Three hundred years ago news travelled by word of mouth or letter, and circulated in tavernsand coffee houses in the form of pamphlets and newsletters. "The coffee houses particularly are very roomy for a free conversation, and for reading at aneasier rate all manner of printed news,’’ noted one observer. Everythingchanged in 1833 whenthe first mass-audiencenewspaper, The New York Sun, pioneered the use of to reduce the cost of news, thus giving advertisers access to a wider audience.The penny press, followed by radio and television, turned news froma two-way conversation into a one-waybroadcast, with a relatively small number of firms controlling themedia.
No, the news industry is returning to something closerto the coffee house. The Internet is making news more participatory, social anddiverse, reviving the discursivecharacteristics of the era before the mess media. That will have profound effects on society and politics. In much of the world, the mass media are flourishing. Newspaper circulation rose globally by 6% between 2005 and 2009. But those global figures mask asharp decline in readership in richcountries.
Over the pastdecade, throughout the Westernworld, people have been giving up newspaper and TV news and keeping upwith events in profoundly different ways. Most strikingly, ordinary people are increasingly involved in compiling, sharing,filtering, discussing anddistributing news. Twitter lets people anywhere report what they are seeing. Classifieddocuments are publishedin their thousands online. Mobile- phone footage of Arab uprising and American tornadoes is posted onsocial-networking sites and shownon televisionnewscasts. Social-networking sites help people find, discuss and shore newswith their friends.
And It is not just readers whoare challenging themedia elite. Technology firms including Google, Facebook and Twitter havebecome important conduits of news.Celebrities and world leaders publishupdates directly via social network, many countries now make raw data available through "open government** initiatives. The Internet lets people read newspapersor watchtelevision channels from around the world. The web has allowed new providers of news, fromindividual bloggers to sites, torise to prominence in a very short of time. And it has nude possible entirelynew approaches to journalism, such as that practised by WikiLeaks which provides an anonymous way for whistleblowers to publish documents,.Thenews agendais no longer controlled by a few press barons and stateoutlets.
In principle, every liberal should celebrate this. A more participatory and social news environment. With a remarkable diversity and range ofnews sources, is a good thing. The transformation of the news businessis unstoppable, andattempts to reverse it are doomed to failure. As producers of new journalism, individuals can be scrupulous with facts and transparent with their sources As consumers, they canbe general scrupulous anddemanding in their standards. And although this transformation does raise concerns,there is much to celebrate inthe noisy, diversity, vociferous,argumentative and stridencyalive environment of the news business in the internet.Thecoffee house is back.
