The Future of 24-Hour News
New Directions, New Challenges
Edited By Stephen Cushion and Richard Sambrook
Chapter 12: 24-Hour News Channels around the Globe: Continuity or Change?
Extract
← 142 | 143 →CHAPTER TWELVE
24-Hour News Channels around the Globe: Continuity or Change?
MUGDHA RAI AND SIMON COTTLE
In the last two decades, 24-hour satellite news channels have become ubiquitous around the world. We last explored the growth of this phenomenon a few years ago by comprehensively mapping the full extent and diversified complexity of satellite news ecology around the world (Rai and Cottle, 2010). More recent debates surrounding 24-hour news channels, however, suggest that the genre may be heading towards its decline (Sambrook and McGuire, 2014; Clarke, 2013; Flinn, 2015). It is increasingly argued that in an era of digital technologies with “on-demand” news needs fulfilled through social media and smartphones, the “rolling” news model of 24-hour news channels will cease to remain relevant. So far, however, there has been little attempt to measure any such decline in the status of these channels empirically. This chapter revisits and updates our findings approximately five years later. It once again systematically charts the full suite of channels around the world, highlighting major developments and departures in the last few years, thereby making a case for the extent to which 24-hour television news remains resilient in a digital media environment. The chapter also re-examines the implications of this phenomenon for traditional approaches to the formations and flows of information and culture. These findings continue, we argue, to variously challenge, endorse or qualify major theoretical positions within the field of international and global communications research....
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