THE MEANING OF NEWS AGENCY

By Chris Paterson[43]

A crucial development of the past five years is that the online news sector is now more evenly split between the cybermediaries of e-journalism (Paterson, 1999), and fully disintermediated producers of original content distributing content directly to news consumers - in accordance with those earliest predictions about internet commerce.

The news agency role is crucial for additional reasons. News agencies set the agenda for what international stories other media choose to carry through the choice of stories they distribute to clients and the amount of visuals provided (moving for TV, still for newspapers and magazines, and both for webcasters), and in the case of agency-provided TV pictures, the nature and amount of accompanying audio and textual information.

Global and regional news agencies are crucial due to their agenda-setting influence on other media, but have grown even more crucial as they increasingly bypass intermediary processors of news in cyberspace enabling them to directly reach - for the first time - a large portion of the mass news audience.

News agencies are often accused of producing a bland and predictable news product, devoid of colour and enterprise reporting and dependent on official sources and definitions of news. But in the realms they know best, like conflict zones and developing regions of the world, the news agencies frequently break stories other major media miss. Despite this, news agency research has demonstrated a highly constrained, homogenous content dictated by the ideological, structural, and cultural nature of these organizations.

It proved difficult to precisely quantify news agency use, but it was easy to demonstrate that major online news services produced almost no original journalism in this case, and published stories that were almost entirely barely-edited wire service material. For example, analysis of the CNN, BBC and MSNBC data revealed that less than five paragraphs from these three services combined were not close or exact duplications of paragraphs written by wire services. It is important to note that within the news industry such a finding is neither remarkable nor alarming. It has always been the role of the news agencies to provide the words when a news service does not have their own correspondent on the scene, and the contracts the agencies provide to clients entitle them to use agency copy in this way. But this dependence was surprising in view of the pretensions of these news outlets to be international news services in their own right. This data seemed to indicate a lack of investment in original online international reporting which called for further investigation.