CONVERGING JOURNALISM

Authors:
Publisher website
Google Scholar
Abstract
The democratization of Web access in the mid-1990s fueled the hopes of many for greater pluralism of information available to the public. Since 2001 the Internet has assumed a more central role in strategies for disseminating news in Canada, and eventually became one of the prime diffusion channels for some major news outlets. However, it appears that while some commentators argued that the Internet would broaden the spectrum of news producers, we have witnessed, in Canada at least, acceleration in the concentration of media ownership. The presence of these legacy actors is almost as important in the new media sector as in newspapers, radio and television, where the only major change has been the introduction of “pure players”, called infomediaries (e.g. Google, Yahoo, MSN and Sympatico). In this paper, we examine firstly how structural factors and current contexts have forged the Canadian mediascape by accentuating a tendency towards the convergence, both technical and economical, of news actors. Secondly, we examine the consequences for journalism practices in the perspective of the apparent obstacle to information pluralism.