Author: Bente Kalsnes
Graduation Year: 2002
Advisor: Diana Owen
Reader: Colleen Cotter
Date: 24 February 2006
Link to Thesis: BenteKalsnes.pdf
The tragedy of September 11 was not only a significant political and military turning point, but also a groundbreaking journalistic one. In the first hours after the attacks, we learned the ?what? about the horrendous graphical attacks from TV. Then we learned some of the ?how?, ?who?, and ?why? from print publications and broadcasters who tried to bring depths to events that defied mere words. But, as this thesis shows, another type of reporting also took place during those first hours, days, and weeks after the attacks. Via e-mails, mailing lists, chat rooms, personal web journals, and non-standard news sources, thousands or even millions of people received valuable context that major American media could not, or would not, provide. However, some of the individual stories managed to pass through the ?gates? of mainstream media, and became front-page articles in major newspapers such as the New York Times or the Washington Post.
This thesis explores how the Internet is changing journalism, mainly because of three features of the new medium: immediacy, interactivity, and new business models. The new medium differs from previous media such as newspapers, radio and TV by allowing communication to flow from many-to-many, instead of from one-to-many. Consequently, the roles of the sender and the receiver in the communication process are transformed. On the Internet, ?news audience? can also be ?news producers.? Because of these changes, I have developed an interactive communication model. I argue that the Internet opens up for increased interactivity among reporters and media audience, as well as among the media audiences, and the new interactivity may also change the media product. Agreeing with Marshall McLuhan, I argue that the most important message the medium produces is the type of change it creates in society. However, we cannot neglect the content changes that are occurring as a consequence of the new medium, in this case the Internet. And as this analysis will show, content produced in interactive communities such as newsgroups and chat rooms differ from content in newspapers in categories such as topics, style, degree of interactivity, and use of sources.
This project has two main components; a theoretical analysis of the Internet as a medium related to medium theory, and an operational part where I present the findings from a content analysis of two newsgroups and two newspapers. Marshall McLuhan and Jean Baudrillard?s theories have been central in this thesis, as well as theories developed by media theorist Jim Hall.