This book overviews and reconsiders media organizations - the news agencies - which report and film the news for the press and broadcast media. Incorporating institutional, historical, political economic and cultural studies perspectives, the book: reviews agency provision of general news, video news and financial news; analyzes agency-state relations through periods of dramatic social upheaval; and critically examines the impact of deregulation and globalization on the news agency business. Contributors consider how leading players like Reuters and Associated Press help to define the nature of both the Global and the Local as well as focusing on the network of relations between international and national agencies. The book

This book overviews and reconsiders media organizations - the news agencies - which report and film the news for the press and broadcast media. Incorporating institutional, historical, political economic and cultural studies perspectives, the book: reviews agency provision of general news, video news and financial news; analyzes agency-state relations through periods of dramatic social upheaval; and critically examines the impact of deregulation and globalization on the news agency business. Contributors consider how leading players like Reuters and Associated Press help to define the nature of both the Global and the Local as well as focusing on the network of relations between international and national agencies. The book also takes into account the attempts by some national news agencies to establish radically different news agendas. Demonstrating how the news agencies have contributed both to the process of globalization and, simultaneously, to the process of national construction, this book provides an important critical survey of the contemporary international news business.

In this provocative book Terhi Rantanen challenges conventional ways of thinking about globalization and shows how it cannot be understood without studying the role of the media. Rantanen begins with an accessible overview of globalization and the pivotal role of the media.

"Thussu brings to this project the passion for news of a socially committed former journalist, the political economy of his international relations education and a formidable assembly of global detail, examining the recent explosion of ′infotainment′." - John Downing, Southern Illinois University "Thussu′s account of war as infotainment, the Bollywoodization of news and the emergence of a global infotainment sphere is as compelling as it is alarming. This is a significant and essential book for anyone interested in exploring the connections between news journalism, informed citizenship and democracy." - Bob Franklin, The Cardiff School of Journalism, Media and Cultural Studies Richly detailed and empirically grounded, this first book-length study of infotainment and its globalization by a leading scholar of global communication, offers a comprehensive and critical analysis of this emerging phenomenon. Going beyond - both geographically and theoretically - the ′dumbing down′ discourse, largely confined to the Anglo-American media, the book argues that infotainment may have an important ideological role, a diversion in which ′soft news′ masks the hard realities of neo-liberal imperialism. Chapters include a historical appraisal of infotainment; the infrastructure for its globalization as well as coverage of recent wars on television news as high-tech infotainment and the growing synergies between Hollywood and Bollywood-originated infotainment. A ′global infotainment sphere′ is emerging, the book argues, within which competing versions of news - from 24/7 news networks to bloggers - coexist. Accessible, engagingly written and robustly argued, the book combines analyses of theoretical debates on infotainment with extensive and up-to-date comparative data.

The global village, however, is not the blissful utopia that McLuhan predicted.

The fully updated third edition of this lively and accessible book argues for the central role of media in understanding globalization. Indeed, Jack Lule convincingly shows that globalization could not have occurred without media. From earliest times, humans have used media to explore, settle, and globalize their world. In our day, media has made the world progressively “smaller” as nations and cultures come into increasing contact. Decades ago Marshall McLuhan prophesied that media technology would transform the world into a “global village.” Slowly, fitfully, his vision is being fulfilled. The global village, however, is not the blissful utopia that McLuhan predicted. Nor, in a more modern formulation, is the world flat, with playing fields leveled and opportunities for all. Instead, Lule argues, globalization and media are combining to create a divided world of gated communities and ghettos, borders and boundaries, suffering and surfeit, beauty and decay, surveillance and violence. By breaking down the economic, cultural, and political impact of media, and through a rich set of case studies from around the globe, the author describes a global village of Babel—invoking the biblical town punished for its vanity by seeing its citizens scattered, its language confounded, and its destiny shaped by strife.

For a century and a half, journalists made a good business out of selling the latest news or selling ads next to that news. Now that news pours out of the Internet and our mobile devices—fast, abundant, and mostly free—that era is ending. Our best journalists, Mitchell Stephens argues, instead must offer original, challenging perspectives—not just slightly more thorough accounts of widely reported events. His book proposes a new standard: “wisdom journalism,” an amalgam of the more rarified forms of reporting—exclusive, enterprising, investigative—and informed, insightful, interpretive, explanatory, even opinionated takes on current events. This book features an original, sometimes critical examination of contemporary journalism, both on- and offline. And it finds inspiration for a more ambitious and effective understanding of journalism in examples from twenty-first-century articles and blogs, as well as in a selection of outstanding twentieth-century journalism and Benjamin Franklin’s eighteenth-century writings. Most attempts to deal with journalism’s current crisis emphasize technology. This book emphasizes mindsets and the need to rethink what journalism has been and might become.