This article explores the nationality, ownership, and governance of news agencies in Europe, and suggests that we need to rethink and problematize the categories previously used when studying these. ...Drawing on recent data from a pan-European study, the article suggests that the concept of hybridity could be applied to analyzing news agencies’ nationality, ownership, and governance. It reviews the concept through different fields: (a) cultural studies, (b) organizational studies, and (c) political-regime and media-system studies, each of these contributing to a complementary understanding of the concept of hybridity. It concludes that (a) the previously fixed categories of national and international news agencies have become more integrated, (b) the different ownership forms of national news agencies have been partly amalgamated in terms of both owners and clients, and (c) ownership category alone cannot determine whether governance is democratic or nondemocratic, so we also need to look at governance. The article suggests that, by using the concept of hybridity when analyzing news agencies, we are able to see crossing boundaries of earlier ideal types and even developing possible alternative approaches to studying news agencies in future.
The Media and Globalization offers: a clear and accessible overview of globalization and the pivotal role of the media; an introduction to the concepts and theories of globalization; empirical data ...on the production and consumption of media; and a methodology for relating individual, local experiences to the global picture.
In Dead Men’s Propaganda: Ideology and Utopia in Comparative Communications Studies, Terhi Rantanen investigates the shaping of early comparative communications research between the 1920s and 1950s, ...notably the work of academics and men of practice in the United States. Often neglected, this intellectual thread is highly relevant to understanding the 21st-century’s challenges of war and rival streams of propaganda. Borrowing her conceptual lenses from Karl Mannheim and Robert Merton, Rantanen draws on detailed archival research and case studies to analyse the extent and importance of work outside and inside the academy, illuminating the work of pioneers in the field. Some of these were well-known academics such as Harold Lasswell and the authors of the seminal book Four Theories of the Press. Others operated in the world of news agencies, such as Associated Press's Kent Cooper, or were marginalised as émigré scholars, notably Paul Kecskemeti and Nathan Leites. Her study shows how comparative communications, from its very beginning, can be understood as governed by the Mannheimian concepts of ideology and utopia and the power play between them. The close relationship between these two concepts resulted in a bias in knowledge production, contributed to dominant narratives of generational conflicts, and to the demarcation of Insiders and Outsiders. By focusing on a generation at the forefront of comparative communications at this pivotal time in the 20th century, this book challenges orthodoxies in the intellectual histories of communication studies.
Upconverting phosphors (UCPs) are very attractive reporters for fluorescence resonance energy transfer (FRET)‐based bioanalytical assays. The large anti‐Stokes shift and capability to convert ...near‐infrared to visible light via sequential absorption of multiple photons enable complete elimination of autofluorescence, which commonly impairs the performance of fluorescence‐based assays. UCPs are ideal donors for FRET, because their very narrow‐banded emission allows measurement of the sensitized acceptor emission, in principle, without any crosstalk from the donor emission at a wavelength just tens of nanometers from the emission peak of the donor. In addition, acceptor dyes emitting at visible wavelengths are essentially not excited by near‐infrared, which further emphasizes the unique potential of upconversion FRET (UC‐FRET). These characteristics result in favorable assay performance using detection instrumentation based on epifluorometer configuration and laser diode excitation. Although UC‐FRET is a recently emerged technology, it has already been applied in both immunoassays and nucleic acid hybridization assays. The technology is also compatible with optically difficult biological samples, such as whole blood. Significant advances in assay performance are expected using upconverting lanthanide‐doped nanocrystals, which are currently under extensive research. UC‐FRET, similarly to other fluorescence techniques based on resonance energy transfer, is strongly distance dependent and may have limited applicability, for example in sandwich‐type assays for large biomolecules, such as viruses. In this article, we summarize the essentials of UC‐FRET, describe its current applications, and outline the expectations for its future potential.
The relationship between the ownership form of news agencies and their independence has long figured centrally in debates about the quality of news agency operations. Drawing on a discursive ...institutional framework, this article explores how national news agency executives in Europe perform a narrated role in the discursive construction of their organizations’ internal and external independence. We set out the concept of independence discourse, which we define as the variety of ways in which news agency executives use claims about the economic independence and the internal and external autonomy of their organizational operations. Based on a discourse analysis of elite semi-structured interviews with 20 European news agency executives, we identify three discursive modes for the institutional construction of independence: (1) abnegation, (2) accommodation and (3) affirmation. These discursive modes represent a set of public and private approaches to discursively negotiating the power of both state/government and shareholders/owners. We conclude by arguing for an expanded concept of independence, one which offers an account of the complex array of forces shaping news agency operations today.
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.
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