global voices, one world

towards a more inclusive global public sphere? institutional changes of journalism in a globalized world

I am interested in the institutional transformations of journalism, driven by the internet, in an increasingly globalized world. I understand journalism as a process of mediated communication that is institutionally and technologically driven and embedded, while also acknowledging that the social and the cultural in turn are mediators themselves in this process. What are the formal and informal rules that govern journalism as a process of mediation and how are they monitored and enforced? How has the internet led to changes in this process, in specific, with regard to its capacity to lower barriers of entry for new actors? In answering these questions, this study focuses on foreign news, as I believe that its institutional changes are among the most pronounced in journalism. They are most pronounced because institutions reflect the resources and power of the actors who made them, and in turn, affect the distribution of resources and power back to society. In this light, we see that, one the one hand, traditional foreign news is in sharp decline and that this is explained in terms of loss of resources such as advertising revenue, suggesting a market failure. On the other hand, there is a rise in global citizen media that primarily takes place outside the market. This suggests the entrance of new mediators and a shift from the market to civil society as the site of production for foreign news. But if traditional foreign news is suffering from a lack of resources and is no longer able to survive, what factors explain the rise of global citizen media and, perhaps more important, how sustainable is it? To the degree that all mediated communication is political, not in the least foreign news, what implications does this shift in the production process have for how some voices are heard in the global public sphere but not others?