Continuity and change in international news: An Introduction

On the eve of the twenty-first century Wu (2000) believed that “the prediction framework of international news coverage”—the configuration of systemic determinants, such as trade volume, and the presence of international news agencies—had almost certainly changed following the end of the cold war. Since then, 9/11, the so-called “war on terror”, and the global financial crisis have also intervened in the shaping of international news. Furthermore, the first decade of the century brought the consolidation of the emergence of the economies of the People’s Republic of China and India which impacted on the original paradigm. Finally, the uptake of a raft of rapidly developing media tools has ensured that international newsmaking has extended in scope, scale and speed, and it now embraces bloggers, tweeters, texters and citizen journalists alongside conventional correspondents. At the beginning of the second decade of the century there was greater uncertainty about what constituted “international news” and who made it and what might comprise “international news” into the future. Take as an example the eruption of the Eyjafjallajökull volcano in 2010 which impacted directly on people as far away as Canada and Kenya. As Wasserman (2010) pointed out, sending a foreign correspondent to Iceland would have revealed nothing about the global consequences of the event, whereas digitally networked citizens were able to exchange vital relevant information to and from almost anywhere in the world.