Impact Assessment Of The New Media On The Effectiveness Of The News Agency Of Nigeria

1.1 Background to the Study

Marshall McLuhan, popularized the concept of the “global village” in his books The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man (1962) and Understanding Media (1964), in these books, McLuhan describes how the globe has been contracted into a village by electric technology and predicted the Internet as an "extension of consciousness”.

The term global village can be used to describe the Internet and World Wide Web. Physical distance is less of a hindrance to the real-time communicative activities of people through the aid of the Internet, thus, social spheres have been greatly expanded by the openness of the web and the ease at which people can search for online communities and interact with others who share the same interests and concerns.

The Internet have brought about the explosion of the new media and a hyper utilization as well as improvement to the old media thus upgrading them to the status of the new media, the internet also has brought about the social media which now pose a great threat to conventional sources of news, thus questioning the relevance of long existing sources of news.

News agencies provide copy for news media with few reporters which appear to have increased the importance of wire services in the daily news cycle. This stance has been corroborated by Frijters and Velamuri (2009) note that due to economic cut backs, most major newspapers rely on “recycled news” from wire services or from a decreasing number of mobile journalists.

The news agencies also called wire services, news syndicates or news services have been a silent source of news to the public over the years as they have been serving as a reliable source of news to news media for various reasons over time. 

However, the use of the Internet and subsequently social media has become widely recognized by people of all ages and geographical dispensations (Kim, 2010). Groneberg,(2007) expresses that people rely on the Internet as a source of information, and as a way of getting fast information.

In this era of new media explosion and social media saturated society, the question now is, do the news media actually have much need for the news agencies now if compared to the past?

Wikipedia (2014) defines news agency as an organization of journalists established to supply news reports to news organizations: newspapers, magazines, and radio and television broadcasters which subscribes to it. Such an agency may also be referred to as a wire service, news syndicate or news service, press agency or press association. It is an organization that gathers, writes, and distributes news from around a nation or the world to newspapers, periodicals, radio and television broadcasters, government agencies, and other users. It does not generally publish news for direct consumption of the readers or listeners or viewers, but supplies news to its subscribers, who, by sharing costs, obtain services they could not otherwise afford. All the mass media depend upon the agencies for the bulk of the news, even including those few that have extensive news-gathering resources of their own (Encyclopedia Britannica, 2014).

The origin of news agencies can be traced to Boston, Massachusetts’ coffeehouse in the early 1800s. There the tavern owner kept a ‘news ledger’ in which he wrote report from merchants who arrived from England in their ships.

The oldest news agency is Agence France-Presse (AFP) originally called Agence Havas founded in 1835 by a Parisian translator and advertising agent, Charles-Louis Havas. Two of his employees, Paul Julius Reuter and Bernhard Wolff, later set up rival news agencies in London and Berlin respectively. In 1853, Guglielmo Stefani founded the Agenzia Stefaniin Turin, that became the most important agency in the Kingdom of Italy, and took international relevance with Manlio Morgagni.

In order to reduce overhead and develope the lucrative advertising side of the business, Havas’s sons, who had succeeded him in 1852, signed agreements with Reuter and Wolff, giving each news agency an exclusive reporting zone in different parts of Europe.

News agencies are corporations that sell news (e.g. Press Association,Thomson Reuters, and AHN). Other agencies work cooperatively with large media companies, generating their news centrally and sharing local news stories the major news agencies may chose to pick up and redistribute (i.e. AP, Agence France-Presse (AFP) or American Press Agency (APA)). Commercial newswire services charge businesses to distribute their news. Government controlled news agencies were also founded in China (Xinhua), Canada, Russia (ITAR-TASS) and other countries also had their government-funded news agencies which also utilized information from other agencies.

The major news agencies generally prepare news stories and feature articles that can be used by other news organizations with little or no modification, and then sell them to other news organizations by subscription. They provide these articles in bulk electronically through wire service (originally they used telegraphy; today they frequently use the Internet). Corporations, individuals, analysts and intelligence agencies may also subscribe.

New media in the present age of information revolution are the modern, technologically sophisticated devices which are dependent on the Internet to function as platforms for media contents of various forms.

Some scholars have made various attempts to define the concept “new media”, but have found it difficult to pin the concept to a single definition because of the dynamic nature of the concept that keeps changing from time to time. It has been in use since 1960s and has kept changing and expanding according to the dictates of technology (McQuail 2010, p.39).

Some authorities have, however, provided some definitions to justify the concept. Odofin (2011, p.80) sees the new media as encompassing all modern media and communication devices that have startlingly redefined, reshaped and restated geographical distances in innovative ways.

According to him, they include cyber culture, ranging from blogging to social networks to online multiplayer gaming. On his part, Salau (2012, p.25) citing Otufodunrin states that new media are “interactive forms of communication that use the Internet”. Included as examples are podcasts, Rich Site Summary (RSS) leads, social networks, text messaging, blogs, Wikis, virtual words etc. McQuail (2010, p.136) opines that the new media are Internet-based activities especially the public use of the Internet which includes online news, advertising, broadcasting, the World Wide Web, forums etc.

New media are web- based /digital computer technologies which can be interactive and networkable such as; the internet, website and so on. According to Croteau and Hoynes (2003), new media, “radically break the connection between physical place and social place, making physical location much less significant for our social relationships”.

Moreover, Logan (2010) sees new media as a term that will in general refer to those digital media that are interactive, incorporate two-way communication, and involve some form of computing as opposed to “old media” such as the telephone, radio, and TV. 

With the coming of the new media, people who have long been on the receiving end of one-way mass communication are now increasingly likely to become producers and transmitters. From Indymedia to the future BBC, the distinction between information producers and consumers will become increasingly difficult to draw (Creeber and Martin, 2009; Bennett, 2003).

New media are extremely de-centralized, require very low investment, provide greater interactivity and public participation and are much more difficult to control (Banerjee, 2008).

Going by the above postulation, it is evident that since new media require low investment with regards to its news generation potential, the continued relevance of the news sources will be a subject of debate, also the ways in which these news sources have been affected by the new media is also to be considered.