiences understanding of our increasingly interconnected world is characterized by huge knowledge gaps. If anything, on-line news is bound to reinforce this pattern, given the uneven distribution of Internet access to date. As of January, 2000, over 75 per cent of World Wide Web sites had North American domain names

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(Lievrouw, 2000) and Americans accounted for an estimated 36.2 per cent of the worlds Internet users. Japan accounted for the second-greatest share of Internet users, at 7.2 per cent (Akin, 2000). Even within well-wired countries like Canada, Internet access remains uneven, favouring the affluent and the educated, further confining the potential audience for on-line news. In Canada, an estimated 53 per cent of Canadians aged 15 and over are connected to the Internet at home or at work, but this number jumps to 80 per cent among high-income Canadians (earning annually at least $80,000 Ca) (Statistics Canada, 2001). Van Ginneken compares the network formed by the distribution of journalists around the world to a large fishing net. Potential news reports may be compared to zillions of fish in the ocean of time and space. The medias news net is organized in such a way that it tends to fish certain news reports out of this ocean and let countless others slip through. At certain locations, the news net is so dense it resembles a blanket. At others, its mesh is very porous. The world news net is woven by the tens of thousands of foreign journalists and newsgatherers, stationed around the world. They are distributed quite unevenly, although in recognizable patterns (pp. 127-128). Such patterns reflect news organizations decisions about what is news and what is not news. This problem of uneven information flows, a source of friction between the developed and the developing world since the end of the Second World War (see Mowlana, 1997; Gerbner, Mowlana & Nordenstreng, 1993; McPhail, 1987; Sreberny-Mohammadi, 1983), is unlikely to be resolved as news moves on-line. It is a problem of interest -- economic, political, cultural and historical interest -- rather than a problem of communications technology. Scholars in the field of news flow research seek to understand the rationale governing such flows, but a consistent pattern has been difficult to discern. Most recently, H. Denis Wu (2000), in an attempt to consolidate earlier studies, measured the influence of nine systemic factors -- population size, territorial size, level of economic development, language, degree of press freedom, presence of international news agencies, geographic distance, trade volume and colonial ties -- on the volume of news originating from 214 countries as those news reports were presented in the media of 38 individual countries. He concluded that, overall, trade between countries was the most influential determinant of news coverage, followed by the presence of international news agencies (pp. 111-124). The most-covered country overall was the United States, ranking as the largest source of news in 23 of 37 countries (besides the U.S. itself), reflecting its superpower status in world affairs. This result suggests a mixture of forces

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that shape international news coverage worldwide -- economic interest, information availability, and production cost of international news are apparently at work in determining the volume of information from abroad (p. 126). Such studies offer no indication that the technological capacity to gather and disseminate news has been a determining factor in patterns of news flow up until now. Similarly, the kinds of news people demand seem to

have little to do with what news organizations are able to supply. Research conducted by the Times Mirror Center for the People and the Press (now called the Pew Research Center) paints a discouraging picture of American readers interest in major international news events and reflects an abundant appetite for trivia (Pew Research Center, 2000). A summary of its 54 nationwide surveys conducted between 1989 and 1995 concludes: While less than one-third of the public followed serious stories very closely (i.e. Bosnian civil war, collapse of the Soviet Union), it could be twice or three times more attentive to pop culture and incidental news. In early 1990, for example, when only 21% were following the fall of communist regimes in Eastern Europe, 74% of Americans had heard a lot recently about the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, 78% knew of the recall of Perrier water, and 76% correctly named George Bushs least favorite vegetable. Broccoli.

Unfortunately, the most comprehensive news flow studies of Canadian newspapers date from the early 1970s. In an examination of 21 dailies between August, 1972 and July, 1973, H.G. Kariel and L.A. Rosenvall (1995) concluded that local news always dominated coverage (averaging 37 per cent of all news items), and that while international news accounted for a significant average of 31 per cent of stories, news emanating from the U.S. constituted half (49.8 per cent) of all foreign news in Canadian newspapers. They concluded that cultural affinity was the most important determinant of foreign news origin (pp. 20-21, 82). Relying primarily on anecdotal evidence, journalist Jonathan Manthorpe (1998) believes international coverage in Canadian daily newspapers has dwindled over the past ten years, reducing Canadian news coverage to isolated self-absorption. Manthorpe writes: It is a paradox of modern journalism that as the revolution in information technology has made the corners of the world more and more accessible, the presentation of news has become increasingly parochial. He cites the example of Southam News, a news agency run by Canadas largest chain of daily newspapers, which as recently as 1988 had foreign correspondents in seven cities around the world, but by 1997 had closed all of its bureaus except those in Washington and London. The relative lack of interest in international affairs in Canadian newspapers merely mirrors the attitude of society as a whole. Canada has only one

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vital international relationship and that is with the United States (pp. 131-135; Southam News Service, 2000).

Conclusion: It is clear that we are witnessing the birth of a new news medium on the Internet, a communications system which James Carey (1998) insists heralds a new media ecology. If, since the late 19th century, communications systems have been organized nationally, Carey maintains that the Internet should be understood as the first instance of a global communication system (p. 28). He argues that the Internet is at the center of the integration of a new media ecology which transforms the structural relations among older media such [as] print and broadcast and integrates them to a new center around the defining technologies of computer and satellite (p. 34). A number of unique features -- hypertext links, archiving, interactivity, search engines, the convergence of audio, visuals and text -- support the claims that on-line news is significantly distinct from its print and broadcast ancestors. It is also clear that one of the characteristics that will distinguish the Internet as a news medium is its temporality, its capacity to publish constantly. Radio and television, even with the emergence of all-news stations, remain confined to strict programming schedules, and only deviate from them in the most extraordinary of circumstances. Already, though, some newspapers are altering their news production cycle, updating their Web sites as fresh stories arrive, even if it means scooping their own hard-copy editions. What is much less clear is that on-line news will be a truly global medium, whose coverage area and target audience will expand in accord with the dimensions of the Internets global architecture. On-line journalism, that is, will not be defined by technology alone. As this paper has suggested, the content of the on-line newspaper -editorial material and advertising -- will also play a key role in how news organizations occupy the Internet map. And so far, it seems, managers of on-line news sites are more interested in expanding their markets temporally -publishing around the clock -- than spatially -- publishing around the world.

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References: Akin, David. (2000, July 8). Internet users get a chance to help shape the future. Financial Post (Toronto), p. D6. Carey, James W. (1998, Spring). The Internet and the end of the national communication system: Uncertain predictions of an uncertain future. Journalism and Mass Communication Quarterly, 75 (1), pp. 28-34. Franklin, Ursula. (1990). The real world of technology. Concord, Ont.: House of Anansi Press. Friedman, Matthew. (1997). Fuzzy logic: Dispatches from the information revolution. Montreal: Vhicule Press. Gerbner. George, Mowlana, Hamid, & Nordenstreng, Kaarle (eds.). (1993). The global media debate: Its rise, fall, and renewal. Norwood, N.J.: Ablex Publishing. Gibson, Lib. (1998, March 14). Numbers, words delivered on the Web. The Globe and Mail (Toronto), p. A2.

Greenspon, Edward. (2000, June 19). All the news thats fit to break. The Globe and Mail (Toronto), www.theglobeandmail.com. Hartley, John. (1992). The politics of pictures: The creation of the public in the age of popular media. London and New York: Routledge. Kariel, H.G., & Rosenvall, L.A. (1995). Places in the news: A study of news flows. Ottawa: Carleton University Press. Leger, Kathryn. (2000, August 2). Quebecor targets new media losses. Financial Post. www.nationalpost.com/financialpost Lievrouw, Leah A. (2000, May). Babel and beyond: Languages on the Internet. ICA News, pp. 6-7.

Manthorpe, Jonathan. (1998). The decline of foreign news in Canadas media. In Donna Logan (ed.), Journalism in the new millennium. Vancouver: Sing Tao School of Journalism. Marvin, Carolyn. (1988). When old technologies were new: Thinking about electric communication in the late nineteenth century. New York: Oxford University Press. McPhail, Thomas. (1987). Electronic colonialism: The future of international broadcasting and communication. Newbury Park, Calif.: Sage Publications. Mencher, Melvin. (2000). News reporting and writing. Eighth edition. Boston: McGraw Hill. Morley, David, & Robins, Kevin. (1995). Spaces of identity: Global media, electronic landscapes and cultural boundaries. London: Routledge. Mowlana, Hamid. (1997). Global information and world communication: New frontiers in international relations. London: Sage Publications. Pew Research Center. (2000). The Times Mirror news interest index: 1989-1995. www.peoplepress.org/niidata.htm. Picard, Robert G. (1989). Media economics: Concepts and issues. Newbury Park, Calif.: Sage Publications. Picard, Robert G., & Brody, Jeffrey H. (1997). The newspaper publishing industry. Boston: Allyn and Bacon.

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Rampal, Kuldip R. (1995). The collection and flow of world news. In John C. Merrill (ed.), Global journalism: Survey of international communication. Third Edition. White Plains, N.Y.: Longman. Southam News Service. (2000). www.southam.com/About/southamnews.html Srebery-Mohammadi, Annabelle. (1984, Winter). The world of the news study. Journal of Communication, 34/1, pp. 121-134. Statistics Canada. (2001, March). Overview: Access to and Use of Information Communication Technology. Catalogue No. 56-505-XIE. Ottawa: Minister of Industry. van Ginneken, Jaap. (1998). Understanding global news: A critical introduction. London: Sage Publications. Wu, H. Dennis. (2000, Spring). Systemic determinants of international news coverage: A comparison of 38 countries. Journal of Communication, 50/2, pp. 110-130.

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