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Diversity of Journalisms. Proceedings of ECREA/CICOM Conference, Pamplona, 4-5 July 2011
In Finland, total circulation of Finnish newspapers has reduced in fourteen years from
4 million copies in 1995 to 3 million copies in 2009 (Sanomalehtien liitto, 2010). The
Finns read news more often from the Internet, but advertisement income hasn´t
changed as fast as readers’ consumption habits. Printed media earns still 58 percent
of total advertising revenue and online media advertising revenue is only 15 percent
of total advertising revenue (Mainonnan neuvottelukunta, 2011).
The biggest impact of the Internet on journalism is the emergence of ‘online
journalism’. The Internet is a versatile medium, which has the capability to combine
the features of traditional media, radio, television and newspapers. The features that
distinguish the Internet from all the other media are: almost limitless capacity to store
news stories; rapid real time updating; largely varying length of stories; use of
interactive graphic elements and direct quotation of voice or video. Specific features,
such as multimediality, hypertextuality and interactivity make online journalism
functionally different from print journalism. Furthermore, online journalism has
influenced the ways print media present news. (cf. Paterson & Domingo, 2008; Pavlik,
2001; Prasad, 2009; Quinn, 2005; Royal, 2008; Thurman & Lupton, 2008 and van der
Wurff & Lauf, 2005.)
Consolidation of media ownership has lead to crossmedia structures, more active
media content allocation and intermediality between different media formats. New
online journalism and new print journalism are mostly results of media convergence,
intermediality and new publishing technology. Convergence is here understood as a
phenomenon in which news stories in different media use more and more the same
journalistic material provided by the same journalists and same news organizations.
Intermediality in this context means similarities, differences, allocation and interaction
of journalistic content in different media formats.
Recent research
Online news media has become a significant part of social, economic and cultural life
in technologically advanced societies. Online news journalism is changing and
developing rapidly, challenging contemporary research in online journalism and
making it quickly outdated. International research about online news has grown
dramatically in the past few years, but in Finland there have been published only a
few studies concerning the journalistic content and the future of online media (for
example Heinonen, M, 2008; Heinonen, A, 1999).
Recent online journalism research areas can be divided according to their focus of
interest for contextual matter (such as the history and market environment, analyses
of the causes, dynamics, and consequences of innovation); changes in journalistic
practice; professional and occupational matters and the role of the user as a content
producer and its implications on the public sphere (Mitchelstein & Boczkowski, 2009,
pp. 562-575).
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