%0 Journal Article
%T Social Media and the Freedom of the Press: a long-term Perspective from within International News Agencies (AFP, Reuters)
%A Michael PALMER
%A J¨¦r¨¦mie NICEY
%J Essachess : Journal for Communication Studies
%D 2012
%I Essachess
%X Since the 1780s, discussions among news professionals on issues such as access to sources and the funding of ¡°the media¡± are often at odds with issues debated by legislators, activists, the executive and the judiciary, in the USA, France and Britain. Is this the case today, with the debate on ¡°social media¡±, the ¡°Arab spring¡±, Internet, blogs, SMS, ¡°Twitter¡± and the like? This is one issue that will be addressed. The authors have researched the history and present news-products and performance of AFP and Reuters (now Thomson-Reuters) for many years. The second issue addressed here is: how do news-professionals assess current geopolitical and technological ¡°changes¡± with respect to their established canons and practices of news-reporting? How do they access, filter, and select from the apparent abundance of sources emerging from ¡°civil society actors¡±, while respecting established practices of news-agency journalism? As the very notion of ¡°mainstream media¡± encompasses an ever-growing number of actors (CNN is ¡°mainstream¡±, al-Jazeera has become ¡®mainstream¡¯¡­), is the issue of access to an ever-widening number of sources to be reassessed in terms not only of the freedom of the media but also to that of the resources available to ¡°seasoned, reputable¡± news-professionals and their organizations to check, cross-check the ¡°images¡±, ¡°texts¡± and numbers emanating from these sources? Issues such as the freedom of the media are ever-more linked to that of the canons of international news-reporting. The authors argue that whereas the freedom of the media is still of central importance, the advent of communications technologies ¨C and the commercial logics that underpin them ¨C often linked to the Internet, radically modify how news-professionals go about their business, in an era of ¡°globalization¡±, ¡°social media¡± and ¡°democratization¡±.
%K international news-flows
%K professional news-persons
%K citizens
%K democratization
%K ¡°Arab spring¡±
%K media freedoms
%U http://www.essachess.com/index.php/jcs/article/view/153/138