INTRODUCTION

Online news is an extremely complex and fast-changing field. What began as the simple provision of news using websites on the Internet has morphed into an environment of multiple digital platforms and products and numerous ways of accessing news content.

This means that creating a single theoretical architecture that accommodates and anal­yses recent developments in online news is not possible, or at least not without ignoring anomalies or over-simplifying categorizations. There is much excellent analysis of sector developments - but that excellence is grounded more often than not in a nuanced appre­ciation of the context dependency of any particular conclusions that have been drawn.

Strategists on the ground in media organizations use the term ‘VUCA’ to describe their organizations’ strategic environments - volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous. It is these VUCA characteristics that preclude the precise definition and clear definitions that are necessary for academic analysis of an industry sector: industry boundaries are indistinct, corporate structures in a state of flux, competitors and sources of competi­tive advantage fast-changing. Journalism is melding with technology. In the news field disrupters become part of the established eco-system and themselves subject to disrup­tion surprisingly fast. BuzzFeed, a native of the social era, has pioneered a high value but labor-intensive social advertising model that bypasses much of the Google universe.

This chapter has therefore necessarily adopted a narrative approach. However, a clear development path in online news can be discerned only in retrospect, and even today its trajectory is relatively murky. At this stage, two eras in the development of online news are apparent. First is the ‘era of digital publishing’, roughly corresponding with the Web 1.0 era. It begins in approximately 1993 with the emergence of the Internet as we know it today - a mass-market global medium for the use of the general public, offering content, communication and community services. It extends through the dot-com bubble to close around 1999. From a media content perspective, text-based, traditional publishing-style content, accessed via portals, dominated during this period.

443

Table 21.1 Eras in the development of online news, the technological inflection points that triggered them, and incumbent responses

The second era extends from 2000 to 2014 and is termed here the ‘era of participation and multimedia’ (essentially Web 2.0). It starts with the bursting of the dot-com bubble. From a media content perspective, this era sees the growing importance of social media and multimedia storytelling.

Table 21.1 provides a visual summary of these eras. For each era it highlights the tech­nology inflection points (the key technological advances that triggered new developments in online media), the Internet media products and services that emerged as a result, and developments or reactions on the part of incumbent news providers in response.

Discussion of online news and the business models underlying it in each of these eras addresses three sectors of the media: print (primarily newspapers and magazines), broad­casting (chiefly television organizations), and ‘pure plays’ (new players whose businesses include news that started with the Internet and developed in step with it). Coverage of the sectors is inevitably unequal, reflecting the fact that online news is a core business for newspapers and new Internet media companies dedicated to news coverage, but one (albeit central) element of a larger and more complex content palette for traditional broadcasters.

After discussing developments in these three sectors during these two eras, the chapter moves on to discuss the strategic, organizational and editorial implications of online news. It closes by drawing conclusions about the development of online news for the media industry, suggesting how the field may develop in the future, and highlighting likely future challenges and controversies.

21.2