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Diversity of Journalisms. Proceedings of ECREA/CICOM Conference, Pamplona, 4-5 July 2011
news flow. Their role in their collection and provision of news was thus underlined. Until
recently, their customers, professional media as well as private or public entities, payed
great attention to their services, because such services were unique; no other major
purveyor of international news could compete.
In the context of increasingly diverse journalism and news-sources and services, do
news agencies still have such a central role to play? In a world dominated by the
Internet and by online practices – at various layers of society – does the Agence
France-Presse still occupy its traditional central role? This article aims to answer such
questions, by observing ways in which Internet has modified the routines of
professional journalists; it examines recent strategies of AFP in adapting to the Internet
era, and analyses why and how news agencies may rely on their own strengths in
facing online competition.
Changing journalism routines and practices
In some aspects, the time when the news agencies were the first and main link in the
chain of manufactured news (Fishman, 1980), seems to lie in the remote past.
Traditional practices gave international news agencies, including Agence France-
Presse, the role of collecting news for other more visible, up-front media players —first
and foremost, newspapers and mainstream print and broadcast media. They were the
main ‘fountain of information’. This classic journalism ‘circuit’ has been more and more
threatened in the past forty years. Change began when public administrations and
private corporations enhanced their communication by making spokesmen send direct
messages to the press – therefore bypassing news agencies. But the main main novel
and fundamental structural change confronting news agencies is more recent: after a
century and a half of of profiting from their technologically advanced networks, AFP,
Reuters and AP have had to face the arrival of Internet. At the outset, in the beginning
of the 1990s, news agencies positions appeared little affected; but soon, they had to
suffer the combined advent of the Internet and of changing user-practice changed
routines —especially journalism routines, which is our focus here. In 2002, Oliver Boyd-
Barrett and Terhi Rantanen pointed out one – if not the main – effect of Internet on
news agencies:
« One impact of the Internet is a further blurring of the line between traditional
‘wholesaler’ and ‘retailer’ roles of news agencies and their media clients,
respectively. […] Until recently, news agencies did not have a direct access to an
audience consisting of individuals ; their services were mediated through their
subscribers. This classic definition fo news agencies still holds true in good measure,
but now needs to be extended and recontextualized. In addition to their traditional
‘wholesale’ role, news agencies have become increasingly important as ‘retail’ sources
of information not only for media but also for individual citizens. […] However, even on
the Internet, clients typically access news agency news through secondary or ‘retail’
agents consisting of general interest (e.g. Yahoo!) and corporate websites, the websites
of newspaper and television stations, or through Internet portals such as Netscape »
(Boyd-Barrett, Rantanen, 2002, 57-58).
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