Another thought
Mar. 25th, 2003 11:25 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sierciaI was driving to work today, listening to NPR and the folks on there were discussing news agencies, and their rights and responsibilities regarding publishing and broadcasting pictures of the war - should they do, should they not, under what circumstances, that sort of thing. Overall an interesting discussion.
Now, some of you may not know that my company's primary client base is newspapers. We're well entrenched in the daily production (ie, getting the paper out) workflow of a number of the major paper in the US. This is relevant in minute, I promise.
One of the things that this has made me very aware of is the consolidation of the newspaper industry, where, like so many other businesses, multiple newspapers are owned by the same parent company - for example, the New York Times owns the Boston Globe, the Chicago Tribune and LA Times are owned by one company, and so on. This is all, of course, public information, but of the kind that I'm not sure the average joe reading the paper would realize. It's always made me slightly uncomfortable - in a vague "I don't trust anyone over thirty" kind of way, I don't like the thought that at a very basic level my news sources could be limited to coming from one or two sources. Perhaps I just focus on this because it's a way to express my general distrust of the media, I'm not sure.
Anyway, one thing that all these conglomerate owned newspapers insist on is that, as a general rule, the parent companies don't make decisions about what does or doesn't run in the individual papers. I've always taken that with a grain of salt, figuring that while that might be true on a day-to-day story-by-story basis, eventually, the corporate mindset would percolate down through its papers so that decision would be made, knowing what the corporate stance was, and so on - self censorship instead of corporate mandated, right?
So, I was interested to hear today, when discussing what newspapers were doing with war pictures, I couldn't help but notice that he listed a number of papers that I knew to be owned by this company or that, and that in each case, the papers owned by the same company were all doing the same thing with regard to their handling of the photos.
I'm not sure that this has much real point. Just something I thought was interesting.
Now, some of you may not know that my company's primary client base is newspapers. We're well entrenched in the daily production (ie, getting the paper out) workflow of a number of the major paper in the US. This is relevant in minute, I promise.
One of the things that this has made me very aware of is the consolidation of the newspaper industry, where, like so many other businesses, multiple newspapers are owned by the same parent company - for example, the New York Times owns the Boston Globe, the Chicago Tribune and LA Times are owned by one company, and so on. This is all, of course, public information, but of the kind that I'm not sure the average joe reading the paper would realize. It's always made me slightly uncomfortable - in a vague "I don't trust anyone over thirty" kind of way, I don't like the thought that at a very basic level my news sources could be limited to coming from one or two sources. Perhaps I just focus on this because it's a way to express my general distrust of the media, I'm not sure.
Anyway, one thing that all these conglomerate owned newspapers insist on is that, as a general rule, the parent companies don't make decisions about what does or doesn't run in the individual papers. I've always taken that with a grain of salt, figuring that while that might be true on a day-to-day story-by-story basis, eventually, the corporate mindset would percolate down through its papers so that decision would be made, knowing what the corporate stance was, and so on - self censorship instead of corporate mandated, right?
So, I was interested to hear today, when discussing what newspapers were doing with war pictures, I couldn't help but notice that he listed a number of papers that I knew to be owned by this company or that, and that in each case, the papers owned by the same company were all doing the same thing with regard to their handling of the photos.
I'm not sure that this has much real point. Just something I thought was interesting.